|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Why does my mother deny her soul? ------------------------------------------------------ I'm a little girl sitting in the comforting arms of a poplar shelter house with a sheet-metal roof. The trees were cut green and I can still smell the wood weathering against my bare shoulder. This is summer time on the acres of wild wood we've dubbed a farm due to our efforts at coaxing produce from a small portion of the land. The night is chilly in a little girl's tank top and shorts, dusty little toes digging into soft-packed earth, eyes bright on the stars above. I ask my father what stars are. Why they're up there. Being the analytic he is, I get a brief lesson in gaseous bodies that I soak up because I'm hungry for any knowledge he is willing to impart. It's so rare that he bothers at all. My mother is disappointed in him, as usual. "Bill, she's a little girl." |
| Sometimes I don't think she realizes that she's interrupting something important. I don't hear what my father says in return. Mind full of the mystery of bright light and swirling fragments of energy, I only know that they're arguing quietly behind me as I rise and walk out from under the cold metal to stand in the tall grass and look up at the beauty of a night sky obstructed only by the treeline. So silent and still out here in the field alone with the stars. If my ears behave long enough, I can tune out the sounds of the tiny nocturnal birds and insects all around to hear the dark stream gurgling icily close to my left. My flesh invites the press of trees from the far right and my heart opens to the crisp air around me, offering my soul to the stars above. Though I now understand a little bit about what those bright twinkles are made of, I'm still speculating about them. With the whisper of grain seeds and slender bodies of grass tickling my legs, I'm grasping for a higher understanding: What are they? Why are they up there? These questions are still rubbing up against me like needy kittens, even though they've been answered. I'm looking for something deeper than science right now with the planet swirling slowly toward daytime under my feet and my mind leaving the confinement of my skull to drift outward and explore on its own, carried by the current of the wind. My mother finishes whatever she had to say to my father or has simply given up on him again and comes out to where I am. "What do you think, Mom?" As a little girl, I try to love them both equally and not worry that someday they might not love me anymore. Right now, the answer to this question is so important that I wish she'd let me hug her without pulling away. Arms held in a frail sort of comfort around my own body, I find that I'm forgetting to worry entirely as my mother speaks. "What if the stars were little windows cut into the sky that we can only see open at night and there are little people up there watching down on us?" Somehow, this is all she really needs to say. Maybe they were just words to inspire my mind and take away the imagined hurt of my father's science, but I lose the rest of what she's telling me because the Earth Spirit has rushed up from below to twine its own limbs around me and introduce its children in the sky to answer the one question that I really couldn't articulate - Why are stars so important to me? The soft voice of remembering whispered in my ear and the pointing fingers of the trees guiding my eyes... See that one? That was the little mother who died last spring birthing her foals. No, of course I don't mean a person when I say mother. I mean the painted horse who lived over the hill a few miles. Remember that skinny pony? I know you haven't seen it, but don't you dream him? ... And there, the laughing twins. See how bright their star is? ... Oh, and here! Look here! That was the most beautiful tree I'd ever seen... |
 |
| That single suggestion from my mother was all it took to birth a firm spiritual belief in me that revolves around stars. Even now, after endless grasping, I don't entirely understand it. Along the path of maturing, I've only managed to find tidbits to console my ravening soul's ache for completion on this subject. Until today, when it all seemed to come together. Perhaps not completely, but in such a way that I no longer feel alone. Today I read Barbara Kingsolver's short-story "Homeland" and was stunned to find words I've been searching for most of my life: |
| "Before there was a world, there was only the sea, and the high, bright sky arched above it like an upturned bowl. For as many years as anyone can imagine, the people in the stars looked down at the ocean's glittering face without giving a thought to what it was, or what might lie beneath it. They had their own concerns. But as more time passed, as is natural, they began to grow curious. Eventually it was the waterbug who volunteered to go exploring. She flew down and landed on top of the water, which was beautiful, but not firm as it had appeared. She skated in every direction but could not find a place to stop and rest, so she dived underneath. She was gone for days and the star people thought she must have drowned, but she hadn't. When she joyfully broke the surface again she had the answer: on the bottom of the sea, there was mud. She had brought a piece of it back with her, and she held up her sodden bit of proof to the bright light. There, before the crowd of skeptical star eyes, the ball of mud began to grow, and dry up, and grow some more, and out of it came all the voices and life that now dwell on this island that is the earth. The star people fastened it to the sky with four long grape vines so it wouldn't be lost again." |
