Transformations

Sarah: born 1830, died 1855

I sit outside on a lovely stone patio in the Shenandoah Valley sipping a glass of nearly-black ruby wine near the gravestone of a young woman named Sarah Girtrude Lynn, the long ago owner of this expansive property who was buried here in 1855.  I sit amid one of the most beautiful vineyards in Virginia on the most idyllic of days in April, just myself and lovely Sarah – or so I feel – sipping the special Locksley Reserve Norton wine, made from the native Norton grape which this vineyard, Chrysalis, has made its mission to reclaim and rehabilitate as Virginia’s own state wine.  Of 70 acres of vines at Chrysalis, 40 are dedicated to the Norton grape.

The Norton grape has a long history, at least long in the sense of winemaking in America.  Of the 25 or so grape varieties native to North America, only the Norton has been able to produce a good dry table wine (there are plenty of sweet table wines in America).  And the original Norton vine was actually propagated by a Dr. Daniel Norton in Richmond, VA around 1830 (he'd been working on it for at least 10 years) from the seed of a grape that is genetically related.  Norton thrives in America when given a chance, in all soils and climes, and has been disease resistant ever since.

The native Norton grape

However, for whatever reasons or mishaps or misunderstandings, the grape was doubted, unappreciated, and outwardly rejected for many years – in spite of having been deemed “The Best Wine of All Nations” at the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873.  The rejection of this grape and the preference for European varietals is detailed in the book, The Wild Vine, subtitled "A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine."  Having read the book and sipped the wine and been made a convert, I am on pilgrimage to see the wild vine with so much history and to sit in the place where its resurrection is all around me.

Winemakers, I’ve discovered in my forays to only some of the 220 wineries in Virginia, either discount the Norton grape, or are passionate about it.  It is like a gem to some, buried and lost and found again. The Norton grape is called earthy, musty, deep, and confusing.  It is the kind of grape that is deceiving in its forwardness early on – and easy to reject because it is so loud and hard to understand – but, given time, it becomes rich and profound and moderated and textured.  It is like the prodigal son who goes wayward only to return decades later a changed man.  It is a confusing wine, but given time (6 to 8 years in the bottle, even more, they say), it is transformed.   

Grapevines in early spring

I cannot help but contemplate the short life of Sarah as I sip my wine made on this land once belonging to her.  Born in the same year that Dr. Norton’s grape was named after him, she was orphaned at age 15.  She was to inherit the beauty and richness of this spot in the Shenandoah Valley, but not the wealth of longevity to enjoy it.  She died at age 25 from consumption.  The land was divided among distant relatives in the decade prior to the Civil War, and eventually lost to all family members in subsequent years.  Sarah could not have known that her simple grave marker would be found while the land was being cleared and excavated to make the patio for a vineyard in the distant year of 2000 – (I learned all of this about Sarah while my host in the tasting room poured sample after sample of very good wines) – she could not have known that there’d be a shrine set up for her in the most trafficked spot on one of the most trafficked vineyard in the state – could not have known on her deathbed at age 25 that people 150 years hence would toast her young, unfinished spirit.    

 Toast . . . 

I simply sit here – and that is what wine is for, I think – to be in the present state – all pieces in one place – Sarah’s land, Dr. Norton’s grape, a winemaker’s vision, the shadows of the toasts of many that have come before – transformation complete.

Heirloomed

There is a big, flat box which I brought back from beneath my mother’s bed when she died four years ago; and since that time, the box has been under my bed, in my attic, on the top shelf in my closet, on the floor in my closet, in plain view, on various chairs, on my desk, near my desk, and beneath my desk where my feet could not rest until they acknowledged what was there.  That box contains the disorganized photos of an extended family life that started even a generation or two before I was born.

The Family Memory Box

My intention has always been to scan each and every photo, to create some semblance of order by generation or by topic or by person or by chronology – I didn’t know which – and to organize them into neat digital albums.  I could then duplicate these albums with the touch of a button or two, and distribute them to anyone interested – giving sense and semblance of what had transpired in one zig-zaggy family line from Germany to America.  The originals would also be put into albums to be handed down to . . . the most interested descendent.

