Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Tangling with Trust

On the advice of Hafiz, I got dressed for dancing last night.  And for a few peak musical moments I think I may have lingered on the fringes of God’s Ward – no stretcher needed.  But this morning I sleep in past sunrise, brew coffee at 8:30, move slowly.

This luxury is mine.  Jeb is with Rex for two more hours and I continue to flip through old journals.  Details for Excerpts from the Coastal Dwelling – my little series here about my time in California this past December – are housed on the pages of one journal.  So I’ve been perusing and piecing together entries that can weave the story.  Last installment ended with the question “Can I trust my heart?” (more on what I discovered in future “Excerpts” posts)

Committed to following the heart thread, I’ve decided to answer a call for submissions for a literary magazine.  Deadline is at the end of this month.  The story I want to tell takes place in ’95 and I’ve only got old journals to fill in the details.

Back then I was 23 and had left New England in my Subaru on a mission to park my car on the West Coast, load my backpack and catch a plane to Kauai.

Somewhere around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, my life took a turn.  Within three weeks I underwent a surgery that removed an ovary, abandoned my Kauai plan and drove to British Colombia, where I would live and heal on a remote island for the next year.

Pages from the journal of this time are full of questions about my life’s direction, my creative expression, and lessons in trusting my intuition.  Old love letters fall from the binding.  A candy bar wrapper hosts poetry from that Christmas when snow stopped the ferries and I was marooned in a houseful of French Canadians and Dead Can Dance.  There is my hand drawn key to ancient Runes.    And plenty of words about the male characters that touched my young heart on that misty island.

on that rainy day goodbye
your lips were slippery
and I didn’t know if the salt came
from you or the sea
grey beneath the apple tree
you had stars in your eyes
and the earth in your hair
and my fingers in your hands
all tangled with stones and shells and seaweed

the swans treaded ripples by the shore
bowing to your mission

staff in hand
life on your back
I told you you were beautiful
then passed you by

Oh, such a vagabond in love was I!  Hardly.  Love and leave has never been my mode of operation, which is probably why I wrote about that rare scene.

There’s a fifteen year span between two journals, yet the themes are still the same.  I want to write.  I love to sing.  I walk in nature and wonder about love and life and my place in the world.  I seek connection with myself and the Cosmos.

Twenty-three or thirty-seven, my hand keeps writing the word Trust.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 2 Comments

Making Peace with Landmarks in the California Sweater

As part of a retrospective on my recent travels to California, I’m offering another installment to the series “Excerpts from the Coastal Dwelling.”  A collage of journal entries, narrative, photographs and random poetic waxing.

Here’s Day Two:

the California Sweater

The pools become my addiction.  I’m called to them again and again.  Three times yesterday in a short amount of hours.  I end the day and begin the day with the baths.  Hot water.  Cold water.  Steep deep.  Let the steam rise from bare skin on cold coastal air.  Every combination.  Quiet.  Speaking.  Silent.  Alone.  Communal.  Wash hair.  Keep hair dry.

After soaking I bundle and seal in all of the healing warmth with socks and boots, double layers and the California Sweater [named so because it’s stored  in CA for when I come to visit].  The wool blanket/sweater I rescued from the giveaway bag – my father’s – the one he got in Mexico twenty years ago.  It exudes the subtle scent of slightly damp wool and the weave lightly prickles my skin.  This sweater is wrapped around me now as I write ink to paper and gaze at the ring – the jade one from Hawaii – its silver casting has turned iridescent turquoise from the minerals of the hot spring.  I really must remember to start taking jewelry off in the baths.

[Though I was cleansing in the waters, I was emotionally steeped in the essence of the love with the rocket scientist that had seeded in that very place the year before.  I was making peace with landmarks around every corner.]

It all came up today – a small cry, really, but one still the same.  We were instructed in our workshop to write our life’s key points in five year increments.  Thinking of the past felt like raw tenderness.  Any recollecting just brought a floodgate of grief for the love that grew from these very grounds one year ago.

These crystalline moments of sweet connection are enmeshed in the landscape here.  I pass the grassy field where we knelt and shared a tangerine while butterflies flit around our heads.  There’s the cliffside bench, the corner tree, that table in the solarium.  I walk past the cabin and the Bottle Brush tree – the backdrop for our happy photos.  The scene’s familiar but he has vanished.

If I was not left with questions I think that I could walk among our monuments with gentle thoughts and sweet memories.  A gratitude.  Can I still find this place inside myself even if the questions are never answered?

Facilitator encourages me to be thankful for what we did share.  She says sometimes things don’t always look the way we thought they would.  And as we write our intentions and desires regarding our livelihood – our place in the world – the doubts arise about dreams. Are they really possible?  Can I trust my heart?

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The Honey of Peace

Last month in California, my father loaned  me his special desktop copy of Robinson Jeffers Selected Poems.  I was on a pilgrimage to Tor House, but first, five days in my feel-good place.

Dad's book at the Jeffers' Cornerstone

Within hours of arriving at the land of my solo retreat, I was out of sorts and feeling stuck.  Searching for clues, I flipped through pages of poetry and found the somber piece “To the Stone-cutters” (entire work can be read here).  My journal entry begins by quoting the last line.  One that seems even more relevant now as I try to glean some nectar from the words I wrote during that expansive time.

Here’s an excerpt from day one, as I began to unravel in that coastal dwelling.

“The honey of peace in old poems…”  Robinson Jeffers

‘Dance Church’ is next door and the bass is pumping.  I know that I love to dance but there are reasons I am here, not there:  jet lag, no sleep, bloodshot eyes, bad music, closed circuits, just don’t feel like it.

I peek in the window and be the voyeur that watches but doesn’t want to take the plunge.  Sixty happy people move and jump in a mass of ecstatic wildness.  A man exits, sees my indecision and encourages me to go inside.  I tell him that I am just too tired.

“I was too, but it woke me up…”

Eventually, I enter.  Somewhere around the Van Halen song, “Jump”, (that’s right, ‘go ahead and jump!’) I’m telling myself that I just can’t dance to this.  But then I try it anyway.  David Lee Roth’s mantra segues into something more palatable and I’m soon a member of the congregation, dancing my own kind of freedom.  My state is altered, my body enlivened and I get so into it that when Dance Church is over and it’s time for dinner, I can barely eat.

Later I’m in the hot springs on a new moon in the starlight.  A bath with myself and two women – silent.  After a long while one begins to gently sing:  “When I am in the light of my soul I am home.”

She sings this line quietly for a short time then slowly exits the bath.  More silence, warm water and calm.”

Ahh…the honey of peace in old poems.