When my dear friend Anna Simon and I worked together on our book, Brave Work: The Heroic Journey At Work, we spent a lot of time looking at the way people made departures.
Departure is a mythic time in all our lives. It’s connected with the seasons, of course. The leaves of the plants deepen, the grasses redden, the whole earth glows with vibrant life as the sun retreats, the frost whistles in, and the leaves relinquish their hold on the trees.
I do find it poignant to see on blazing leaves the meeting of fire and frost. There are several fairy tales that capture this paradoxical encounter. Father Frost warms to a girl who is freezing to death in the woods. The Snow-Daughter and the Fire-Son may love one another but they can’t live in the same house because he would melt her, and she would put out his fire.
In every departure, there seems to be this heightening of fire and frost, of desire and death. Every person’s story unfolds in a different way and every one holds mysteries. Some people have a prophetic sense of the change about to come, others are shocked by it, some have a deep wish to change that steadies them through stormy times until the final hour of departure. Each of us remembers the major changes in our lives. We remember details about how they were precipitated and assisted, and we may wonder all our lives about the strange and perhaps even seeming predetermined orchestration of events.
Final departures from this world are mythic experiences, huge and resounding. Long ago, when my mother’s father died, I imagined him leaving on a train of purple light. In a poem, I named it the “Ameythyst Ray.”
Grandpa died on Easter Day
At nine in the morning, after a few months
Of standing outside the pearly gates
He told my mother that he had to wait
For a room on the other side
He was all packed and ready to die
And maybe, he said, if all was okay
He would travel on Easter Day.
Grandpa rode home on the Amethyst Ray.
When my dear friend Annie died eight years ago, I saw her leaving on a fairy ship as magnificent as the ship in the story, The Elf Maiden. Our imaginations may become very active during final departures, as the oceanic, feeling heart reaches into the ethers, gathering impressions that often can’t be spoken in any other way than through poetry or prayer.
The lesser departures of life bear the stamp of the major ones: leaving a house, leaving a job, leaving anything has become familiar. These days I’ve been interested in the departures that we might not even name as departures – great changes in our attitudes and our outlooks. How do you let go of an old narrative that has ruled a routine way of reacting that you no longer want to act out? How did we make these kind of changes in the past?
When I think of the more subtle departures I’ve made in my life, I go back to a time when I was in my twenties. I had done all the things I thought I was supposed to do, but I wasn’t happy. I wanted to get inside myself, and inside the world outside myself. I did a lot of camping at the time, and I would lie by the river and watch the water flow by, feeling numb. I had the song running through my head, “Is that all there is?”
Then, quite suddenly, I started dreaming. I dreamed huge and spectacular dreams, dreams that shattered my normal way of thinking. I had been interested in dreams, but more as amusements or curiosities than as contents of the psyche. Some of the dreams were so terrifying that I didn’t want to fall asleep. I felt that I everything I had held back, held under, rushed in a torrent through the dam I’d made in my brain.
So I dove under the “surface,” borne on a flood of dreams. I learned to record them, query them, gather information about my daily life through them. My aunt helped me because she dreamed a lot. She would divide the pages of her journal in half, drawing a vertical line down the page, and putting her daily events on one side and her dreams on the other. She advised me to simply record the contents of the dreams, and notice everything: the colors, the snatches of conversation, the objects and characters. That was very helpful because it allowed me to become detached, take on the attitude of reporter to a series of inner events. The vertical line gave me a wall, a boundary between the realm of the dream and daily life. I learned to understand the way dreams speak, to trust the dreaming mind, and converse with it.
There is so much to learn about departures. I’m endlessly fascinated by the stories of what we left and how we changed and who helped us. We’re constantly refining our ability to let go, the skill of staying open in uncertainty (the poet John Keats called it “negative capability”). Above all, I think what we gather from our departures is resilience. In order to move forward, we have to release our attachments, and it’s rarely easy. We often don’t even know what they are until we try to move forward, and then we slam right into them.
How do we let go our our attachments? The fairy tales show us thousands of different characters who have to break powerful bonds. They mark the path of departure, but they leave the details to us. How did the handless maiden leave home? What did she go through to come to that decision? How do we let go when the departures aren’t our own decisions, when the losses are swift, and “thrust” upon us, as Joseph Campbell would say. Snow White had to flee her wicked stepmother, but when does she really “get” that she has to let her go? Hansel kept devising ways to get back home, but when does he realize that home isn’t sweet?
I don’t think I’m done with this subject. Are we ever?
Michelle, what a perfect ending to this post. The last line perfectly illustrates the whole of the contents. To me, it’s very poignant. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on departures.