Four years have passed, and I have scanned as many photos (four), though they had nothing in common with each other – I just liked the photos.  They were wily subjects or people that resisted categorization – they were better off standing alone – and so they became just four photos scanned.    

Grandma Golem

There’s a picture of my grandmother at Cherokee, NC standing next to an Indian dressed garishly with cheap feathers, beads and headgear.   It was 1967 and I was a 10-year-old child standing right about where the cameraman is taking the photo.  I remember him telling my grandma to smile.  My grandma was a fiercely independent and strong willed woman who always questioned the roles handed out to women long before it was commonplace to do so.  My mother said she was very intelligent, but had to quit school at age 8 to work in a sewing factory after her father died in a drowning accident, leaving a wife and four young daughters.  She lived alone for many decades after her children were grown and her husband left her, until she broke her hip while taking her daily walk through a Buffalo snowstorm.   She was forced to sell her house and move in with our family just outside of Buffalo until five years later when we moved to North Carolina.  My mother said it was someone else’s turn to take her, and that’s when it was decided Grandma would go to California to live with her daughter (who swiftly put her in a nursing home).  Grandma always said she was being “shipped off to die.”  This day in Cherokee with the Indian Chief was one of the last days I spent with her.  She died a few years later.

It’s a disorganized set of tales in that box – each picture needs a narrator to sit by it as it is delivered up for view, a storyteller of a thousand words to point and give direction and disclose the real story behind the picture. 

I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make a digital, librarian-like order out of the chaos of a multi-generational family life.  Each time I bumped into the box or moved it to a more (or less) prominent spot in the house, I thought of all the years in which my mother planned or intended to do exactly what I have hoped to do these last four years – make order out of it.  “Maybe when you go off to college, I’ll get around to organizing those pictures,” I heard her say.  Or, “When I get caught up with the mending, I’ll get to those pictures.”  It ended up under her bed where she could sleep on it – until it was no longer her problem.

Maybe boxes of family pictures aren’t supposed to be organized.  Most of the events and people in those boxes were never ‘according to plan’ to begin with.  Families can’t be alive in a photo album, digital or tactile, any more than a textbook can tell their stories.  They’re messy and don’t categorize well.  Some events and people just have to stand alone – and oftentimes the background is a bigger picture than the foreground. 

So when my eldest child on Easter afternoon asked to see the box of pictures from Grandma’s house, I presented the box ‘as is’  (from the top shelf in my closet).   She poured them out onto the floor as I had always done when I was that age – began by digging in, randomly selecting one, staring into it, asking questions – or not.  An hour or two later, when the background of a few chosen photos had been brought into focus and a few things had been made clearer, the piles were unceremoniously stuffed back into the box – for another day, another year.      

  

I wonder if my mother ever noticed what I noticed today as I lifted the sturdy box (which originally contained a “Queen Elizabeth bedspread”) to the top shelf of my closet – in fancy script, the words, Loomed to be heirloomed. 

Tolstoy's Desk

The desk upon which Tolstoy wrote "Anna Karenina"

I imagine the day when Tolstoy might have sat down at this writing desk, in this room, taking refuge from the burgeoning family life in Moscow – that is, the many teenage daughters and his capable, practical wife Sonia who aptly managed the minutia of . . . well, everything.  Perhaps an argument had just ensued about which gown a young daughter ought to wear to an upcoming Moscow ball – after all, the family wintered in Moscow so the daughters could attend such balls and receive a good Moscow education and be part of "good society."

Tolstoy would have much preferred to stay year round at his working country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, just a few hours' coach ride south of Moscow, to toil alongside his many serfs on the soil of his Motherland. Tolstoy, born into wealth, had always held onto his ideal to be part of the common people, the "true" Russians, he called them -- their folklore, their wholesome peasant food, their simple pleasures.  Sonia was irritated by this ideal of his – after all, she had a household to run, daughters to marry, work to be edited and published and given credit where credit was due.  They were always at odds with each other in this way, Sonia and Leo – his high ideals and the romance of life among the working class, her practicality in what was needed to run a household.  Always the arguments . . .

