Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness
Section 1: Chapter 4—Forgetting Essence
Dear Reader: Do you remember the first time you told a lie? Do you remember how it felt?
This chapter is a story of my first lie—but more importantly, how it felt in my body. This sensation would be a clue for my future relationship with the lies I told—not only to scary uncles, but to myself.
But before I get to the lie, I’ll introduce you to the place where I spent many of my summers growing up—my grandparents’ farm in rural North Dakota. You’ll also meet a couple members of my family.
I recommend that you re-read Chapter 3 for more about the ego’s forgetting/remembering process from the perspective of the soul, as well as other key connections between the chapters. Refreshing on the previous chapter(s) will always be a good way to get that much more magic out of the book!
Enjoy…
~
Chapter 4: Forgetting Essence
My grandparents’ farm, which included a house, a barn, and several sheds and garages, was located about an hour south of West Fargo, adjacent to the Wild Rice River and before a quiet gravel road disrupted by only an occasional whizzing car. The drivers of these cars, all of them neighbors, honked and waved, and my grandparents waved back. Out in the plains of rural North Dakota, neighbors didn’t refer to people in terms of physical proximity — it could be miles between homes — but rather in terms of the relaxed way they related to each other: through a pancakes-and-coffee friendliness or collective mourning at a funeral.
Until I was a teenager, I spent at least a week of each summer on the farm, in addition to all the other times we visited during the year. We’d often go on Sunday afternoons in time for dinner. After that the grownups would play cards while we cousins would play outside. I would wander over to the barn to hunt for the farm cats, or peek in at the cows in their pens, or walk through my grandma’s garden, studying the rows of tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, and potatoes. I was an inquisitive but cautious child.
Sometimes, in late summer, I’d tag along with my grandpa to combine his wheat fields. I’d stand next to him in the enclosed compartment of the combine harvester, smelling the scent of his sweat mixed with hay. Or my grandpa would let me steer the combine, sitting between his legs on the worn leather seat. We’d lumber silently down one row and up the next. Watching the wheat surrender its tall, flowing stalks to something new made my belly flutter, my fingertips tingle, and my heart feel light as I sensed anticipation and excitement about the wheat stalks’ transformation. As the machine magically cut down and then threshed the wheat stalks into two parts — the seed or grain, the edible part, and the chaff, the unusable outer skin — I experienced life, death, and transformation tangibly intertwined.
I also was an instigator of transformation. If my favorite older cousin Mike was at the farm, sometimes we’d stand in the long grass of the ditch and catch live grasshoppers in our hands as they sprung up, then carry them, still jumping, between our cupped hands to one of the farm cats, who’d eagerly grab them between their paws and tear into their bodies, gobbling them down hungrily — a process we watched with fascination.
In the evenings, after supper, by the light of a soft lamp and the television tuned to Family Feud, I’d sit on Grandpa’s lap and clean his nails, watching for signs that I was hurting him, especially when attending to the third nail of his left hand, which he had smashed one day working on farm equipment.
“Did it hurt?” I had asked, wincing when he first told me the story.
“Yeah, it hurt,” he replied.
“Will it ever go back to normal?” I wondered.
“Nah, it’ll probably always be like this,” he answered, shrugging.
“Did you have to go to the hospital?” I asked.
“Nah, I ain’t got time for that. A guy’s gotta get back to work, you know,” he said.
This motto and his handed-down mindset of endurance and discipline have translated into many admonishments over the years: “Quit your whinin’,” “Just get it done,” “Enough screwin’ around.” For my grandparents, daily life left no time for comfort or time-outs. For them, Mother Nature was not a kindly figure but one at whose mercy they remained. Just enough rain at just the right time could signal a prosperous year ahead — food on the table, money to supply seed for the next year’s crops, perhaps even enough to purchase some much-needed machinery. But too much rain or hail could wipe out their crops and their hopes, leaving them with nothing in their hands and even less in the bank. Their forbearance and headstrong determination worked as the fertilizer allowing them to plant and produce crops year after year, no matter how many fingers might be smashed along the way.
***
One late summer day on the farm when I was seven, I headed out back where Grandpa had hung a tire swing between two oak trees. My grandpa had transformed a tractor tire, which had rolled over countless acreage over the years, into a source of joy for my cousins and me — not a bad retirement for a tractor tire. I slipped off my pink jellies and tossed them onto the lawn. They rolled to a stop at the feet of a brand-new riding lawnmower, cooling down after a hot afternoon spent trimming the grass around the barn, the silos, and the dusty white farmhouse. I gripped the two cool, metal chains and wiggled my hips to the tire’s front edge. Its warmth seeped through my sundress into my summer-kissed skin. My feet stretched down to the dirt, my muscles flexing as I walked backwards until the tire stood nearly as upright as it had in its working days.
