Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Pregnant Pause

It’s as if some giant, invisible hand pressed down and stilled me.  Wrapped feverish fingers around my small frame, humbling me into a great pause. As I twist in bedsheets and a pile of tissues, the hand gives a swift flick to my cell phone and slams the laptop shut with a single tap of its thumb. This overbearing palm insists complete submission – no distraction.  I’m left to breathing and the thoughts behind closed eyes.

From my bed I craft partial posts for the Archives in my mind, then leave them unfinished to seep into my fluid haze.

Budgetary calculations raise their numeric heads (fueled by the fact that I’ve missed a week of work due to this illness).

I ponder access points to time travel.  What exactly is a morphic field?

Think of portrait artist Alice Neel, who raised two sons but never sacrificed her art. Her boys say they suffered because of it and Neel’s work was never recognized till old age.

I dwell on a summer scene in Seattle, 1994.  Me, on a porch in a hand-me down skirt.  He, the Swiss traveler with a golden goatee and clear eyes.  How we threw our watches away at the Center of the Universe and left the city in my Subaru.  We found the lighthouse that marked my ancestor’s utopia.  Slept in island forests.  10,000 Maniacs in the tape deck.  The warmth of fire.

photo by Jessica Dofflemyer - all rights reserved

My muscles ache despite five pillows.  Outside lightening flashes bright.  It is silent in the pregnant pause.  Then the thunder booms.

Here in the dark, day four in this bed, I’m living in the space between.  Like that span between light and sound, I am suspended.  Charged but not yet fully realized.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Showing Up to Dust and Sunlight

http://www.joycerupp.com

Quite present in the here and now, I spent yesterday monitoring Jeb’s low-grade fever, haggling prices with a car salesman, sweeping dust bunnies from under my bed and steam cleaning my floors.  Feeling the same kind of “nesting” energy just before giving birth to my son, I wonder what is driving this flurry of practicalities.

This morning in a newly angled bed, beneath all fresh linens, I drink coffee under the covers and allow myself a moment with a book.  Joyce Rupp’s “Walk in a Relaxed Manner” chronicles her 37 day pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago at the age of 60.

Only two chapters in and I’ve found quotes and passages that resonate.  Somehow I feel a weaving of the Archives, northern Spain and my current dust pan tasks.  She reminds that the ancient way of the Camino is a physical reflection of the path we each walk in life.  How do we take our steps?

“…on a refugio wall in El Burgo Ranero.  It said:  ‘Peregrina (pilgrim) you do not walk the path, the path is YOU, your footsteps, these are the Camino.'”

I can nurture romantic visions of walking a stony path in forests filled with purple crocus, but perhaps the treasure found there is just as rich as what could be touched, here, as I wipe down my window screens (well, I’m not sure how much of that you’d actually want to touch).  Certainly there is beauty in imagining a sacred path in a distant land.  I’ll keep that dream alive.  Yet right here, golden morning sun lights the drooping banana leaves like tropical icicles, heavy dew dripping in sparkled drops.

Rupp suggests that wherever you are the Camino can be found, quoting Pema Chodron’s sage advice to “train wholeheartedly.”

I am in training.  On a journey.  One step at a time.

Rupp tells of the inspiration she had to share her experience on the Camino, when at first she had been inclined to keep the special experience to herself.  It was an article she read including Joseph Campbell’s description of the mythic hero, someone who ends a journey with one of two kinds of heroic acts:

“A physical act in which the individual gives his or her life in sacrifice for others, or a spiritual act, in which the hero returns to share an extraordinary experience, and thus deeply benefits the community.”

I’m no hero.  My journey is far from mythic.  But I’m on the path, in training.  I observe and call back some snippets of what I find.  Log details in the Archives.  Yesterday turned up dead moth larvae in remote corners, long untouched.  This morning it’s hints of summer sun through my bedroom window.

The path is mysterious.  My intention is connection.  The strategy?  Just keep showing up.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Crumbling Empires and Parked Cars

I’d been dreaming of escaping the land locked San Joaquin Valley since I was in grade school, collecting shells in jars at the age of seven.  By high school graduation, I’d been accepted at two colleges but my long-time boyfriend (one year ahead of me) was not at my school of choice. Tearfully, I chose to forgo the giant Redwoods along the ocean, so I could stick with him in the asphalt apartment complex of Bulldog Lane Village, Fresno, California, USA.

image courtesy of Fresno State University

I knew it was a gamble, but I was willing.  I tried to make the best of it.  Got a job at Naturalizer Shoes in the mall, grateful for air conditioning in 108 degree heat, especially since I was donned in the required pantyhose.  I even hooked my boyfriend up with a job at the same shoe store in the neighboring mall, which was the beginning of our demise.  Romance struck when he bonded with the goth-fashioned clerk down the way at Waldenbooks.  He broke up with me and started reading “Geek Love”

.

courtesy of Wikipedia

I was devastated and stuck in Fresno.

Around this time, I found myself in a Political Science lecture where the professor reminded the class, “Throughout history, all empires have fallen.  Who is to say that the United States is any different?”

The suggestion shattered the bedrock of a foundation I had never questioned.

Still needing to finish up the school year, I took a short story fiction class, read Chekov and met a fellow student and brilliant writer (and, by chance, the son of the Political Science professor).  I still remember that first story I read of his.  A man and woman, oranges and chocolate and plenty of pregnant pauses.  I was enamored.  He took me to San Francisco where I wore red lipstick in the day time.  We ate Vietnamese food, perused bookstores and I bought a copy of  “That Which You Are Seeking is Causing You to Seek.”

I tried to make the best of my Fresno time.  I wrote a lot in my journal.  Found off-the-path nooks on campus where I’d sit in the shade of a big tree and read about the act of peeling a tangerine as meditation. Saw Ramblin Jack Elliot perform at a small bar in the Tower District with my father.

One weekend I took a road trip to Humboldt with my girlfriend, where a kind, handsome man in Buddy Holly glasses read me Richard Brautigan poetry at 2am in his studio by the railroad tracks.  I swooned to the sound of

“I want your hair
to cover me with maps
of new places…”

Foundation had been shaken.  The light was spilling forth.  Back in Fresno, I was standing in the displays of white, soft-soled shoes reading “Death is a Parked Car Only” with skipping heart beats.  I would no longer be confined to used peds and Orange Juliuses.  I would not end in Fresno.

Richard Brautigan

“You joyride around for a while listening
to the radio, and then abandon death, walk
away, and leave death for the police
to find.”

Sometimes the greatest gift is to lose the thing you wanted.  That which I was seeking, was causing me to split.  I finished that semester, left Geek Love and the Bulldogs behind, and headed for the ocean.