How does meaning find us?

For months I have been trying to understand a complicated tangle of events. Something happened in my life. It was my fault and I didn’t handle it well. But I also didn’t anticipate the consequences, how there was so much going on under the surface of an apparently normal situation. Under the surface, there was misunderstanding, pain, accumulated hurts and grievances, broken connections, strands of hostility (mine, theirs). I initiated the events. I own that. It was my fault. For months I have been trying to understand how I could have been oblivious to the currents and turbulence. (A small voice tells me that I must have known, when I did what I did, that nothing would be the same after. I must have known.)

So much of my thinking happens in the night or else while I am swimming. I have been thinking about this situation for nearly a year. It hasn’t been easy. Some mornings I am grateful to be in the pool because no one can tell I’m crying. As I push my body through the water, I try to release the difficult knots in the tangle, the ones I can’t untie. It’s hard, awkward. Some of the knots go back decades. And if I untie them all, untangle them all, what will I be left with? I am trying to find out.

One thing I’ve unravelled is a series of old hopes and expectations. I’ve written here of the trip we took to France in the fall so I could visit some of the paleolithic caves I first learned about 50 years ago. I even wrote about them then. When I was planning my university courses for my first year, I was drawn to anthropology. I met with an academic advisor who helped me with choices. I remember I took anthropology, sociology, and a linguistics course appropriate for anthropology majors. I also took English and Classical Literature in that first year and in the way that these things work, I ended up leaving the anthropology dream behind. I found my English and Classics professors more encouraging. Am I wrong in remembering that the anthropology guys were real bros in those years? They’d talk about their field work–the linguistics prof went to eastern Washington every weekend to work on a Spokane dictionary — and it didn’t seem that there were many women included in this group. It didn’t feel welcoming, not in the way Peter Smith made a generous place for young students interested in Greek tragedy or epic poetry. Or Rosemary Sullivan opened the possibilities of literary scholarship.

Swimming, I’ve been remembering how dazzled I was to enter the cave opening in the photo at the beginning of this post. How I forgot that I can be claustrophobic as I slithered sideways through a narrow passage that led to the images I’d seen as a 19 year old. How I was glad for the dim light our guide shone on the walls of the cave because no one could see I was crying (again). Over the week we were in the Dordogne, we visited 3 cave sites and would have gone to more if the rental car I’d arranged had actually worked out. I was relieved that John also loved these places (he took that photograph of the opening at Grotte de Font-de-Gaume) and is willing to return. There are places I want to visit in Spain too. And Portugal. I want to know more about the stylistic variations, the pigments, the meaning(s).

Swimming, I’ve been trying to find a way to understand the past year. I’ve learned I’m not the person I thought I was, haven’t exactly lived the life I thought I’d made for myself and others. So much feels sad and broken. I don’t know if I have enough time and intelligence to return to that path abandoned in my first year of university, the one that would give me a foundation for understanding the deep history of paleolithic art, but I think I’m going to try. I’ve identified a couple of online programs I can register for and I’ve already begun the reading. Maybe I don’t have the focus but then again, maybe I do. That path continued. I was the one who stepped off it. I found it again inside Font-de-Gaume and maybe I’ll find it elsewhere too.

Some mornings my swim feels sort of aimless. Back and forth, 3 strokes, 6 km. a week. But this morning I felt like I was finding something out, that meaning was finding me. Not the meaning I’ve been living with because somehow I have messed that up. Caused damage to people I love. I am trying to repair that but I have to live with my grief that I wasn’t good enough.

A poem I loved in those old days was John Berryman’s “Dream Song 30”, these lines in particular.

& I took up a pencil;
like this I’m longing with. One sign
would snow me back, back.
is there anyone in the audience who has lived in vain?

I don’t want to have lived in vain. I want to know things and I want to do things and yes, I am longing in this language I know and use but am willing to try something old and new. Or both. Is it too late? I hope not. How does meaning find us? In the dark, in the water, listening now to rain on a metal roof while a small fire burns in the woodstove nearby.