Jamie Lee

Day Three

Morning Recording Session

 ”Are you ready then, Jilly?”

“Yes, Grandpa, but can I tell you something first?”

“Of course, as long as it doesn’t lead us astray from my story.”

“No, it won’t. It is, well, I keep thinking about what you said about remembering to forget and all that. It is the weirdest thing. I’ve been transcribing your tapes at night but when I listen to the tape, I find I have forgotten all you said. Isn’t that strange? Why can’t I remember? I heard it only a couple of hours before.”

“You must think you are getting as old as your grandfather. No, Jilly. It isn’t so strange. This story, as I have told you, is not mine but comes from the other realm. Because we are here, in these all too human bodies, the knowledge from the other realms is a shifting, changing thing easily caught in the web of forgetting. Not to worry, pretty girl. Not to worry. The right parts of the story will come to you at the right time. You will see.”

“All right, Grandfather. I trust you’re right.

“It is what I hope for, Jilly, that in telling this story, the words will be like rain and tears-pure enough to wash the thin veil of gray from our eyes so we can see, and remember. Now, to the task at hand, is your little machine ready to remember?”

“Yes, it is more reliable than I am. Go.”

I was still staring into the valley of trees when First Man walked up behind me. He put a hand on my shoulder and asked, “Do you see the power of alone?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is not a lonely thing, not if we release the fear.” I was strangely comforted by his hand at my shoulder, his presence behind me, and recognized that the new cycle begins with the gathering of strength and energy.

“Yes, if we release the fear, and listen for the deeper rhythm of things. Come with me now. You are ready for the next lesson.”

I followed First Man as he walked a path down the mountain and into the valley that held the standing grove of trees. My ears still heard the deep thump, thump that had restored my sanity. Beneath my feet, the soil was damp and I smiled. My tears.

First Man was silent as we walked. My sense of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling were vibrating within this vivid world. I didn’t want words-only this wide-awake thing flashing around me. When we had walked for perhaps an hour, we came to a grove of Aspen trees lacing their thin stumps and branches through the other, sturdier pine and oak. We came to a small clearing and First Man stopped. “Your classroom,” he said, grinning.

I laughed aloud, for sitting in the center of the clearing was a small, wooden desk very much like the kind we had had in the mission school. It sat ridiculously alone and out of place in the peaceful, leafy grove. I fully expected a black-garbed nun or priest to step out from behind a tree.

“You like it?” First Man grinned at me.

“Funny, First Man. I think I will call you Funny Man.”

“I like it too.” He waved a hand and the hard, wooden desk disappeared in a flash of dissolving points of light. “Do you know, Albert, that an Aspen grove is one of the largest and oldest living organisms on earth?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, beneath the earth their roots are common roots. This whole grove of Aspen trees is one family. It can travel when it runs low of food and water. Do you know why it is so long-lived?”

“No.” I felt as though I should have taken a seat in the little wooden desk.

First Man walked over to one of the trees and spanned its trunk with his ten fingers as if it were the waist of a pretty girl.  ”This tree knows to whom it belongs. It never forgets. All the trees stand alone, are separate, and yet they hold their belonging deep within their roots. This pretty Aspen will never wonder if it should be a Pine, or a Maple.  It is an Aspen.”

“What are you saying, First Man?” It seemed obvious to me, but I knew he wanted me to see       a deeper meaning in his words.

“Let’s sit. I want to tell you about the four ages of humankind.”

I sat, as instructed, and First Man talked and talked for many hours again. I cannot recount all his words but will retell the lesson as I understand it.

He said the cycle of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone is both a very small cycle and part of a larger spiral. Just as day passes into night, and summer passes into winter, and life passes into death, each cycle is both separate from, and a part of, the larger spiral of life. We are all subject to the same natural law.

The human race, First Man explained, has been in one singular sweep of this spiral for thousands of years, since the first Walkers walked out across the earth and left the First Family. While continuing in their small ways to form tribes and clans, and dissolve tribes and clans in order to form other camps of belonging, they have also been engaged in the first single spiraling loop of consciousness.

First Man said a thousand years ago the gathering, or bonding and belonging parts of       the first large loop was completed.  That is when The Wind of a Thousand Years began blowing the people of earth into one another. It is the time of separating, First Man told me, a painful but necessary time, a time of letting go of old identifi-cation and attachment, a rite of passage for the species as a whole. A necessary madness, he said. And now, in this time, we have entered the time of standing alone.

Remember my gray cocoon? First Man says all the human race is now blanketed in this gray. In this time, and perhaps over another decade at least, the sense of despair, grief, isolation and loneliness will reach its zenith. During this time there will continue to be great suffering and bloodshed.

As I listened to his voice, I thought of the wars even now burning across the earth. This making of war, First Man said, is a desperate attempt to find our footing by creating a mythical belonging, a false belonging. It is the noisy claim of one group over another, but it is a belonging no longer based in root and seed but in ideology, theology, of the mind only and not the body. It is the belonging that comes with forgetting.

I didn’t like his words. I didn’t like the truth of his words, and considered the way I had fought for my own small place in the world.  His words left me dead and cold in the center of my belly. I felt my old anger rising like a serpent inside, of Indian and white, of rich and poor, the unfairness of it all. I wanted there to be no truth in what he said. First Man saw my anger and waited.

“You see,” he said, “How quickly we jump to take back our smallest identity.”

“But you said it yourself. This Aspen is an Aspen-not a Pine or Maple or Elm.”

“Stop, Albert. Remember the standing grove? And remember also that the Aspen is the oldest living organism, and the wisest. It never cuts its own roots.  It belongs first to its own family, and then to the other families.”

I did remember, but struggled to understand as if it were a difficult math problem.

First Man smiled. “You are young, Albert. You will not get this all in grade school. Time. There is time.” With that he turned and began following the path down which we had first entered the grove. When he began the upward climb, however, he took a path toward the east, as best as I could tell. The land was still beautiful, but I noticed it had lost its sweet sugar smell.

“My energy leaves me again, Jilly, and I need a break.”

“Yes, Grandfather. I’ll make us some lunch.”

“Thank you, dear, and don’t despair.  The best is yet to come.”

Albert’s Notes

I smile a bit at myself. Don’t despair, I tell Jilly. But we are in the era of despair. I may as well tell the sun not to shine or the moon not to bother rising. I don’t think Jilly got my little joke. I didn’t either, not for several decades after my meeting with First Man. I wanted to prove him wrong but, in the end, his truth remained. 

But now I begin to see a resolution.

While Jilly makes us a nice lunch of tuna fish, I wander back to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. I stare out across this sun-drenched land. It is a relief to finally be finishing what was begun so long ago. I no longer fear death. It holds little interest except as it opens that next spiral of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone. Jilly calls me to lunch.  I take a long sip of the coffee she brings me. It is warm and creamy, a little sweetened.

She leaves me to enjoy my coffee and review my notes for this afternoon’s session.  I thought a long time about what First Man said about the aspen and how they never cut their roots.  That is why they are so long lived.

 I understood the need for common roots, or at least I thought I did. But I was unable to reconcile the earlier images of many leaves blowing around the world, all different colors, and all different races.

At first I thought the white-barked Aspen must mean First Man was talking about white people, and that we must all maintain our racial identity if we were to survive as a race. The Pine must be a Pine, the Aspen an Aspen. Finally, many decades later, First Man’s words began to make sense.

The whole human race is like the Aspen, linked at the root, traveling over the world, always related, always connected. The trees, the wolves, bears, birds-all kinds of creatures-are living side by side in the standing grove.   Connected, yet separate.