The Tolstoy family photos

I imagine it was in this state of mind that Tolstoy retreated one cold Moscow morning to his desk in the small room at the back of the house.  I imagine he sat for a few moments in meditative solitude as the din of family life subsided from his conscious mind -- the echoes, the fury, the inescapable world of practical matters still audible through thick walls meant to barricade him from this world . . . this world . . . of Moscow society and teenage daughters and ever-practical wives . . . oh, this world.

So, I imagine . . . that Tolstoy eventually sat slightly forward at the tidy desk which Sonia had only that morning cleaned and prepared and made ready for writing.  He would have picked up his pen, dipped it in a full ink well, shuffled a bit of paper to his view (for he was very nearsighted and in fact had sawed off the legs of his chair so he could be closer to the desk), and so write these famous words:  All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

That is how he began the saga of Anna Karenina, the great novel about families -- the Oblonskys, the Karenins and the Vronskys -- each unhappy, but . . . in different ways.  Buried within the novel is the story of Levin and Kitty, representing Tolstoy’s own vision of marital happiness – Kitty, a devoted wife in all things agrarian and otherwise; and Levin, a husband who works the fields alongside his happy serfs.  They represent mutual respect and love and equality for all. 



Sonia's desk: for household business and editing

Of course, I don't really know Tolstoy's state of mind when he approached his desk in Moscow to write Anna Karenina.  Honestly, I don't think he was moved by inspiration nearly as much as careful planning.  I do know that he and Sonia fought their entire lives about his ideals and her realism -- she, always determined to keep him on track; and he, always headstrong to go off track -- until eventually he did so in his old age by boarding a train after a heated argument and thus contracting the illness and delirium that ultimately killed him.  Sonia carried on the fight for practicality even after his death -- now with publishers who would deem to use the proceeds from his novels for the "common good" rather than for Tolstoy's own family.  These were pre-revolutionary times, and the publishers believed that the great writer Leonid Tolstoy belonged to the people -- not to his family.

And yet Sonia had managed the household(s), given birth to 13 children, and edited and re-edited and written out by hand every novel her famous husband wrote.  Some even venture to say that it was Sonia's good reason and judgment (and talent for writing) that made its way into the characters we respect so highly in his novels.  She had always been in charge of the details, the minutia, after all.   

I think of all these conflicts and points of view when I look at Tolstoy's desk where he had written, among others, his famous novel about the unhappiest of wives, Anna Karenina – that is, in Russian nomenclature, "Anna, the wife of Karenin."

Fourth and Walnut

Thomas Merton Square

I had only 15 minutes on the parking meter at Fourth Street in downtown Louisville, KY, just enough time to hastily walk up to Thomas Merton Square at the infamous corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets (now called Muhammad Ali Boulevard, however) where I could possibly bask in the energy that might still be present there –

This is the place where Trappist monk Thomas Merton – author, poet, contemplative, and spokesman for interfaith relations in the 1950s and 60s – experienced his sudden epiphany (or satori or mystical revelation) which he describes in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

This is where it happened . . .

It occurs to me that this may be the only historical marker in America that is meant to herald something so intangible and un-provable as inner revelation. Most markers commemorate a Civil War battle or a political figure or the birthplace of someone famous. This commemorates the inner awakening of a sequestered monk on a street corner in 1958, one that would launch the remaining decade of his life in which he would travel the world and write primarily about social justice and the commonality of all faiths. We are all one, he said over and over until his tragic death in Thailand in 1968.

