Transfiguration
“The broken are not always gathered, of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. . . . . Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them—clumsily. . . . Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the weight of love on this pilgrimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.”
Stephanie Kallos’ Broken for You
I didn’t travel outside Montana this year—or all that much under the Big Sky. I am well. A year later here on Alpine Street, rubber bands, stray lids, and broken birthday candles have already taken up residence in the silverware drawer. I’ve learned to gauge the march of weather across “my” valley. Dave’s estate is officially settled, though a few file folders linger on my desk. The car knows the new way to Rocky Mountain Development Council.
In May, I changed up half of what I do for RMDC one more (and surely one last) time–trading out my Retired and Senior Volunteer Program hours to tackle PR for our whole agency. Although fear follows me out to get the newspaper each morning, I relish this new assignment. I get to write. I’ve learned far more about our Head Start, low-income housing, energy assistance, homelessness, senior services, and mental health programs. “Work” remains informative, powerful, maddening, and invigorating.
This year, as they grow up into their lives still more, I’ll let the Heather and Coby, Emily and her family, and Amanda share their own stories as they choose. Amanda is in Kalispell teaching third-grade scholars this year. Emily and her crew of Memo and Mathilda are in Boise where five-year-old Memo just started kindergarten. In St. Louis, Heather took a new position in community college administration, as she and Coby continue to pursue their art.
Mostly it was a year of quiet ordinariness and sweet fellowship. At one level, Dave’s death does not define my life as it did the last three Christmases. Figuring out how to live beyond it—to carry the weight and carry on—does. Figuring out how to take pieces of memory, experience, time, hope, habit, fear, grief, and joy and transfigure them into something new does.
On this icy winter night, I’m remembering:
- Two lovely days of solitude at Mammoth Hot Springs last Christmas, in that glittering, breathing wonderland.
- Friends from the corners of Kansas and California, Washington, Minnesota, and Montana coming HERE to visit!
- Saying goodbye to the North Fork: committing some of Dave’s ashes to the soil and the air; memorizing the mountains one more time; finding peace at the river.
- Planting a porch full of flowers.
- A day of impossibly good music and friendship while Butte reverberated to the likes of Magic Slim, BeauSoleil, and Nati Cano’s Mariachi Band.
- Fat moons rising over the Belts and then yielding to ethereal sunrises.
- The patter of baseball announcers that felt like home again.
- Movies that brooked no pettiness: Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Solist.
- Tim O’Brien, P. G. Wodehouse, Stephanie Kallos, Ellen Meloy, Ivan Doig, Pema Chodron: whose words let me breathe in their wake.
Dave often used the metaphor of mosaic–reminding us that Montana’s history is not a seamless tale of heroes, but a crazy quilt of forgotten fragments and curious shards. Maybe that’s why Kallos’ book of shattered lives becoming art resonated.
“The metaphor culminates, obviously, in relationship which is, after all, a marvel of construction, built up over time and out of fragments of shared experience. Maybe we feel such a strong kinship with pique assiette (mosaic) because it is the visual metaphor that best describes us; after all, we spend much of our lives hurling bits of the figurative and literal past into the world’s landfill—and then regret it. We build our identities from that detritus of regret. Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. . . . . The next time you break something, consider the action that might not immediately come to mind: Say a prayer of thanks over what has been broken. Then, give it place of honor. Build it a shrine.” Stephanie Kallos
Beyond the exhilaration of work and the peace of an evening with Mr. Noodle, you are there. And I remain grateful beyond measure for the ways in which you inspire, encourage, and accompany me in this very unfinished business of reconfiguration—transfiguration. Thank you—for your steady patience, honesty, understanding, practicality, play, and creativity.
May this season of returning light bring you time and space enough to gather all the pieces of your life, glorious and unbearable alike, into a new song, a new quilt, a new book, a new garden, a new dream.
