In the movie, “Wild,” Cheryl Strayed ponders, (I am paraphrasing here; you will capture the essence,)
“What if I forgave myself? What if I was sorry, but if I had to go back and do it all over again, I would do it the same way? What if having sex with all those men taught me something? What if I learned a lesson doing Heroin? What if it was just as it was supposed to be?”
I think about Strayed’s monologue and my own version of these questions, minus the men and the Heroin. I think about my tattered, weather-beaten, joyful, sad, crazy, happy, life. While some of my experiences have been external circumstances, the rest have been a culmination of my choices and my ability to navigate through the fallout. Like the writer, Strayed, losing my Mom put me in a personal wilderness, where I both wondered and wandered for a long time. After seeing “Wild,” I think that the wandering/wondering was the significant point. Without the internal investigative work, we are stuck in a purgatorial space. It is important to look even when the screen reads like a warzone.
The night after I saw “Wild, I had a series of strange dreams. They arrived in vignette form like the Chronicles of Emily, Volumes 1-47.
Dream 1: My mother and I are in a fabric warehouse walking through huge isles, touching reams of beautiful cloth.
Dream 2: My ex is yelling at me as I precisely and deliberately lace up a new pair of aqua colored running shoes.
Dream 3: I am bowling.
Dream 2 is pretty obvious. After 15 years of marriage, I ran from my first union. I didn’t leave in the best of ways, but if you find love and marriage complicated and messy, try on some divorce britches. They fit like a muthah. It is so easy to blamestorm after a marriage fails. I own my part. I left something that appreared okay from the outside but wasn't okay at all on the inside. It took all my courage to run and there were casualties. I am living scarred, but not scared, living in the real. I learned, learned, learned and married differently Round II. Grateful for the God of 2nd chances and the insight to be different and to decide differently. Besides, aqua is my favorite color.
Dream 1: Walking isles of fabric is such a great image for me. My mom was a great seamstress. She could sew, embroider, stitch, crochet. She could make most anything from scraps and thread. I don’t sew, yet watching my mom in her art element impressed upon me that colors and patterns and hemlines are infinite. The texture and the way you assemble it all together can build something unique and extraordinary. My mom and I spent hours in the fabric store finding the right thing for her to make, (usually for me or her granddaughters,) lost in the possibility, lost in the companionship, lost in being mom and daughter. Thank you, Universe, for letting me reclaim this dream the next day. Thank you for letting me hear her voice and laugh so plainly as though time hasn’t faded or blurred her. Thank you for making her so real.
Dream 3: Well, uhm, I’m not a bowler; haven’t bowled in a couple decades, so there’s that. The weird thing about this dream other than my very large red bowling shoes, was that I was throwing gutters and strikes. It went on for a while, this zero/perfect, zero/perfect score. It isn’t too far of a stretch to figure that this was perhaps a sleep-state analogy of failing and winning. You have to keep throwing the ball and playing the game. In bowling, don’t get too wrapped up in a single frame. Also, there’s that whole “spare” part of the score which has never really been my style. Be all in, dream big, fail big ... just keep rolling, just keep rolling. I wish the imagery could have been something other than bowling since all that germ-laden rental equipment wigs me out. On the upside, there were those volcanic-Velveeta kind of Nachos.
There are critics of Cheryl Strayed who feel her voice is too harsh, her story too extreme. I say to those critics, “Hush up your pie hole.” I applaud Strayed in her bravery to flash her own shit onto paper and the big screen - I mean the real skinny, the things that were hidden, the things that she did and thought about, the things she ran to and ran from, the things that would keep many of us from hiking hundreds of miles on the Pacific Coast Trail. Without the noise that we conjure to silence our stuff, it might come out of mute and speak to us from some dark closet. Once it is out there, taunting us, we may have to open that door. And, when opened we would realize that once the light floods in, there's just dust and debris. No more bones, just ashes.
What if you forgave youself? What if you said, it has all been part of my path to now? What if this trail that you stand on and what lies ahead, that is what will make the difference?
