Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Finding the way back home

I f what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

--David Wagoner, “Lost,” in The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, ed. Christopher Merrill (Peregrine Smith Books, 1991), p. 155.

He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes
   “A song,” he said, “was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.” . . . .
   In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that . . . had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every episode was readable in terms of geology. . . .
   By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning “creation.”
--Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Viking, 1987), pp. 13-14.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

--T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, "An accurate online text," http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html

*   *   *   *

July 24

This day’s run started with a dream about my mother and both the run and the dream have filled the days from then until now (July 27). Perhaps what I have been doing is following a dream-track. Sometimes that is not smooth going. It involves getting lost and loss in general, but also finding anew the way back. Or finding a new way back. Or finding, if we are still, and listen carefully, a new way in.

It was one of those dreams that feels real, tangible, as if I am wide awake. I dreamed that I overslept the morning of the group run, that it was 7 or 8 a.m. when I woke up, and I was upset at myself that I would not make the workout. But when I came downstairs from a porch room where I was sleeping (which reminded me in retrospect of a room in one of the Fire Island houses I’d inhabited during family vacations there), I encountered my mother, to whom I expressed how upset and disappointed I was to oversleep, and (while not, I think, actually saying it) wondering if she’d give me a ride there (of course, it would be too late, so it didn’t seem to make sense to ask). Somehow, we started out together, although I don’t remember our being in a car. It seemed as if we were walking. As we walked, we talked, just as we always had before, eventually reaching the Philadelphia Zoo, where we encountered Dave.

When I saw him, I explained about oversleeping and my disappointment, as he sympathized and forgave me. Then I introduced him to my mother, and as I did, it occurred to me that he had heard she died, and I realized too how grateful I was to have her back with me. I told him what a scare we’d had and how good it was that the two were getting a chance to meet. It made me so proud to introduce them to each other, and they seemed to like each other right away.

My mother and I then went on our way, and came upon a car, one that looked something like her Honda only it was a station wagon. We talked there a bit. I told her how wonderful it was to hear her voice. She said she was happy to see me too and hoped that this would help me “resolve the issues” in my life. She said that she looked back now more critically at her life than she had before—yet I didn’t get the sense of a negative judgment, just a desire to change some things and to help me heal. It was a wonderful dream. After we talked, she was helping some people in the car and also trying to secure some large containers. So it didn’t seem as if there would be room for me, but that didn’t worry me. I had a sense that--whether there was or wasn’t room for me--we would be together, and I didn’t mind that she was helping these other people. Even as I write this, the dream both gives me peace and brings tears to my eyes. I have been missing hearing her voice, talking with her, her physical presence in my life. I never want her to fade from my memory, and this was a very healing and reassuring dream. Even the purple dress she wore in the dream spoke of resurrection: it was the dress she had worn on Easter this year. I was actually surprised to awaken and find that I had not, in fact, overslept.

*   *    *    *

Now, the workout:

As previously, a few of us went to Belmont Plateau with Dave in the “team bus” (his red Saturn), and warmed up upon arriving. The speedier bunch warmed up by running there from our meeting spot at Lloyd Hall. When they arrived, Dave cast us in our roles in the drama that was to follow, dividing us into “varsity,” “JV,” and “freshmen.” I was in the last of these groups, but the upside for me and the other “freshmen” was that although a couple of us were a few (just a few) years past being freshmen even in college, we had the privilege of suddenly being made the youngest of the crew. Dave often talks about the tradition and the great runners who have raced around Belmont Plateau—perhaps the dream tracks we follow, yet the dream tracks go deeper into the soil. Sydney Maree, Marty Liquori, Frank Shorter, the great distance runners….they have followed dream tracks and so have their ancestors, and the Plateau is alive not only with their footsteps, but also the Native runners eons before cars were ever parked there for cross-country meets.

It might seem that warming up on the same course as I would later run my “tempo miles” would give me a wee bit of an advantage over the “varsity” and the “jv.” It might seem that way, but I am directionally challenged—a fact I am slowly learning to accept about myself, slowly beginning to see the opportunities inherent in “getting lost,” as expressed so well in David Wagoner’s poem, “Lost.”

Standing still—it is not something runners do readily. During our first mile, I merrily took the lead. That worked until I realized I couldn’t remember the route. And this was the “outside” mile at Belmont Plateau, simpler than the “inside mile,” most of it run on open fields. But I made too wide a turn, the other “freshmen” following me (such trusting souls!). Fortunately, someone in my group noticed that we’d gone wide of the mark and that the JV was passing us. After we corrected our course, I lost my lead to Nanci, a fellow “freshman,” who, throughout the workout seemed to gain speed after being misled.

