Life Cycles

Life Cycle September 12 2009

Today, a stunning sight –

Outside a deserted house --large seedy yard --

Forests all around --

A sick red fox, at height of day,

Lies there, watching us watching him.

Above, a dozen vultures circle hungrily.

The fox stands briefly, but he cannot walk.

He stays, atop a rock, fully visible.

He has lived – he’s beautiful.

Now his time has come to die.

He patiently awaits his fate –

He who’s eaten many other creatures

Will soon, in turn, be eaten.

Life proceeds in cycles.

Like the fox, we, too, live, and then we die.

Inevitably.



Reflections:

Today, I visited places I haven’t seen for more than 50 years. Two were particularly striking:  the giant building where I had spent three years training to become a nun, and the island city of Newport.



Right after high school, I entered the convent. On this trip, I was staying near the place where the novitiate had been, and we drove there this morning to see it. This was the first time I’d seen it since leaving in 1959. In the 1950s, it had been a prosperous place, bustling with people. Twenty five or thirty young women became postulants every year, so there were close to a hundred in the three year cycle of preparing to become nuns. The convent and novitiate occupied an imposing, brick, three story building the length of two city blocks, on a massive forested rural property big enough to hold several farms.

The novitiate program was supported by a whole staff of nuns. The novitiate was also the location for the order’s regional administrative officers and staff. The Mother House was a very large, white, 1920s bungalow just across the way from the novitiate, and it, too, bustled with activity.

I knew that today the novitiate and convent building were being used as a nursing home. I was not prepared, though,  for the aura of abandonment that I found. As I drove up to that formerly imposing building and saw its present state of disrepair, I realized that nothing much has been touched in the last 50 years. The cement columns are crazed with cracks, and the paint around windows is cracked and peeling. Some hang slightly askew. Grassy weeds grow between slabs in the walkways leading up to the side entrances. The former chapel has been demolished, and nothing was built in its place. A ramshackle fiberglass tunnel leads across the place where the chapel’s basement had been, providing access to the basement of the remaining building. Now crumbling steps behind the building leading up a steep slope gave us access to the fields and hills above, places to play and socialize.

The former motherhouse across the way is also abandoned – sitting amid splendid woods and fields, but empty and achingly uninhabited – except by the dying red fox sitting outside. I realized that the time I remember being there had marked the pinnacle of the place’s prosperity and usefulness. It was as if it was aging with me and my long-ago classmates. Shortly after I had left the novitiate without taking vows, Vatican II and the abandonment of traditional convent dress and rules had decimated the number of young women who felt called to become sisters. The novitiate as we had known it had not survived for very long after that time.



Newport provided a striking contrast. When I had been there, while in college, in 1960 and 1961, most of its old building stock was suffering late stages of decay. Wooden Georgian houses from the 1700s were missing window sash and trim pieces. Many historic waterfront buildings had fallen down or were in the process of doing so. Exploring the old streets had felt like visiting an archeological site. Today, it has all been refurbished or rebuilt, and is lively with tourists and shoppers. A building here and there caught my eye, remembered from decades earlier. Much of it, however, was a modern recreation of what might have been there before – now created whole from the imaginations of architects and developers.

The whole day provided a sobering example of the transitory, cyclical nature of experience – life and death, prosperity and decay, memory and imagination.