It Begins with a Call - Part 1

I have been working on a piece of writing for some time now.  It is a work in progress, and I really have no idea where it is going.  But I'm taking a deep breath, taking the risk, and starting to share it.

This story begins with breaking a lineage.  This story begins with a fire.  This story begins in childhood.  This story begins with a dream.  This story begins with a longing.  This story begins in elder years.  This story begins with a call.  This story begins with an image.  This story begins with fear.  This story began centuries ago.  This story begins with a story.  All of these beginnings are true.  Or maybe none of them is true.  What is true is that this story does not have an ending, no happily ever after.  It may or may not ever have an ending, except for the inevitable death of the writer of the story.  This story is what I have.  Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that this story is actually many stories within stories.

           

Let’s say that it begins with a call.  Things do begin with a call.  Sometimes you hear it, and sometimes you even follow it.  If you don’t, something dies inside, and a particular way forward shuts itself off to you.  The call is always surprising, fresh, original.  Where does it come from? Spirit, intuition, the thread you’re given to follow, your dreams, your parents’ dreams, out of left field?  Sometimes it emerges out of memory, out of what has transpired in this life, or in one’s parents’ lives or their parents’ lives.  It may lead away from these, or deeper into them. 

           

For instance, in my life, I continued and furthered the breaking away from thousands of years of lineage that my parents initiated.  I am close to one hundred percent Jewish, all the way back.  My parents, however, joined no temple and never attended one other than for the requisite Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.  I always believed they simply chose to reject organized religion.  Someone must have told me that; it was the story that I believed.  My older sister recently informed me that it was all her fault.  Our parents had tried to enroll her in Sunday school, but the synagogue gatekeepers refused to place her in the higher-level class that my parents requested and felt she warranted.  So, they left in a huff and never came back, and neither my sister nor I got formal religious education.  I’d never heard that story before. 

We did celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, and my father spent Yom Kippurs sitting alone in the back yard (or later on the patio of our house in Miami), praying or contemplating, or whatever it was he did out there.  When I came of age, I left even these observances behind.  The traditions had a fond, familial feeling, but not enough significance for me to carry them forward.  I’ll always be Jewish in my bones, but I no longer carry the lineage, and my sons even less.  I feel a certain wistful regret about this, but, again, not enough to draw me back into the fold.

           

And yet, despite my disconnection from religion, from early on, there was something ineffable and intangible that hovered around the edges of my consciousness.  There was an inkling of another reality, a murmur of a call.  I didn’t understand that.  I didn’t know what it was that I felt.  At night, alone in the darkness of my bedroom, before my older sister was sent up to join me, I sometimes had an experience.  The dark took on a quality of brightness.  There was no light, but there was an indescribable brightness to the dark, followed by a vision.  It was always the same vision: a garden swing, double-sided, in an arbor.  The light was golden and ethereal.  A child in pale blue corduroy overalls sat on the swing, and perhaps others. Maybe the child was me. I always felt a sense of peace at seeing this scene, maybe even euphoria.  The way I described it to myself was, “I feel clean.”  I never told anyone about this. I’m not sure why; perhaps I knew they wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to minimize its power.  It didn’t happen frequently, and I couldn’t will it to happen.

In waking life, at age four, my ballet teacher planted the seed of a story in my awareness, and, like a magical vine, it grew and twined itself around my being.  As the years passed, it beckoned and called and sang and tugged.  Its name was Persephone.

Camus said, "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."   Persephone was mine.

My Persephone SoulCollage® card