His Locker: Unpacking the Gift

It is the time of pitru paksa, the time of ancestral remembrance. It is also the year anniversary of the start of this blog, Life in Seasons. This has brought me to a lot of reflection over the past week as I move forward in my seasonal work, as I think about heading into another cycle of this life of mine.

It has also been a time of reflection upon the professional side of my life, because I recently signed a contract for my dissertation manuscript to be published into a book. I spent the past few weeks rereading and editing the dissertation, turning in all the material just a few days ago. It was scary.  Revisiting the place where my professional life started was frightening and liberating--in equal measure.  It meant I had to sit in the place where it all started: children of Vietnam Veterans.  It is a knotty and dense place for me. A place where everything meets: personal, professional, past, present, hopes, and dreams. Everything. To revisit it as a person who has grown and become something so new was disarming.  Yet it provided a way for me to see how my hard work has brought me to where I'm at. Here.  Now.  As I write this, I can see why the past week or so has been... challenging.

His Locker

The photograph, "His Locker," is symbolic of a lot of what has been happening over the past week or so.  It is a haunting photograph. My father gave me this photograph quite a few years ago--back when I was in grad school.  I had asked for photos from his time in Vietnam and this one struck me as intriguing, undefined, yet full of meaning.  It was his locker.  His Vietnam locker. Until now I did not know what to do with it.  As I read my manuscript, though, I hit upon a section in which I analyze parts of Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried.  Here is a section of my introduction:

"The Things They Carried focuses on one of the greatest hurdles in the process of remembering: putting traumatic memories to words. The quagmire of a lost past full of contradictory emotions, and the irresolution it carries, can (and often does) leave one paralyzed into silence.  O’Brien counters that silence through his disjointed stories that attempt to make sense of the things he carries. The book opens with a laundry list of things Lieutenant Cross and his men carried on their combat missions.  As we read the list of items, it soon grows apparent that there is a complex mixture of tangibles and intangibles.  With the guns, malaria tablets, and P-38 can openers, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien, 1990, 21). Thus, while language is necessary to express memories of the past, the stories of the past carry weight that goes beyond words.  Included in the stories O’Brien tells us are the interactions he has with his daughter. Kathleen has more than words to make sense of; she carries the weight of her own memories with her father.  Enmeshed in those memories are the love and turmoil found in their relationship. Language provides a skeleton, but the meaning, the flesh filling out the structure within it, comes from something beyond the words themselves."

For me, this locker carries all of the baggage and emotion that my father brought home with him--and what he brought into my life.  It is part of the gift that he left me. It is the ancestral legacy that I must work through in my own way, in my own time. Another excerpt:

"Walter Benjamin, via Shoshona Felman’s analysis, invites us to ponder the residue of a traumatic history.

What Benjamin attempts, in other words, is to transmit the story that cannot be told and to become himself the storyteller that cannot be one but that is one—the last narrator or the post-narrator. The trauma—or the breakdown of the story and of memory, the fragmentation of remembrance and the rupture of the chain or of the “web of stories”—is itself passed on to the next generation as a testament, a final gift. (2002, 46—my emphases)

The ruptures emerging from the breakdown of articulation is what makes trauma visible; the pieces being the gift handed to the next generation. For children of Vietnam Veterans, piecing together the fragments of remembrance is fraught with uncertainty; yet, it is the process of piecing together that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning in the crevices between what is known and unknown."

That locker holds so many stories, but they are fragments for me to decipher. A suitcase, shirts, canteens, cups, bottles, and numerous unknowns. 

My Altar

I also look at this photograph and think about how my father's aesthetic is similar to my own.  I like photographs that capture meaningful things. Thing that are rich with meaning, yet undefined, chaotic, and full of metaphor.  Things I don't want to forget.  I think of my altar photograph and can't help but think about the ways in which we are both trying to communicate moments full of emotion. His locker (altar) is very different from my altar. But I can see how he might have gone to that locker for retreat, solace, and to get through a difficult time in his life. It was a space full of transformation and growth. He saw value in snapping that photograph.  That moment meant something to him.  And now here I am working through that meaning in my own way.

