Back to the Future. Front to the Past.

 

What if you rearranged past and future in your consciousness as an experiment?  The Aymara indigenous people of the Andes see the past and their ancestors in front of them because they know they can learn from them and they see the unknown future that they imagine as behind them yet unseen. 

Carmen Acevedo Butcher

How strange it feels to imagine myself walking towards my past, my back to the future. I am surprised at the comfort it gives me, to sense lost beloveds and precious memories coming towards me ever new, to experience and be with again. In these moments, I am re(collected) with parts of myself long neglected, the past with my present, the future following.  I find myself and healed and full in this new integration. 

Transported into the past, I am filled with longings for what has changed, lost, and in need of repair (the regrets).  For those sweet memories, my imagination is rich.  As I go towards the past, I smell and feel the warmth of a wood-stove, hear my parents talking in another room, jump off the dock into a cold lake.  I am there again at 7, 10, 25, 45, my younger self with the younger selves of my beloveds and the untrammeled landscape.  In this reexperiencing, I am reconnected to sources of deep nourishment that had been cut off by despair.  The flow into these experiences can feel like a grief if grief is like a wave of tenderness that wells up from the heart into the fountain of tears.  The tears are purifying, consoling and help me to feel close to all that has gone. 

One image that is coming to me lately is the time I had with my mother in the summer.  We spent the whole of the summer up at the cabin in New Hampshire.  For the most part, it was just the two of us as my father stayed at home to work during the week coming up only on weekends and then the last two weeks of summer.  I want to seep into the quiet cool of an early summer morning, my mother sitting on the couch with her cigarette and coffee, me eating cereal at the wooden table.  There is birdsong is all around.  No pressures or agendas to follow but the roaming beacon of the heart.

I cannot recall a single conversation that I had with my mother during these times but sense her quiet presence around me tending to the house, preparing my meals, washing clothes.  During these long slow and easy days of summer, the ones that seem to have lasted a lifetime, she gave to me the tremendous gift of safety, ease, and freedom. Even as a young child of nine and ten, I could do as I pleased up at the cabin.  There were no rules about when to get up or go to bed, what to wear or eat, what to do during the day.  I could lounge around the cool cabin all morning undisturbed in my imaginary play.  Then, when the day grew warm I would head out along the dirt roads to find friends for exploring the forests and swimming in the lakes and the river. My mother let me go like a helium ballon into the sky to fill my days with any adventure.  

One afternoon when I was nine, I hiked miles from my house with a new friend along the wild Ammonoosuc river.  It began to rain hard and thunder and I was startled as my newly tied-dyed t-shirt began to bleed blues and greens onto my skin.  We took shelter in someone’s barn before turning around to head home.  Along the way a police car drove up the rutted dirt road now running like a stream urging us to make it home fast, that my mother had called worried about where we were. When I got home, my mother just said she hoped I wouldn’t do such a thing again without letting her know where I was, that it might not be safe in the woods during a thunderstorm, and to promise I wouldn’t swim in the river when it was lightening. 

I sit with this memory of the quiet cabin and am bathed in my young mother’s calming, freeing presence.  I long to feel that blessed alchemy of safety and adventure in my life again.  The innocence of a child now married to the wisdom of my age so that I might adventure forth still with that child, that mother, into those forests, lakes, and mountains again. There, I recollect parts of myself no longer neglected, ready to offer them the security and freedom they are hungry for this part of the journey.