I want to write about the heart. I can’t possibly finish this in a blog post, but I want to start.
Today I know that now, right now, is the beginning of the rest of my life, on which there are no limits. The “secret” is being true to myself, the fact of which I’m only beginning to feel. True to my true nature, I should say, in the context of a calm, slowly building joy and union with with all Creation. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. The locus is the natural world.
I grew up with a thousand reasons to be unhappy. In my case, it’s partly psycho-genetic. My granddad used to take the train from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia for a day to visit art museums. My grandmother, daughter of a “shoutin’ Methodist” circuit riding preacher in West Virginia, wouldn’t hear of it. “What’s the point of that,” she’d reprimand him, “there’s nothing there but pictures on a wall!” — but he’d go anyway. I never really got to know him — he died while we were overseas and I was 10 years old — and I wish I had. I’d like to ask him what he felt about those paintings and what they meant to him, since there was not a stick of anything you’d call art in Granny’s house when I came back to Chestertown as a grownup.
One day Granny gave me her father’s saddlebags, however. That’s right, my great-grandfather used to ride a mule to a different church every Sunday, before he landed a regular parish gig in his later years. I kept those saddlebags for a long time, until my aunt in Maine asked for them back, a typical Farr family manuever. That was only a few years ago, mind you, and though I deeply resented her asking, I realized the only way to avoid more injury to myself was to send them back immediately, along with every other family artifact in my possession. I had quite a collection, too. I’d come to sense that these things were actually poisonous, although sometime in the late ’80s I’d exorcised the saddlebags by taking them to my great-grandfather’s grave in Parsons, West Virginia and smoking a pipeful of dope, exhaling over his tombstone. She doesn’t know that and probably never will — shortly after I sent the musty relics back to Vassalboro, she walked out of her house and tripped, hitting her head on a rock, and hasn’t been the same since.
They can’t hurt me any more, I can only hurt myself (as I was taught to do). Hurt follows hurt, and love follows love.
I give myself permission to be. The sound you hear is singing in the blood.
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