intersecting storylines
Our storylines intersect. How long we are at the junction is determined by a number of things: desire, circumstance, time. What happens because of the meeting can be as fleeting as 'thanks for the coffee,' be as profound as standing at the bedside of a loved one seventy years on.
In 1984 I met my wife. I didn't know it at the time, that we'd be wed. We didn't know each other then, had never met. We'd both been invited, along with eight others, to the Banff Centre as young professional actors to be a part of a theatre masterclass. I wasn't sure I was going to go, and when I finally did accept the invitation, I told myself that if it turned out to be a sour or ridiculous experience I wouldn't linger - I'd bail and be on my way to the Coast. Deciding to go to Banff in 1984 changed my course. It turned out to be a one of the most significant experiences of my life.
'On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people - likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus - walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago-before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked; it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three's steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. "A remote ancestor," Leakey said, "experienced a moment of doubt." Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.' Annie Dillard wrote this in her book For the Time Being in 1999. I read it in 2000 - 3.6 million years after the story reportedly unfolded. It took a while for our storylines to intersect but since reading it the impact continues to ripple.
Our storylines glide, collide and circle back - sometimes fade, disappear then reappear. I met an artist from Mexico City once who told me he had come to a realization. He said he'd been missing large swaths of his life. Before the epiphany he'd get up in the morning, cross the many streets to his studio, returning to his sculpture. But one day crossing a street en route to the studio he stopped and took in where he was: the sky, the street, people, dogs, cats and birds - the taste of the air. He realized that he'd been ignoring the life happening all around him - that he'd made an unconscious decision that whatever was going on had little to nothing to do with him. From that point he made a decision to live every step of the walk to the studio. He explained that his work took longer to develop, he felt for the better, and because of his awareness of the intersections his life became richer. He'd leave his apartment in the morning and could end up in the south of the country by supper time in the company of people he'd met an hour after waking up.
William Blake in 1789 wrote: true innocence is impossible without experience and children become experienced through their own discoveries. That place you found in childhood in the woods by the creek, where you built the fort, the friend you met at school, or on a train platform, maybe it happened with a book, a poem, a piece of visual art, with your mom, in an idea - storylines intersect. Was it easier when we were children to recognize it? Was there less clutter allowing more time to understand what happened at the junction? To be open to the experience can, at times, be a challenge as we age. Through the getting on of our getting on, sometimes because of the fog of our preoccupations, could be the fatigue from the three AM frets, we pass through the intersection with barely a whisper. Our ability to feel it, to linger long enough, to maybe drop into the deep well of it, requires innocence, curiosity.
'You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.' (Mary Oliver's poem: Wild Geese)
'Deep down, beyond all thought and language, reason or knowledge, there’s a river. It never ends. And it’s a million years deep.' Our storyline intersection with the world, unconscious or conscious, be it with each other or with the pebbles buried in the road is always available. Sometimes its our awareness that needs the work. In the 21st century how many storyline intersections will lead us forward in a peaceful and civilized manner, will have us innovate in ways that will impact beautifully, artfully, in ways that we can't imagine at this moment?
Intersecting storylines abound - and with them is our history and our future.