The course correction made, we all finished relatively unscathed, if at varying speeds. Dave, our ever-optimistic coach, felt that this boded well for our attempting the “inside mile,” the one that includes the famous Parachute Hill. I was doubtful. Losing my way in an open field didn’t seem too promising. But Parachute Hill has an adventurous ring to it, and I was assured that even the most directionally challenged athletes had managed the route. Hmm, she said to herself, has Dave not seen me in action? Still, he was going to point the way at the crucial turn onto Parachute Hill. Throwing caution to the wind, I again lined up and again took the lead. All seemed to be going well. Parachute Hill is a bit of a climb to be sure, but I had run in the Mount Washington Road Race (without getting lost, although the reader may understandably view the latter as not a terribly impressive feat on a road with no forks). We reached the top of this hill and our next task was to find the route that would take us back down. This became a problem. Oh we found a downhill all right. But somewhere in the process, we made a turn and found ourselves in terra incognita—it should have been obvious when my digital watch read 12:23 that, even with the hills factored in, I’d been running too hard for that to be only a mile. Still, I was on the verge of passing Nanci, who had for the second time passed me. We then both heard voices ahead, which we presumed meant that the finish line was in sight, and that we were merely coming at it from another direction, running a longer “mile” than planned, but at least almost done.

No such luck. The voices ahead belonged to some varsity folk who were as lost as we were. At this point, we saw a truck depot and thought perhaps we could cut through it to a path we saw on the other side, one that seemed to hold some hope of leading us back to the start. Not quite.

“Hey! You can’t come in here!” The voice startled us as we passed the open gate toward the path. “You won’t get anywhere doing that except locked in here!”

The truck driver who barred our way directed us back on the path where we’d been, and told us which turn to make. Somehow, after what seemed to be an endless trek (how had it been so quick to get to that point?) we once again reached the start. You do not want to know my time for that “mile.” Nanci and I had fallen behind the others, Nanci having some knee pain, and we expected that with our arrival, everyone would be present and accounted for. Um…. No.

“Where’s Rebecca?” we were asked. “Did you see her?”
“We thought she was with you.”

Dave seemed not to be mollified by the suggestion that we were all so focused on our running that we lost our way. After sending those of us present onto our last mile (back to the “outside mile”—although I believe that was the plan to begin with, before our collective scattering to the four winds, it no doubt was a plan welcomed by all of us, including Dave), he went off in search of Rebecca. This time, I wondered if there was anything left of me to run this mile. But as Nanci opened up more ground between herself and me, I thought, “bad knees? I want bad knees that work that well!” and forget tempo pace. I dug down and pushed myself and pushed some more, taking the correct turns this time, and still my team-mate with the apparently bad knees was moving further ahead. Finally, in perhaps the last quarter mile, I gained back some ground, until, about 50 yards from the finish, I passed her. But the battle was not over. She nipped me at the last second, and “won” our “race” (which we’d run despite being advised against racing). At that point, we congratulated each other on fighting the good fight. Rebecca returned, then Dave, and confident that we could successfully reach Lloyd Hall again, Dave sent us back, running, rather than in the car. This time, we succeeded.

At no time during our wanderings in the woods of Belmont Plateau, not sure of our direction did I feel any of the panic that being lost can sometimes cause—even though memories surfaced of my 5-year-old self wandering for what seemed like hours alone in unfamiliar countryside in Western Pennsylvania, when, after a spat with my brothers and sisters, I stomped off in the opposite direction, thinking I’d find my way back to the farmhouse we left. I cried for my mother to find me, longed to see her roll up in the station wagon and reclaim her lost little girl. Eventually, someone saw me—a little girl walking along a country road crying isn’t hard to miss—and fortunately, that someone lived near the farm, knew the owner, and decided brought me back, where I was tearfully re-united with my by then very worried mother.

In the process of writing this, I found myself absent-mindedly losing objects I needed, books from which I wanted to quote, a photo I wanted to have framed, and my inner peace, frustrated so much with myself about my inability to hold on to things. I finally gave up on finding one of the books, and just walked to the library to get a copy, and as for the Eliot quote, I decided that instead of another search for my copy of Four Quartets, I would content myself with the online text. Meanwhile, perhaps significantly, I found my passport, a document that allows me to travel the world, follow dream tracks wherever they lead. I thought I’d lost that, and so when I found it where I last remembered seeing it, I decided it was a sign that I was finding my way at last.


In Shakespeare’s plays, characters lose one another on islands and in forests—and find their way back together. In the stillness of sleep, in the pause to stop and listen to voices nearby, we find, if not our way, ourselves, and the land sings to us. The sting of loss and the sweetness of reunion partake of each other, as we find the confidence to return to that place where we listen and where what a tree or bush does is not lost on us. And this morning, as I thought through all this, the words came to me intact and out of the blue, "there is nothing lost."

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