Thank you, Jen. The subject seems to have opened up a wide field of other related subjects, and what better time to reflect on our departures then this time of the year.
The other day, the storm that barreled through the city tore a huge limb from our old maple tree, and the tree had to come down. It was an emotional event and made me realize how the limb of that tree was connected to me. We don’t even know our limbs until we lose them. I know you could write a whole book on the subject of loss, Jen. I have been so inspired by your blogs, and the way you honor loss through your art. Thank you for your comments, thank you dearly.
Aw, Michelle, I’m sorry to hear about your beloved maple tree. Will you plant a new baby tree? It’s amazing how important trees are to us. I adore them. Have been working on a book about the special trees in my life. It came about because at a time that was rather difficult I came upon a list of things to do to move into a happy zone, and one of those things was to be out in Nature. Since it was late at night when I did the exercise, instead of going out to walk, I started remembering walks I had taken, which led me to think about the trees I loved, since most of my walks lead me to favorite trees. I was so surprised to find that my list went on and on until I had over 40 special trees written down. I could see each of them in my mind’s eye. Each of them were my companions at pivotal times in my life. So I started writing a book, with each chapter devoted to one of these companion trees.
I’ll see if I can attach a bit here – The book goes from early childhood to middle-age, and the chapter below is when I was about 11, working with my sister.
Our Gnarly Apple Trees – In Which I Learn about Duality, by Jen Berghage
When we lived in the butter yellow house on Longview Avenue–the one with the best backyard ever–one of the things that made it most special was the apple trees that grew in the back corner and along the side yard. There were three of them, gnarly and old as all get-out.
Their trunks were strong and thick, and their branches were as big around as our legs and they twisted all over the place. They were perfect trees to climb, which we did all the time. We hung upside down from one of the lower branches, or sat in the perfect turns and twists of the branches, swaying with the breezes in spring and summer, and huddling in the fall. Their branches were full of stubs which would either poke me as I leaned on them while sitting, or prod and scrape as my hands grabbed to pull myself higher up into the canopy.
Their fragrance in the spring was divine and sitting among the blossoms and bees as the buds slowly opened in the sunshine was a world unto itself. Soon firm round fruits would start to grow, at first hard, tiny and green, then swelling and ripening into blushing, juicy apples that we could pick and crunch on in the fall.
Playing in and among these trees is when I began to have a sense of the duality of this world, when in the fall, the trees would shed the apples that were not collected or eaten, and the ground would be covered with them. This became true Wellington territory, as some of the apples rotted and became mostly applesauce – brown and gushy, that we had to slush through as we did our father’s bidding.
He would send us out with brown paper grocery bags to fill with the fallen apples. This was in the days before they made plastic grocery bags; paper was all anyone had and it had its very own wonderful crunchy brown smell. My sister and I would pick the apples up one at a time and drop them into the bags. We didn’t have gloves, which would have made this process much more efficient, so we were careful to pick them up just between one finger and a thumb, with the other fingers of each hand stretched out to avoid the rotten spots and worms and bugs getting on us. The juice would drip over our hands and up our sweater sleeves to our elbows making us feel sticky all over.
The fragrance around these beautiful apple trees at this time of year was sweet and strong–a bit past ripe, and the soft summer breezes had turned to chilly winds snapping our hair across our faces and putting roses in our cheeks. Sometimes the apples would drip so much juice into the brown paper bags the bottoms would fall through as we dragged them across the yard over to where my Dad would prepare them for disposal. Those times we’d have to pick them up all over again and plop them into a fresh paper bag, shaking the juice off as we went and examining the worms and bugs left in the bottom of the bag once we’d gotten them all transferred over to the new bag.
Sometimes our reward from our father for a job well done was a shiny new dime per bag – we’d get about five to eight bagfulls; the trees were fruitful indeed. I liked to spend my hard-earned money on bazooka bubblegum because I loved the comics enclosed in each piece, and I could get 10 pieces for a dime. I loved to blow huge pink bubbles and chew to my heart’s content. I learned that duality has a silver pink lining, yum, and that this kind of work is GOOD.
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Big thanks for sharing your tree story, Jen. All my senses enjoyed it. I can see you dragging those gushy bags of rotten apples, and I can smell the apple air from spring to fall. It invokes my own memories of visiting my grandparents in Salmon Arm, and climbing the apple trees to eat the fruit. We never had to do the work, though, it was just all miraculously done by somebody else. All we did was eat the pie! Too much pie and not enough farm work and you don’t actually bite down on the dualities your speaking of! So thanks for bringing them to us. You’ve managed to accomplish another one in the writing: sweet-sticky, and ICKY!
Lol, you have such a way with words Michelle 🙂