I am grateful to be back home, sitting on my bed in front of the fan, Honor lying in her bed across the room, curled up and sleeping. We are both glad to be home. I didn’t sleep well last night. Sometimes on the night before I travel I don’t sleep well, and I was aware as I was trying to quiet my mind to sleep that there were a lot of challenging thoughts coursing through it. I woke with some of the same thoughts, mostly questions that sent a rumbling undercurrent through the relative stillness on my surface. On my surface I chatted with my sister and my cousin as we had breakfast at the hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota this morning. But my mind was churning and my stomach was murmuring as I prepared to come back to this place.
I’m not sure what I went seeking or expecting from our time in Minnesota. I am more grateful than I can say to my sister Sandy for making it possible and easy for the two of us to travel together to reconnect with our cousin and aunt. The three of us talked of many things–old family history stuff, but also the challenges of extended family: about how our grandfather’s boasting about our father’s accomplishments affected my uncle and his children, about the impact of not feeling that approval so keenly wanted and so stingily offered. We talked about our current lives, the lives of our children. Sandy and I talked about the deaths of both of our parents and Denise talked about her father’s death and mother’s aging process. I felt a kinship with my cousin I hadn’t realized was there–not simply blood kinship, but more like being a kindred spirit: I could see parallels between her life and mine. I wondered if and hoped she is happy. When I hugged her goodbye it was the extra long hug of I’m glad we did this. We shall connect again soon. I love you.
As Sandy and I drove toward the airport, she declared that this had been a wonderful visit and that it was exactly what she’d hoped it would be, that she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. I agreed with her that it was indeed wonderful, though I find as I return home that I have a lot of questions to which I don’t have easy immediate answers. Some of the questions have been percolating for a while now, and others were stirred during these past few days. I bring myself back, as I usually do, to the concept highlighted in Ranier Maria Rilke’s admonition to, “be patient will all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” It isn’t always easy for me to sit with questions; it demands a level of patience I don’t exhibit nearly as often as I’d like, though I actively and regularly work on it. Rilke goes on to say, “Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” I reckon I need to be able to live the questions, which to me means being patient with things as they unfold. It is in the unfolding that I actually live the questions and begin to gradually live the answers.
My intention is not to sound deep and esoteric with these posts, though it perhaps comes across as such. On evenings like this I know that I am discovering as I write, uncovering ideas, thoughts, feelings that have heretofore been unexcavated and unexamined. I am grateful for the time spent in conversation with my sister and my cousin this past weekend. It unearthed new questions for me to live into while also reconnecting me with old family stories told from perspectives I hadn’t considered before. These are all good things. I am grateful to be on this journey of gratitude. It continues to provide a space and open me up to think about important things. That I get to share those things with you who read these musings each day remains an additional blessing for which I am most heartily grateful.