I expected much from the experience, and as it turns out I had just enough time to run up to the corner, hastily cross the street, snap a few pictures, then re-hastily cross the street from whence I came and return to the relative quiet of my car. The corner was so noisy, so full of the confusion of cars and people and street musicians and construction – or destruction – I don’t know which – for there was a lopped off cement head the size of a small boulder propped on the sidewalk where Merton must have stood and discovered oneness and love for all humanity. The head may have belonged to a gargoyle and may have fallen from the building above, who knows – for there was no body to claim it. I had to step over and around the thing to get my picture of the bronze sign clarifying the reason for naming this corner after the Trappist monk who wrote so many of the books I read in my youth and which had influenced me in so many untraceable, intangible ways . . . who knows . . . but perhaps I should have snapped a picture of the lopped off head staring up at me, for that was more reflective of my own state of mind at this time and place where I had hoped to bask in the revelatory moment of another man’s destiny.

A sample of Merton's few belongings

Only a mile or two from Thomas Merton Square is Bellarmine University where Merton’s few worldly belongings are collected – and I had only an hour there because the visitor parking space near the library warned me I could take no more. Once inside, my mood was quieted as the friendly, calm curator explained that since Merton had no family and had taken a vow of poverty at the monastery, his personal belongings were minimal – but what he did have was there in the library, all of it – his books, original manuscripts, letters and journals; his blue chambray work shirt and white cowl and farm boots and eyeglasses, that sort of thing; and the object that spoke loudest to me: his old Royal typewriter. I approached it with respect and awe – Thomas Merton’s typewriter, in plain view, not encased, and not off limits.

My pilgrimage was made worthwhile

I placed my own fingertips on the keys of Thomas Merton’s typewriter just in the places where he had done so and had thus composed the many books that meant so much to me as a teenager in the 1970s when I was stubbornly learning to bake bread and write and hone some kind of world view.  I used to save my babysitting money to send off by mail order for each book, one at a time as I could afford them, I told the curator. On the hood of the typewriter was taped a handwritten “guide” to what the number and symbol keys really meant – for apparently those keys were mixed up and didn’t correspond to what they said they were, the curator explained. “Rub your hand over it,” he implored me – “That is what Merton did when he placed it there,” and he made a sweeping motion across the typewriter with his own hand to demonstrate what he meant.  Some spirit rushed through me in that second when I did so – and then it was gone – but revelatory, satori-like, in my own private kind of way.

Miracle in Slow Motion

It started out as the practical task of cleaning the book shelves, something I do only once every several years or so – that is, taking books off the shelves, shooing out whatever dust balls are behind them, extraditing books I have outgrown, and reminiscing about others.  I won’t list the laborious titles I discarded, but many of them were a penciled and highlighted “self-help” variety of book, things that had absorbed me at the time before I absorbed them – or didn’t – and so let them collect dust.  Some of those books weighed heavily on me now; I no longer wanted them in my peripheral vision.  I ended up with two grocery bags full of books to discard in one way or another.

The way . . . dust particles pass through glass doors

As I chose my piles: which to discard, which to keep, which to peruse again and think about and later decide, I reminisced about the hopes and plans they gave me at the time.  But mostly I contemplated the mystery of dust balls – how they accumulate, why all those random particles comingle behind books on a shelf . . . and, more improbably, how dust particles must sometimes pass through glass doors before gathering into groups behind books on a shelf.

I thought . . . a single particle of dust must fall from who-knows-where and then hover at the shelf near the top of any given book. Then, by some volition either internal or external, it must traverse the top of the book, horizontally of course, before releasing itself to descend to the narrow bit of shelf space in back of the books which are lined upon it.

“Now this improbability must happen thousands and thousands of times over before a dust ball can be formed,” I said to a person in casual conversation about what I had done that day.  Only then did I begin to understand in myself the miracle and meaning I gave to it.  I was only talking about cleaning dust behind books on a shelf when I spoke to this person, mind you – and only later did I realize the significance of my contemplative task.

