Soul Sister - Part II, The Search Continues

Why BYU Survival School in Escalante [desert], a demanding, body and soul-wracking experience?  Was Carol returning to her deep Mojave Desert roots in the spirit of the Early Church Fathers who retreated into the Egyptian deserts to “find themselves?"

Survival:  That’s the key to Carol.  The Sister’s Soul sustained by survival. Every woman knows survival—the hydraulic demands of childbearing, the endless cooking-eating-cleanup cycle.  So she and most of God’s Daughters find inner resources, those survival strategies, ways to be when the storms come.

We need what Napoleon Dynamite, that redhead Fumble-Wonder who survives backwards, cries out, “I need skills!” The poet, Tomas Transtroemer,  knows we all face “a storm that is moving over us all.”  If we don’t have the inner life, what the Germans call Innerlichkeit, we’re alone, “afraid,” the Swedish bard says, “the storm will blow everything inside us away.”  That’s survival: Keeping our inner life from blowing away.  And Carol has done that.  It’s a project we must all engage in. The Mojave Winds blow outside, but we remain calm inside.  As Dad said, when he sold the wrecking yard, “If I don’t get away from this partner, he will kill my soul.”

Because what’s “inside” us is us. Carol’s life of searching is about surviving, adjusting to each new child, each later child’s shift, their turbulent moods and moving—East for two of them.  Think of it?  Yoga, swimming, the Escalante, Tai-Chi dedicated, quiet conversations with a Japanese woman, dabbling in alternative medicine, in church books and books about the art of raising children. She’s always moving, finding new and better, more sacred ways to survive.

Survival: Not just holding on, though; no, prevailing, overcoming. That crazy trip to France was about more than mastering the conjugations and the declensions of French.  It was a search in a desert of a different kind for Self.

And all this building that has continued has erected a stair-step ascent to The Sacred. We all need to be “going somewhere.” How terrifying is the word “just chillin,’ as if “just” being frozen solid, immobilized by a cell phone or video games is not a kind of death itself.

Thoreau counsels us about our movements. He makes no mention of “chillin.” He speaks to her quietly, his strong callused hand in her own. “Carol, 'I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.  I . . . had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.'”

There!  There is our theme, finally:  Several more lives to live. How? In others, in books, in God. Carol, like Mom, always has a clutch of close friends. Some live across the street, some in Norway, yes, Vikings who write and even come to see her.

Like Mom, even in the Escalante, she learned to "solo," going alone for two days, eating lizards and Brigham tea, and rose hips, perhaps feeling what Dollie felt as the dreaded Mojave assaulted our shack in the high desert.

But John Donne pleads for connection. “No woman is an island,” he counsels. Carol took The Escalante with her to Norway—and the two worlds met and merged. Think about your own merging worlds. Half the families in America are reconstituted.  Not a seamless blend but possible –if there is love and patience.  Love makes all things new again.

And finally, what about you and me? If you read one line, you belong to me in a strange, New Age way. Perhaps we’re trading molecules or converging in what Teilhard de Chardin called the Noosphere—a streaming cloud of knowledge and love that surrounds the earth. The Jesuit paleontologist could not prove his poetry, but it tastes good.  I write and you patiently read; we are bonded, the ink we share, even thicker than blood.  Not a Noosphere, perhaps, but cyberspace, where, apparently, nothing is ever lost.

Mystery.