What’s Going On?

Apart from being a great song by the great Marvin Gaye, it is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I got the wanderlust and hit the road to the Grand Canyon only to find myself alienated and lonely. I come back for a day here in Coolville where all is quiet and lovely, and I’m supposed to head to Boston this morning to the warm embrace of the great companions. My flight is the one I usually take: 6:50am to Atlanta. I set the alarm for 5:00 am and wake up at 7:30. What’s going on? Immediately, I get on the phone and arrange to get on the next flight, leaving at 11:50 am. Delta tells me that it is no problem, as long as I cough up $300. I tell them I just overslept and want to be put on the next flight. Jane tells me that if I call back three hours or less before the flight, I can make the change for $50. “Thank you Jane,” I say, and go back to bed. I wake up at 9:00 am and cheerfully ask to be put on the next flight. “I’m sorry,” Patrick says, “but those flights are full.” He checks later flights, and they are full. He checks tomorrow’s flights, and they are full. I ask him about New Year’s Day. “Yes,” he says cheerfully, “I can get you the same flights you have with only a $75 change penalty. “Okay,” I say, sad that I will not be with Roger and Eileen for New Years Eve in Boston, but thinking that this will give me a chance to get some work done, the work that I can’t seem to bring myself to do whether I am in the Grand Canyon or my living room. I call Roger and tell him the news and that I am a doofus. “You said it; I didn’t,” he replies helpfully. What’s going on?

Okay, the work part is not hard to figure out. The last weeks at the Buffalo Center were the most intense work experience I have ever had, and that was at the end of the most intense semester I have ever had. The work was good work; there was just an enormous amount of it, and as I mentioned before, I threw myself into in a way that left me empty. My desire to work over break is to ameliorate the next semester by starting ahead rather than behind, but that desire is countered, I suspect, by the desire to just chill. The latter desire is winning out. I think that’s okay. The next semester has to be better if only because I make it so by taking control of my calendar, and it won’t be my first as director of the Buffalo Center. I know some things now and have my feet under me. I’ve connected with the students in a terrific way, and no one seems to think the Center is going down under my watch.

But what’s going on with missing my flight? I used to be a fan of psychological interpretations of these kinds of things, and there probably is one, but I think I was just tired and overslept. Like anyone, I was not looking forward to nine hours of flying and airports, but I have made this trip several times, and with the iPhone and the MacBook, it’s not hard at all. In fact, again, I thought I would work on the flight. But now I’ve missed New Year’s Eve in Boston with my dear friends, and I’m left here alone in Coolville. All the students and most of the faculty are gone, though I got an invitation to a party just today. I’m afraid to go because I will have to get up at 5:00 am the next day, but maybe I’ll go and just stay up all night. Some other colleagues just invited me to lunch tomorrow at the English pub in town, so maybe I’ll do that too. So I guess everything is okay, but I still wonder what’s going on.

It will be good to be back into the flow of the semester and around students and colleagues again. I just have to measure myself and not do everything that is on the schedule. I have a new staff member coming on the second week of January, so that will be helpful in some ways. Everything looks good for the spring; I’m just still recovering from the fall and from the year.

What a year. I began with loss in Boston, and I write at the end of the year with a full life in southern California. I have dear friends now on both coasts, and my work is the most meaningful it ever has been. My dear brother suffered a terrible loss but begins his own renaissance on January 7, the very day I suffered my loss this year. It is also the first day of the semester at Cool University. Synchronicity. I am closer to my family than ever before, and I am freer than I have ever been in my life. I can buy blue towels, be up and gone on a moment’s notice, and I’m spending the summer in Europe with St. Judy of Ohio and her daughter and granddaughter, then by myself for another month or so. Life is good.

Still, as we complete this circle of motion, I find myself sad and contemplative. I feel like I have found home, but I was seeing home as the end of the journey, and it is. The question that remains is: What is it the beginning of? Now that the circle is complete, what happens next? In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the problem of this stage of the journey very well, and it depicts my own feelings exactly. Coming back to the everyday world after experiencing a sacred journey is extremely difficult because your perspective is still being shaped by the journey and the wisdom found there, but there is no place for such things in the everyday world. People don’t understand your language and perspective on things and may even think you are weird. The sojourner now has to find how to live in this world, and he often suppresses his knowledge of the sacred to do so, or he can be up and gone again, creating another journey with a new home to seek. Whitman: “I am restless and make others so.” Of course finding a way to live in the world again is its own journey; it’s just not as dramatic or interesting. I realize that most people are just fine living in the everyday world and actually thrive in it, but I’m starting to realize that I’m never going to be one of those people. Does this mean I will be up and gone again? I hope not. I want to see what it means to live here in these mountains and be the director of the Buffalo Center. At the same time, I know not to predict the future; it just never works for me. This is, of course, still solstice thinking.

Another way of talking about this is to say that a new self–yet another one–is beginning to emerge, and what I am feeling are birth pains. Who am I if not the solitary traveler? What am I if I’m not on the road? What shape will my life take when I see my place here not as the sacred reward of a life-and-death battle but as something else? And what is that something else? And who am I? How interesting to be this old and have gone through this year and still not know the answer to that question. All shall be most well. The next circle of motion begins, and I remain in the Between. The Wallace Stevens poem that I posted this summer comes back to me, now in a different form with a slightly different reading, this time with weight on the words “unexplained” and “inexactness.”

Wallace Stevens – The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

To next year, a year lying and gazing at the sea where I can recognize my unique and solitary home.