This improbability must happen thousands and thousands of times over . . . I thought this to myself the remainder of the day and the day after that too . . . traversing improbable odds before gathering and coalescing to form a dust ball behind a strip of books on a shelf . . . What a miracle!  It was a contemplation of dust balls and the gathering of random particles – not really a task of cleaning out books and dusting shelves.  Dusting behind things is a thankless job no one will ever notice when it’s done anyway.  Those others will not arrive home and announce, “The dust particles that I never saw are now gone.”  It is a vision and science known only to those privileged few who partake of such hidden work.

The lessons they hold . . .

To get rid of the books one no longer needs because the promises or lessons they hold have been absorbed into one’s life – or were never meant to be absorbed at all – that too is a miracle traversed over time.  It was a miracle in slow motion – the way all those books’ meanings and lessons and insights became part of me – one small change at a time, brought about from the inside or outside or an interaction of both – gathering and coalescing, like dust particles traversing the tops of books and landing upon a narrow strip of space behind them – hidden, dark, insignificant, unseen by most – until we excavate and look behind the apparent, until we see what has gathered over the course of time.  That‘s how miracles happen, I suppose – a painstaking accumulation of causes and effects, the way dust particles gather behind books on a shelf. 

Iconography, Day 7: Correction

One of the few choices given us came at the end of the last day – the choice to make Mary’s eyes gaze downward to her infant – or to make them gaze slightly outward to the world in front of her.

I intended to make Mary’s eyes gaze only at her infant – through means of placement of those white moon slivers near each iris.  I intended to place them at the top of the iris so she could appear looking downward.

But once I was home, and a day had passed, and I gazed at it thoughtfully – that’s when I strangely realized that I’d done it just the opposite of what I’d intended!  It was a mystifying experience because I had been so conscious of wanting to make it this way – gazing down at her infant.

I experienced a few moments of disappointment at my error – almost wondering if I’d picked up the wrong icon. This was one of the few choices given to me and I had messed up – until I realized that I preferred it this way, the way I had erred.

After all, a woman, albeit devoted to her infant, should also gaze outward to the world.  I much prefer it this way.  What if I should have made it the way I intended – eyes only for her infant – what disappointment I might have experienced in the days and years henceforth as my own life struggles to look forward.

A mother – or woman, or human – should keep her eye upon the world as well as her infant.  Even in the Tenderness Icon, she is part of the world.  I’m glad of this ‘mistake’ – not a mistake at all, but a correction made – or given – in spite of me.

Iconography, Day 6: Acceptance

There is a spectacle that happens when an iconography workshop is coming to a close and everyone stands back to look at their own icon or to walk around the room to look at others’ icons.  No one says, “Wow, I did a great job," or “Yours is better than mine.” Instead, the two phrases heard over and over again are: “Wow, how did this happen!” and “Wow, they all look so different!”

Iconography is not about taking control and creating something that is not there. It’s about letting go and seeing what is there. Even though we all write the same icon and follow the same steps, somehow each icon is very different.

“Every icon is a surprise,” our instructor (who has been writing icons for 23 years) said. There is no iconographer who can say they would not have done something differently if given the chance – but that is looking backward.  We accept what is, and by doing so we accept where we are in our individual spiritual journey.

If we struggled with one particular stage of the process, then that struggle helps us identify particular problems in our own spiritual journey. For example, trouble with drawing straight and trouble free lines could indicate a struggle with creating order in one’s life.  Conversely, if the lines are too harsh, perhaps it’s time to loosen up a bit in daily life.

From the first day I felt intrigued by the infant’s hand that clasped at its mother’s headdress. I felt intrigued because, as I said at the time, “that’s what babies really do.”  But I also know that ‘the pull’ doesn’t end with infancy.

Our instructor had a different take on that tiny hand: she said that the Divine is always trying to engage us, always drawing us into the realm, always tugging at us . . .

Many Iconographers of old did not sign their work, and those few who did, have done so on the backside of the panel.  We use a phrase, written in Greek letters, which means through the hands of . . .

When we inscribe through the hands of . . ., we are not saying, “I did this icon.”  We are saying, “I accept this icon.”