Soul Mosaic

Before I could create my toolkit, I needed to have a handle on the full scope of the challenge.

Writing is the heavy lifter of excavating the wisdom….but what do you do when you can’t feel…when you can’t reach the emotions locked away…when you may not even realize the emotions are there?

And worst of all…even if and when you can get at them, what do you do when they so overwhelm you with pain and intensity that you are rendered mute in your trauma…you literally cannot find the words to fully express and release what is flooding through you?

That is where I started this journey. And so many times I just walked away because I didn’t know what to do. It felt almost impossible. I say “almost,” only because I had been here before in life and I knew there was a way to bring order to chaos – that whole “Pick a nipple” experience decades earlier.

Thumbing through that tan notebook from my son’s infancy, its pages starting to come loose, I felt hope that I could find the right way to do this, that an organic structure would suggest itself.

Certainly, this book couldn’t be like writing a nonfiction “how-to” book. Nor was it a “sit-at-the-computer-open-a-vein-and-it-would-all-neatly-come-pouring-out” process. It needed to run wild before it could show me how to proceed. But even “running wild,” needed some boundaries.

I wandered around the house and stopped in front of the ham radio receiver from the WWII tank that my Dad used for years. I stared at it on the shelf, played with the dials. Tactile memories stirred. And yes, there is the question: “Why do I have that WWII tank radio receiver in the first place?” That was no small clue.

The music on my laptop drifted in. Songs from 1965, 1966, and 1969 brought me right back into those years. One particular one came on. Several nerves twitched. Suddenly I was 12 on a violent Sunday afternoon, cowering in my bedroom.

A copy of Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World was on the next shelf — one of my treasured 1960s Scholastic Book Services purchases that I’d kept. Again…why did I hunt these books down — these very editions? Why did I need them?

Carefully opening the book, I shoved my face right into the middle, right against the pages and inhaled deeply. I just love the smell of books from the 1960s — the ink, the paper, the age. They don’t smell like that anymore. But as I took in that sensory moment, I was back in 7th grade at Sacred Heart School on a fall afternoon, trying to sneak past the nun who told me to stay after school.

Each item on that shelf — smelling it, feeling it in my hands — generated a force that surged through me, as if these objects were Talismans infused with the power to take me back and reveal secrets I’d long forgotten or locked away. Talismans. That is exactly what they were. Objects of power to open a door.