| Fifteen or more years later, I discover that my mother was telling me part of a creation myth that night and I doubt she even realized that herself. In Kingsolver's writing, this is a tale told by a Cherokee woman of the Bird Clan. When she finishes, her granddaughter mentions the worry of not being able to remember it in order to tell her own children. Earlier in the story, her grandmother had consoled this fear with "If it's important, your heart remembers." and instills in her granddaughter the fact that she must go on to tell her children the stories they've shared. Now I'm asking myself how many ancestors passed into death before all my mother's heart could remember was the part about the star people without attaching it to their integral role in our existence? How many histories have been lost as this became nothing but a child's story in the minds of my relatives? Even as a child myself, I was breathing the importance of my mother's words and my heart remembered things that hers didn't because it's more than the heart that remembers - It's the blood that flows through it - The blood of the earth. For years, my sister has fretted over our lineage, our descent from the original mother and father and the path it took to bring us here, to each other. Much of what has been discovered about our ancestors is subject to wishful thinking and hearsay. Now I no longer have a doubt about some things. Growing up in eastern Kentucky at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains never seemed so important to me as it does now. Getting my mother to write or to tell about her childhood and the things she remembers only becomes more crucial to me with each passing year, each new infirmity. Writers like Kingsolver bring home the terror in me that the oral traditions of my family will die with my mother. So much history she carries around in her mind. Such a great deal of importance that she passes off with a shrug of the shoulder and a sparkle of the eye as hard living. How I strain to express to her the fact that she is an integral part of a forever dying culture. My new mission is to impress upon her the need to read Barbara Kingsolver's work. I originally avoided the author myself because so often things are packaged as Appalachian this or Appalachian that without having any true bearing on the life and history of the individuals who carved their livelihood out of the unyielding mountains and fruitless clay soil during the years of hardship that swept over the nation and seemed to find their final home in those areas of Kentucky. Hardship so deep and cruel that it was passed down for generations before families either suffered and broke under the yoke of poverty or triumphed over it to welcome the new century. My mother is one of those who found her way out of Pikeville, KY to bear two children with a fierce need to rise above the anxiety of rural life in the Ohio River Valley farther north of her birthplace. Two daughters who strive to make something of the lives they were given because they understand the fight of a noble woman only looking to live out the life given her. My mother will never understand how vast is her importance as a female who struggled through survival in a time and place that can only now be visited in works of art. Kingsolver takes me home to that era with her writing. A home I often asked my mother for as a child standing in my parents' house without being able to articulate a location for my real home. I only had the words "I want to go home" and I didn't even understand them myself until now. What I need to find is the home in my soul that I often find difficult to open the door of and almost impossible to walk into and sit down in that old rocker with its peeling yellow paint. The home I need is locked in my mother's mind along with the aches and pains she retains from growing to adulthood. While I desperately need to be in my home, I am often reluctant to open the windows because the house is so empty that I don't want what's already there to get sucked out on a breeze. Since meeting the man I love, I find it easier to sit in my home sometimes. I fill it with sunlight, take a deep breath, then open the windows and unlock the door in hope of a brighter tomorrow seeping in to claim the lingering emptiness. Now, as I stand here on the threshold of my life with sunlight behind me and the green fields of opportunity spreading endless to the horizon, I find a new question in my mind: Why does my mother deny her soul? |