A Steady Companion

Within a month of being new parents, Sally and I—separately, but concurrently—felt a strong urge to pick up the phone and call a couple of friends to say “I’m so sorry. I didn’t have a clue.”

These were the friends who became parents a year or two before us. These were the friends we ostensibly “helped” when their entire worlds were turned upside down by small, composting creatures.

A couple of weeks into parenting, Sally and I came face-to-face with reality: the “help” we gave our friends hardly approached the quantity or quality of what we imagined we’d offered.

I was in my mid-30s. I recall feeling amusingly embarrassed by how little I understood my friend’s lives and needs. Perhaps I placed too much stock in my own capacity to imagine and empathize?

Around the same time, my friend Deirdre emailed me a poem. It was after a phone call where we spoke about my dad, a new widower.

Something in the conversation prompted her to share these words:

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

I can’t say I understand this poem. I’m unable to describe what happens in it.  I’ve typed “the waking poem what does it mean” into internet search boxes several times.

Reading it out loud to myself, I feel like I’ve woken up after an important dream but the details of it are just out of reach. “What falls away is always. And is/near” upends me like a zen koan. I like it, but what is it?

But even upended, I come back to the poem’s last line: I learn by going where I have to go.

It’s not “I learn by going where I want to go.” Or “I learn by going where I choose to go.” Instead it has an imperative. I learn by going where I have to go, where life takes me. Even if I feel upended.

Like my father, widowed at sixty-four years old, sleeping alone after nearly forty years of sharing a bed. How does one go?

I learn by going where I have to go.

It’s not a very complicated sentence. It has little specificity. It’s not like Mary Oliver’s line in “Wild Geese”—“let the small animal of your body love what it loves”—that was my twenty-something mantra:

I learn by going where I have to go.

Maybe part of the line’s pull is its combination of faith and solace. If life unfolds as it does—with both loss and gain, sorrow and joy—it is this learning to be human that will leads us onward.

When I was young person I thought that adults—I couldn’t tell you what age they were, just “old”—were “done” in the way a cake was finished baking after thirty or forty minutes in a 350 degree oven. Adult humans were themselves. They were done becoming. And that’s who and how they’d live the rest of their lives.

It’s charming, that is. And that young thinking was age-appropriate. Yet from the vantage point of the late 50s, it’s crazy to think of being “done” becoming a person.

A couple of years ago, my Dad, now in his eighties, emptied the three bedroom/one bath house he built up and around our original family of five in the 1970s and 80s. Over several months he filled up his red Toyota pick up truck for runs to the town dump or to my sister’s attic to prepare to move into a one-bedroom cottage at local over-55 community.

He’d never walked that road before. Nor had his three daughters. It was a brand-new “going” for all of us. How do you say goodbye to a childhood home? How do you say goodbye to your late wife’s flower garden?  Theodore Roethke’s line was repeated not a few times.

I learn by going where I have to go.

Ultimately, that line—that faithful, consoling line—invites humility and compassion, too.

I do not know the paths I have not traveled.

I do not know what landscapes others have walked through.

I can listen.

I can witness.

It’s a simple sentence.

It’s a sturdy and steadfast companion.

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What about you, Reader? Is there a line or words that serve as a companion as you live your life? Maybe providing inspiration or solace or ___ (you tell us.) You can tell from this post—and others I’ve written—that I find other people are a great resource for being a person. Maybe your words will connect with someone here today.

If you’re so moved, I hope you’ll comment.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

Until next week,

Rachel