New Thoughts About Old Homes

So already, you see those brick townhouse buildings on the left-hand side of the photograph below? I lived in one of them in the late 1970s. And yes, you're looking across the Black's Creek salt marsh that I so often photograph and blog about. 

The truth is my teaching career began and ended at the edge of that salt marsh. And it's possible something else is beginning there now.

When I moved to Quincy in 2003, I moved here for the second time. Each of my Quincy moves marked the start of a new phase of my life. In 1978, I had just accepted my first public school teaching job and needed to live in reasonable commuting distance from Marshfield High School; in 2003, I was newly married, and Quincy was halfway between my teaching job in Cambridge and my husband's art studio in Rockland.

Given the regularity of my salt-marsh wanderings these days, it's often struck me as ironic that back in the late 1970s, neither I nor my roommate--one of my former college roommates--ever set foot in the marsh or walked its scenic perimeter. And that, even though taking just ten steps from our back door would have planted our feet squarely in it. Oh, what I would give now to have the back-porch view of the marsh, and the easy access to it, that we had back then! 

So what I was doing back then? I'll tell you. But I want to tell you first that until I began rereading Richard Rohr's Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life a few weeks ago, I hadn't thought of what I was doing back then simply as "normal"--age-appropriate and life-stage- appropriate. I just kept shaking my head at those missed marsh-walking opportunities.

In 1978, I was dancing as fast as I could professionally. Any beginning teacher knows what this is like. Teaching had me by the throat: I spent almost every waking moment either teaching or getting ready for "tomorrow": planning units and lessons, creating the materials they required, and "correcting"--the word we used back in those days for reading and responding to student work. I didn't dare join a choral group, since that would have meant needing to miss a night of "homework" once a week in order to attend a rehearsal.  

The few weekend and occasional weeknight hours I wasn't doing school, I headed north to Cambridge and Boston, where most of my friends lived: in those days, I needed the company of friends more than I needed the sight of egrets and herons. Quincy was a place that I slept, ate, and got ready for school "tomorrow," period.

As Richard Rohr explains in the first section of his book, during the first half of life, people are generally and often necessarily concerned with "establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people and projects (vii).*

That's what I did during the first part of my adult life: constructed a very strong "first-half-of-life container (27)," as Rohr would call it--"a very strong ego structure" (26). That container stood me well through various trying professional and personal situations, and I couldn't have constructed it without the combination of good friends, personal reflection, and an excellent therapist.

When I stopped teaching roughly thirty-five years later, I didn't adjust to retirement easily and blissfully, as so many of my colleagues did. Because I'd gotten into the habit of walking around the Black's Creek salt marsh after I moved back to Quincy in 2003, I definitely enjoyed having more time to do so. But often when I walked my usual route as a retired person, I was trying to distract myself from my parent-related worry, stress, and sadness--or simply to "get exercise" in a nice place. In other words, visiting the marsh was usually about me, not about the marsh. Sometimes the marsh was a tool, sometimes it was a setting, but more often than not, I, not it, was center-stage in my mind.

Still, I was without doubt at a different stage of life. When a friend recommended Richard Rohr's book to me last year, its title immediately made me think I must be in the second half of life because I was retired--and had been for almost seven years. But reading the book, and especially re-reading presently in preparation for discussing it with two of my old college friends, makes me wonder what half of life I'm in, even though at sixty-five years old, you'd think I would have made it into the second half.

So what does Rohr say about the second half of life? First of all, it entails connecting with our souls and expressing them through our lives: "We are given a span of years to discover [our soul, (which Rohr says is God-given)], to choose it, and to live our own destiny to the full. . . . Our soul's discovery is utterly crucial, momentous, and of pressing importance for each of us and for the world" (ix). I have to confess that when I hear words like "crucial," "momentous," and "pressing," I can't help but feel that there are things I should already have been doing. Old emotional habits die hard, even though Rohr so willingly meets us where we are and welcomes us.

Second of all, in terms of container talk, the task of the second half of life is "to find the contents that the container was mean to hold" (xiii), "to discover the 'task within the task,' . . .: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing" (xiv). Thus, what we are doing in the second half of life expresses or reflects the soul we've managed or somehow been forced to discover, the soul that explains the deepest--and theoretically most crucial and momentous--purposes of our tasks and actions.

So if one of my self-assigned tasks these days is walking the salt marshes, what is it I'm doing really? I'm not sure, but I can say that these days, more often than not, the salt marsh is center stage, not me. I'm not sure when that shift happened, but it did.  

Meanwhile, whatever I do and don't understand about the task within the task, there is something Rohr says about "true religion" that I can more easily apply to my experiences in the salt marshes: "True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, despite our best efforts to deny it or avoid it." So often when I'm out walking in or near the marsh these days--actually, I realized I felt this way last fall--I have the sense that I am part of it, that I'm participating in the big, permanent, always changing scheme that contains it. I like that feeling, and I'm still surprised by how strongly I feel it.

In fact, last fall, on one of those occasions that I was really feeling buoyed by my feelings of belonging and participating, I actually said to myself, "This marsh feels like another home to me." I was surprised by that: I've never been a "nature girl." I wasn't used to having a place without walls, a ceiling, and a floor--a place that didn't wall me off from the outside and outsiders, that didn't feel like some kind of personalized, protecting, identity-affirming (given that homes often contain those objects that show us to ourselves)--feel like home. 

And this, during a pandemic when the world and other people have so often been defined as "dangerous" in a whole new way and so many of us feel compelled to spend so much time "at home."

Wherever I am on the continuum of spiritual development laid out by Rohr, there I am. Rohr cautions that the fact that there is a second half of life doesn't mean that Falling Upward  is a how-to book for "achieving" this "more important" half of life; he never denigrates the first half of life. His goal is to offer some support , to "map the terrain of the further journey, along the terrain of the first journey, but most especially the needed crossover points" for those who who are feeling that there could be another way to live or think about life, including their own lives (viii). He doesn't prescribe a particular route or counsel for or against particular choices; he does provide some information about what we might expect while journeying, perhaps upping our chances of recognizing and realizing our most meaningful hopes, even though "each of us has to go on this path freely, with all the messy and raw material of our own unique lives" (viii).

When I first contemplated the irony of my not having walked in the salt marsh when "home" abutted it, I felt stupid--yet another example of my not having seized opportunity when it was staring me in the face. 

Now I just understand it better--differently, non-judgmentally: we are who we are when we are. But at the same time, based on Rohr's ideas about the soul with which I agree (at least most of the time), we are also who we always are. 

Now there's the stuff of paradox. And paradox always pulls me in, even when I'm not in the mood to wrestle with it. At some point, the "who we are when we are" and the "who we always are" could converge. Now there's a provocation and possibility to inspire journeying. For now, I'll keep walking in the salt marsh. Who knows what I'll see, think, and feel there in time. Right now, though, I find myself thinking the line in the The Beatles' song really should be "Get back to where you finally belong."

* Rohr, R. (2013). Falling upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life. Jossey-Bass. The first section of the book is called "The Invitation to a Further Journey."