I'm not sure if the publisher will use my dad's photograph. I hope they do.

This time feels appropriate as a marker of the transition out of one cycle and into the another.  This book work, along with the ancestral work I have been doing during pitru paksa, is the perfect set of sadhanas to close out this cycle--and season.

Kali

Lately, I have been experiencing an intense transition in how I see myself in the world. I know it might sound a little cheesy or strange, but something has unsettled within me. It is intense, not because there is some dramatic unraveling of my external life. It is intense because it is happening at such a deep and subtle level that it is only now that I can feel like I have some ability to articulate what is shifting around for me. 

Sadhana: a discipline undertaken in the pursuit of a goal.  The goal of sadhana is to attain some level of spiritual realization, which can be understood as enlightenment.  For me it is the practice of practicing and the practice of reflexivity. 

The Path of Practice focuses a lot on sadhanas involving ancestral memories and accessing the divine feminine. Both of these have been practices I have been working with in a variety of other ways over the summer (and less so over the past few years) that didn't initially have any connection that I could see with what Tiwari articulates in her book. It took me some time to realize that my summer of research in Colorado was very much a practice of delving into the past of my family.  In addition, as I read my fun books, they had a consistent theme: the divine feminine and how vital it can be for a woman to access that internal power.  The link between that work and what I embarked upon with Tiwari's book very slowly started to come together.

As I worked with sadhanas that emphasized Kali and moon cycles with clarity and intentionality, I was facing challenges in my external world. Mother challenges. Work challenges. And in the face of these challenges, I could no longer react the way I have in the past.  Something in the sadhanas left my old ways of coping and handling stress unsustainable. 

Kali

Kali: the Hindu goddess associated with empowerment, shakti. She is the fierce aspect of the goddess Durga. Kali is the goddess of time and change. 

There are times when everything seems to fall together. Align. In the past few months experiences have aligned to bring me face-to-face with a woman I know well: me. It has brought me to a place in which I have to confront what I haven't been able to see within myself. It has also brought me to a place in which I understand that if I want the life I dream about, I have to start seeing myself with the fierceness that Kali embodies. No, I don't need a bent sword or a necklace of skulls, but I do need to comprehend that I have the right to assert my own voice and that I do have important things to say, things that matter. The time for people pleasing is drawing to an end and I have to stand by my own voice--not hide from it.  It is time to assert my right to be me out in the world, and not try to hide behind veils of fear and insecurity.

I know in the past I have worked with Kali mantras and practices, but there is something different in the practices I have undertaken in the past month or so. There is a visceral, qualitative difference. It is not just words I repeat, but something that truly has an energetic quality. There have been times my body has not known what to do and I've been frozen with fear. There have been other times in which I have been braver than I thought I ever could be--to the point in which it has actually startled me afterward. But I realize I am at a point in which I can't turn around and run for the hills of my previous self.  I have to settle into this new self that is intensely, subtly, me. 

Doing the Kali sadhanas while doing sadhanas that draw me into memories of my past and my family has created a strange synergy of shifts. I know it might be hard to comprehend if you haven't experienced it for yourself, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I can feel the unsettling changes not within my perspectival thoughts, but within my tissue and bone. It's like my body is trying to settle into what it going on and my brain is an observer, waiting for the tissue to find its own grounding and new set of normalcy. I say this because I have had moving muscle pain throughout this month of Kali and family sadhanas.  Muscle tension in places I never have muscle tension. I had a muscle spasm the first week I started doing the family work. I'm sure these things could easily be identified as coincidence or I could find numerous logical explanations. But what is going on right now is not about logic. It is about trusting what is going on and continuing with the sadhanas. It is about listening to my body with multifaceted ears that can hear the rational and the visceral and the primeval with equal measure.