Memories of Place

Memories of Place May 25 2010


A beloved house where once we lived--

Its trees, its drive,

Its empty rooms with traces still of long gone memories –

Ghostly wisps of past hours wafting through.

We drive up, we look, we feel the pain of loving still this place.

We walk again the ground, neglected now,

Where once our spirit dwelt in peace and love,

Where once our family ran and played and laughed and argued,

Where once we planted, built, and prayed.

We are spirits from another plane – from timeless, formless space,

Yet our molecules have sunk deep roots into the earth where we have lived and loved,

Entwining heart and body with that soil, that grass, the fiber of that place.

We leave behind so many threads of love – elastic – binding us though we may stretch them thin.

It’s thus that we leave heartprints on the earth wherever we have been,

And feel the earthprints on our souls.



Reflection:

Today I accompanied a friend who was revisiting a home she loved and had left behind. My friend’s attachment to this place was still palpable, years after she had left. Obviously a portion of her spirit dwelt still within that space, upon that ground.

Today I had also learned that the people who had bought the house I had just left were starting to tear out the part of that place I loved the most – cutting down trees and eradicating the wild areas to plant a lawn.

These conjoined experiences, on the same day, have made me go back in spirit to the different places I have loved on the earth and to which I have felt bonded over the decades of my life – from the fields, streams, and Atlantic water of Padanaram, where I spent an important portion of my childhood; to the rolling hills and brushy woods of northern Rhode Island, where I lived for three years as a nun; to the hardpan soil and mine-pocked trails of Old Mines, Missouri, where I wandered in the woods and scratched tiny garden patches into pure clay; to the bracing, cool Pacific breeze and restless ripples of San Francisco Bay; to the majestic pine and hardwood forests of the North Carolina Piedmont – the place I now live. My heart ‘s memory remains entwined with the earth, the air, the trees and grass of each of these earthly homes. When I return to them, I feel their unique magnetic pull signaling my ongoing relationship to each place, even after I have moved away.

As we live longer, we understand better our unity with every person and every place. With every love, we exchange elements of ourself with the beloved. In so doing, we grow ever larger, ever more connected; We ARE more.