Trauma and Transcendence
Howdy folks.
One of the things I like to do is draw maps of my life. I fancy myself an amateur cartographer, though not at all an illustrator — I’ve talked myself into believing that I can’t sketch, though, of course, I can, I’m just critical of the outcome.
I love the book The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen, whose parents I once knew. The movie adaptation is terrific, too. T.S. is twelve, lives on a ranch in Montana and maps everything, beautifully. Read it or see it or both, I recommend.
At some point, probably the point at which I realized I was starting to forget a lot of the parts of my life, I got a big sketch book and started mapping. I noticed that I’ve traveled in a sort of spiral, returning to people and places. It did not come as a surprise; I think a lot of us move through life this way.
I mapped all kinds of things: important relationships, major turning points, my travels. I mapped the schools I attended and the classes I took, the books I’ve loved.
Once the mapping began I had started the process of unearthing me, an essential part of the journey inward. The funny thing about life is that we are taught to believe that important movement is outward: find a mate, win the race, get the degree, nail down the property. All outwardly-oriented enterprises.
At some point it becomes important to tend to the garden within. There are consequences if we neglect this aspect of being alive and vital. We have to get out the existential shovel and do the work.
And so the other night I was laying in bed, under the full moon, thinking about one of the mappable aspects of my life: all of the traumas. Oof, this is a hard door to open, but, again, unavoidable for those interested in true growth.
It’s totally fine to skate across the surface of life: do the thing, the next thing, the next thing … until the end. But I have a squishy and irrepressible hunch that you’ll be back, repeating and repeating until you finally commit and start the dig.
In surveying the wreckage I noticed that the traumas began at the very beginning, when I was born with one leg shorter than the other. In 1965 the remedy for that was to pull the offensive leg down and into place and then encast both legs for a year.
So yes, I began my time on this planet held in place by two full-leg casts. For the entire first year of my life.
This is probably the reason I have not sat still since, but that could be hyperbole, I’m not sure.
Looking at the photos from that time, I seem a happy baby, always smiling in spite of my immobility. In one picture my older brother is seen brushing my hair, a scene eerily prescient of what happened 21 years later, after I was hit by a car and immobilized once again. Then it was my younger brother who helped with my hair, washing it for me, outside in the evenings, a memory so tender and ethereal that it almost neutralizes much of the trauma from those days.
I girded my loins and continued on through all the usual childhood traumas: poor parenting, the Catholic church, the elementary school cafeteria, gym class. Then I moved on to early adolescence and all the horrors of budding and deeply-confusing sexuality. The shame, fear, lack of boundaries. Boys and young men (and sometimes older men who should have known better) with groping hands and me with a mouth that could not form the word No.
Young adulthood, pregnancy and childbirth and babies and loneliness and confusion and poor choices. Rummaging around in a life that never felt like mine, as I quoted in a previous piece. Divorce, marriage, addiction (alcohol) … divorce, again.
Hard to imagine how a body holds all this trauma, isn’t it? And I’m just a regular person. I wasn’t born into extreme poverty, I wasn’t explicitly abused by anyone as a kid. I was just subject to all the regulars of life, which is, by definition, traumatic.
So I was laying in bed forcing myself not to turn away from all the old pain when my mind turned to the transcendent moments of my life. What, I wondered, were the peak experiences?
Most of them, I realized, were very small, quiet moments.
Almost all of them happened outside, in relation to the natural world. Standing on top of a mountain, flying over the Yukon River in northern Alaska, Flying over Mt. McKinley and seeing what remains when a glacier moves. Glaciers move!! An all-day hike up to the Grewingk Glacier in Homer Bay (that’s three in Alaska 🤔). Seeing the northern lights. Skiing, anywhere, every time.
The sunrise. Swimming in the ocean after dark among luminescent creatures off Vieques. Waking up in a tent and smelling fresh air. Dancing with thousands of other people at a Grateful Dead show.
Holding a baby. Holding my three babies. A sleeping baby on my chest.
Holding the hand of someone I love. Looking at the face of someone I love.
When all three of my kids are sleeping under the same roof (as we will be tonight) and I can hear them all breathing.
When I turned 50, seven years ago, this was all I wanted, to be with them in the same room, so we went to the Adirondack Loj at aptly-named Heart Lake and stayed in a bunk room. There is no greater bliss, I tell you, than the sound of your kids sleeping. The next morning we hiked up Mt. Jo and I apologized to them for all of my nonsense and thanked them for hanging in there and told them that they are the only things that matter to me. I’ll probably tell them all of that again tonight as tomorrow we start to disperse once more: Maine, Lake Tahoe, Manchester and beyond.
Thanksgiving 2018, Sierraville, Nevada.
What I realized in my nocturnal evaluation is that the list of transcendent moments is far shorter than the list of traumas and so I, on the spot, promised myself that I would dedicate the rest of my life to shifting that imbalance. Moving forward I want far more transcendence and far less trauma. And I want the same for you, too.
xomo
If you wish to stoke the fires and pre-order, these Little guidebooks will be out in early 2023. Thank you.