Recently, I returned
to my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. I
was attending a book signing. I found being in Greensboro, after all these
years almost a surreal event. I left North Carolina one chilly day in October
1972 to join the Navy and I never looked back.
I returned to the
houses I grew up in, the neighborhoods I walked, and noted with quiet pleasure
that the trees I had loved as a child were still standing. Neighborhoods
change, become different because people make a neighborhood and people change.
Thomas Wolfe, in Look Homeward Angel
was right: you really cannot ever go home again, you cannot return to those
places of childhood with the same eyes. If you think you can, then you have not
evolved as a soul, as a person.
In this tool of
transformation, I have had the opportunity to return to the past, perhaps to
give it a healing look and then to decide that there really are no ghosts to
move on, maybe they are all gone now, buried in the past of memories held close
and the wisdom from experiences hard won.
It wasn’t just
returning to old residences, or seeing old memories in a new way, it was more
than that. I think perhaps it was looking back over a lifetime of traveling,
meeting people and building on a childhood rich in variety of experiences and
emotions. For me, it was amazing to look out a window, see all of these
beautiful trees and catch a glimpse of a rain shower washing the day, followed
by a light shaft always piercing the grey of a cloudy moment.
Fascinating how we all
change and yet in some way, we are the same person. I feel I am different
because of what I have lived and yet I am still that same little girl who
wanted to visit all of those far away places with strange sounding names. I am
still visiting them, still traveling and still sharing with family and friends.
Perhaps at the end of the day, that is really what mortal life is all about,
traveling down that road of experiences, sharing it with the beloved ones in
our lives, aware, poignantly, that who we have with us is a gift of momentary
time. Going back in time can move us forward into the future because we have
come to appreciate the past in the context
of the present. When we can do that, we can feel we have advanced down that
long road of soul evolution and the happy acquisition of wisdom.
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