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Published: December 15th 2022
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Well it’s been a quiet week here in Chapel Hill, our home town. It hasn’t actually been particularly quiet, but the words bring to mind the calming voice of Garrison Keillor, which is always nice to channel. And neither is Chapel Hill our “home town” now, in any heartfelt way, though Sally and I did, both together and separately, spend multiple decades in the Triangle area. So perhaps I should just go back and scrub that opening and take a different angle, but that would be bowing to the God of Perfection, so Ima leave it and move on.
Gotta say, though: being back in NC does feel weird, just as a return to any of my former haunts has felt surreal and dislocating. While Thomas Wolfe’s “you can’t go home again“ surely comes to mind, the phrase that more often fits when I find myself back in a place that I used to inhabit is that I am, in some real way, “returning to the scene of the crime.”
So what is the crime? I’ll see if I can suss that out.
Like everyone, Sally and I both carry baggage. Old wounds and traumas. Old stories. Old programming. Old habits. Though we’ve both spent a great deal of time and energy working™ to notice, identify, clarify, and understand our old programs, such that we can then either embrace, accept, or learn to cherish them on the one hand, or root out, dis-spell, unravel, or delete them on the other, it seems that this work™ is never really done™, though we have both set down a great many bags. In the end, it proves to be a loser’s game, trying to use ego to remove ego from ego, whatever ego is™, and though we have slowly learned to bring in “the big guns“ (Life, the Universe, and Everything… AKA Spirit… AKA “God”), traces of old stuff can still stick to our shoes like the clay mud around our new house. Stories and fears and reactions and past experiences, attached and entangled to ourselves, to others, and to places, can hover about us like needy ghosts as we move through life. Stories of self doubt and failures to be. Fears of not being wanted or needed, of not being able to get our needs met, of not being able to use our gifts, of not knowing what to do or how to help. Reactions to the sharp edges of modern life and the actions of others. All of these things can rise up before us if we’re caught off guard or a new experience latches hold of the old.
And when I go back to a former haunt, there are more ghosts there, just waiting for me.
And the thing is, I have a lot of former haunts. Ionia, MI. Lacks Industries. Michigan State. Cork ‘n’ Cleaver. Garrett-Evangelical. Park City. Carson Pirie Scott. Kenosha. American Critical Care. Durham. UNC-Chapel Hill. Potluck Community Farm. Square Dancing. Roxboro Theater. ShadowPlayers. Landmark Education. My first wife. Most of my family of origin. Blue Heron Farm. ContraDancing. Dialogue Circles. The Doomer community. The Gathering Inn. Rochester, VT. Oliver! Eastport, ME. Atlantic Beach. Crawford Dairy Road. ZOOM Groups. And now Whitehall, MT. People. Places. Homes. Rehabbed houses. Groups. Shared activities. These are just some of the highlights.
And it has felt, for years, as I looked back over my own past, that I was driving down the road, and glancing into the rear view mirror, and seeing bodies in the ditch.
Because I, and we, seem to keep moving on. And that, friends and relations, is the crime. I don’t know that Sally would put it that way, but that’s how it feels in my bones. We keep moving on. We break the old contracts. We don’t stay put. We don’t do the things old folks are expected to do. I can hear the ghosts as they call out to me in the darkness. You left us. You abandoned us. You stopped coming. You changed. Over and over, they point out some way in which I failed to be, failed to stay at my post, failed to hold the line, failed to remain constant.
Such has been the cost of becoming myself. It appears to be built into the system here on Earth. To step more and more into your true being here, you may inevitably disappoint, disturb, or provoke dislike from others in your life. In fact, triggering these reactions can be seen as proof positive that you are truly being you. I don’t see any way around it.
It appears that both Sally and I have had enough “courage to be disliked” to keep following that path. In a world grown increasingly surreal and chaotic year after year, where questions like “what’s going on?” and “what do we do next?” feel unanswerable using reason and logic alone, we just keep adding new pearls to our strings, to steal an image from the new documentary
Stutz, doing the next thing that feels right, walking through the doors that open, turning away from the doors that slam shut. We drive this dark, twisting, hilly road on low beam headlights, able to see the next curve but not much else, making choices and seeing how the Universe responds, following what guidance we can find.
That’s how we got here. Sally fell down through a hole in the floor of our new house and we ended up driving an old Winnebago across the country. One pearl led to another and another. And now we sit in the Saxapahaw General Store, drinking coffee, watching the hard rain fall outside, with maintenance jobs to finish at the Air BnB, with sorting and packing and cleaning to sort out before we get on an airplane a week from today. More pearls. More string. All on low beams. Me and Sally and Jesus at the Wheel and bodies in the ditch. Turning toward kindness. Leaving the live baby gators behind.
It’s all sort of calming and sweet, in a way, to hold it this way. Already the ghosts have grown quieter. I think slowly we’re learning to just give ourselves permission to be human, to do our best but no more, to follow our hearts and our signs and promptings with less regret and more joy, to love ourselves without reason, and to let ourselves be exactly who we are, damn the torpedos.
We’ll likely rent a car tomorrow. That’ll make the week go easier. Then we can drop off Betty for repairs and continue to run the errands we need to run and show up in the places we want to show up. We’re having some really sweet times with the kids and grandkids. The play that brought us here is still to come. We’ve had great reconnections with a few old friends. And the coffee is good and plentiful, an antidote to the cold, wet air and the remaining unknown that seems to sit between now and next Thursday.
For now, we’ve got things to do and Rumi to read.
Ya’ll take care out there.
Pax-Tim
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