Like Isis, I Find the Pieces & Whole the Soul

When I set out on the Inner Beauty Pilgrimage to the Sacred-Ordinary Everywhere, I was aware enough to know I wasn't sure what I was doing.  There was a pretty good cover story: I will offer some events with some people in different places, talking about what really makes us whole / beautiful.  There was a pretty good calendar of events - not by any means complete when I set out, but good enough.  And there was rich personal experience to back up the hunch that whatever I thought this journey was all about, much larger truths & patterns would be revealing themselves bit by bit, if I remained open to receiving them.

Speaking of truth & its opposites, you know what's total bullshit?  Allowing the beautiful word Isis to be claimed & monopolized by a bunch of violent sado-theocratic thugs, that's what.  I hereby reclaim Isis as the name of the Egyptian wisdom-and-love goddess.  I hereby claim Isis' story of searching the world for the dismembered pieces of her soul {mate Osiris}, and bringing them home, as an underlying mega-truth of my pilgrimage story.

Remember, on the very first stop of my journey, when my friend Monica gave me back the before-the-beginning prototype of the Inner Beauty compact, that I did not even remember she had?  That was the opening move in a whole long series of intimate visits from my past.  I would show up at a friend's place for dinner, and above the dining room table there would be some Tibetan nuns laughing in a photograph I'd taken 20 years before.  Elsewhere, a glitter-painting of FULLNESS from my grad school days winked at me from above a friend's couch; and in another friend's bedroom, a little ibex-painting I'd forgotten about leapt up to greet me, in all its freshness and clarity.  Kali's Names glow in a painting in my brother's living room, and above my friend's clay workbench, my weird little minotaur carries on his passionate dialogue with the moon.  These re-visitations happened again and again, with such un-dismissable reliability that I began to get the message: Don't forget who you are and the beauty you have made.  Modesty is fine, but the cloud of forgetting is dangerous.  It stops you from trusting the power of your way, and thins you out in the world.  Yes, there is a LOT of egotistical nonsense in the world & especially the art world, but your amnesia serves no one.  You have important work to do.  Reclaim your roots in beauty.  Speak.  Re-member the pieces of your soul.

Re-experiencing many of my past homes became another part of this Isis-finding-bits-of-soul process.  Again, I did not consciously set out to do this, but it sure was happening.  What's partway between Manchester, NH and NYC?  New Haven, that's what.  Zooming along the highway with no intention of making this detour, I found I physically could not resist it.  So, OK.  There were the residential college & weird little annex I had lived in, the apartment above the café, the Yale-China Association that had sent me to Hong Kong.  There was the landscape of my life from 1990-1994, open to the bright September sun, self-liberated and stripped of the restrictions I had felt when I lived there.   

In Sewanee I drove past the little yellow yellow house where I had lived, and saw that it was good: someone had put out white-painted rocking chairs, and the yard looked neatly kept.  In Atlanta, a steady thread of curiosity trumping common sense, I braved super-congested Friday afternoon traffic to revisit many of the places I'd lived, as well as my old high school.   I knew the beautiful rambling house my parents had lived in from 1989-2006 had been razed to make way for a circle of giant McMansions, but apparently McMansion standards rise fast, because now that new house is has been destroyed, and an even-more-giant gaping hole in the red clay awaits grander designs.  Aha!  I thought.  Like this.  I drove up the steep driveway to my old apartment on Lafayette Drive (yep! still lovely, still no parking), and walked with my friend Kristin to the studio apartment I'd lived in on Charles Allen Drive.  She remembered that I'd once missed most of family Thanksgiving, too busy rolling around with my then-boyfriend on the platform bed I'd built in the kitchen to be very interested in other forms of stuffing.  Nyuk, nyuk.  

Despite what one might expect, these visits didn't carry a quality of nostalgia.  They felt like re-assessments or re-seeings.  There was the pleasure of recognition, without any sense of wishing to be in the past, or wishing to alter the past.  More than that, I felt the pleasure of knowing how much more at home in the world I feel since those days.  Whatever this life is for, I am growing into it.  I felt this in returning, now as a visiting teacher, to a new version of my old Zen group.  I felt this in re-seeing old friends.  Oh, you!  Mostly, we've grown up.  Some of us more than others.  In the midst of all this, my Bay Area friend Johanna emailed me from a business trip to Fresno.  Fresno?  That's not a place I thought I'd hear from again.  On a lark, I wrote, Say hello to 4361 Wishon Avenue for me.  And so Johanna did a drive-by, and sent me a picture of the house I lived in with my family from 1977-1982:

My intuitive sense of what's happening in all these places is that I'm releasing any bits of regret or unfinished business that may still be clinging to them.  I'm shepherding home any bits of soul that are still stuck there.  I'm doing the work of re-inhabiting the world from a new perspective: one that's wider & more compassionate, more grounded in the body and less afraid.

Last night, back home in my bed in NH, I dreamed of my family's first house in Atlanta, on Dalrymple Road.  In the dream, there's water flowing down from the white dining room ceiling onto the dark hardwood floor.  I go into the kitchen, and from the oven, pull a foil pan with egg-shaped indentations in the bottom.  With a sense of duty towards the empty house my parents cared for, I try to set the pan to catch the flow, but I can't - the leak's precise location keeps shifting - there's  water everywhere - it just won't work.  In the living room, in the gloaming, I realize all the lights in the house are out, except for one string of Christmas lights glowing away in a loop in the ruins.  Cheers to you, Lights!  I think.  I don't know who set you, or how long you'll last, but I am glad you are here.  I realize I don't need this house anymore.  No one does.  I leave the house of my adolescent depressions, and re-enter the world.

​On waking, my body feels rich - not by any means pain-free - but alive, wholly inhabited, heavy, tingly, delicious.  Having brought back the pieces from Fresno & Atlanta & Sewanee & everywhere, this soul is whole, present, and ready.  Like Isis, I find the pieces & whole the soul.