Finally, I kicked out, chains indenting my palms, dust flying. I folded my knees and tucked my legs underneath the tire as it swayed back, and then again I pulled, leaned back, and reached out, blotting out the sun with my bare feet. My long brunette hair flew in my eyes. The world blurred; the wind whispered in my ears; the sun warmed my skin; and my soul, the source of my life and power, flowed through my body like blood through my veins. I defied gravity for a blissful moment at the height of my swing until my hips plopped satisfyingly back onto the tire. Just before it was time for our supper — Grandma’s special buns with roast beef, mashed potatoes, sweet corn I’d shucked, and tomatoes I’d plucked — I leapt from an upswing and landed on the earth in a crouch, my whole body tingling with pleasure.
On the stroll back to the house, I kept an eye out for the wild farm cats. Without some food to entice them, most would not let me touch them. But I always tried because once in a while I was rewarded with an unguarded cat purring contentedly against my own unguarded heart. My heart — not yet broken by disappointment or betrayal — was still free and innocent inside the body of a cautious girl dreaming dreams ten times her size. That day somehow my heart guided me to a black cat lying in a shady place on the edge of the sidewalk leading back to the house. I tiptoed closer, hoping it wouldn’t jump and run. It didn’t.
I bent down to pet the cat. It was scrawny; while my grandparents would sometimes feed the cats leftovers from supper, they never let them get dependent on free food or allowed them in the house. The hardy cats who survived the North Dakota winter — a Herculean feat for a five-pound animal — would reproduce in the spring. Those that succumbed, my grandpa would bury in the spring.
The black cat did not respond to my touch. It was cool and stiff. Its entire body rotated on the pavement when I kneaded my fingers into its hip. I suddenly realized that the cat was dead. I snatched my hand back, having never before touched anything dead other than a bug.
I stood still, observing yet another transformation.
“Did you touch that cat?” asked my uncle in a low, warning voice.
Startled, I stared up at a dark, imposing, jean-clad man with downturned lines on his whiskered face, his brow sweaty, his knuckles grease-stained. My uncle was much like my grandfather — hardworking and salt of the earth. He was often kind to me; I have pictures of him and me making snow cones together on a child’s machine. It is understandable to me now, as a protective and busy mother, how finding his niece seemingly playing with a dead cat would provoke my uncle’s ire. At the time, though, I simply sensed danger.
“No, I didn’t,” I lied. By this time in my life, I might’ve told a few little fibs, but I remember this as my first conscious lie. I remember the way it felt — the way a lie still feels — in my body. My face flushed hot, my throat clenched, and I held back tears.
“Are you sure?” he asked again, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Why can’t I touch the cat?” “Will I get sick?” “What happens to the cat now?” “Did she have kittens?” were questions I had but intuitively knew better than to ask. Unwilling to waste more time, such a precious commodity in farm country, he said, “Well, just forget about it and go wash up for supper.”
“Okay,” I whispered and plodded up the concrete steps leading to the house. My head felt heavy. There was a painful hollowness in my heart. I pulled open the squeaky screen door and let it double-bang behind me. I shuffled into the kitchen, where the food was steaming on the table, but my hunger had disappeared.
For my uncle, for most adults, a brief exchange like this would be inconsequential. But for me this incident, which combined a first exposure to death and a confusing encounter with an authority figure as well as a first lie, triggered an awakening.
This was not a rub-your-eyes-greet-the-sunshine-coffee-is-ready awakening or the kind of awakening I have since learned about in my spiritual studies, one marked by bliss and enlightenment, because rather than an awakening that helped me enjoy the sensory aspects of life or recall my innate connectedness to all things, this one caused me to forget.
I forgot about my natural connection and communication with the natural world.
I forgot about my awe of transformations, both instigated and inevitable.
I forgot about my freedom and the simple joy of being myself.
And with all that forgetting, I woke up to the real world.
Things and people of the world snapped into their proper places like schoolchildren coming off the playground and returning to their desks. Everything became organized into categories of right or wrong, good or bad, friend or enemy, mine or not mine. What had previously been called “experience” and “lessons” became judged, counted, and measured. I understood that there were rules to learn, games to study, lines to color inside, and correct behaviors to adopt.
Soon after this “awakening” I stopped picking dandelions for my mom on the way home from school because I knew they were not flowers but only weeds. I saw my parents not as superheroes who could fix or answer anything but ordinary, fragile people who experienced sickness, injury, and failures, and didn’t have all the answers. I became acutely aware of how much my mom spent on groceries each week and stopped asking for costly sugary treats. Standing in ditches catching live grasshoppers in my hands I now saw as gross, and jelly shoes were no longer cool.
I mark this day in my life as the day I forgot who I was — someone free, whole, adventurous, curious, and filled with an unmeasured love for the world around me. I also mark it as the first day of my journey to remember these aspects of myself.
~
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