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| ISBN-13: | 9780835631358 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 448 KB |
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To the Mountain
One Mormon Woman's Search for Spirit
By Phyllis Barber
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2014 Phyllis BarberAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3135-8
CHAPTER 1
DANCING WITH THE SACRED: PART ONE 1975
After my two oldest sons bolt out the side door, late for elementary school, scraping their backpacks against the already-scarred door frame, I look at the piles of breakfast dishes. Specks of cake mix, flipped from the wire arms of the electric beater yesterday, remain on the kitchen window above the sink. I open the refrigerator and notice an amoeba-shaped puddle of grape juice marring the shine of the glass shelf. I close the white enameled door covered with magnets, and I leave this messy kitchen, this reminder of my ineptitude, which will depress me even more if I think about it much longer. I need to talk to someone. But who wants to listen? Whom would I tell anyway? Maybe I should get on my knees and talk to God, but I need to move more than I need to stay still. I need to feel my body alive—my arms stretching up and out, my blood speeding through my veins. Midstep in the front hall, where family and visitors come and go, I am struck with an idea. Luckily, the baby is still asleep.
I turn the corner to the family room. It is filled with furniture, but because I feel compelled to dance, I am suddenly an Amazon. I push the wing chair to the wall, the sofa as well. Now there is space, enough space. It might be possible, instead of praying to God, that I could dance with him somehow, that maybe he could take me in his arms. Today. Right now.
I thumb through my stack of albums. I find Prokofiev's Concerto No. 1 for Piano & Orchestra, Op. 10, lift the record out of the sleeve, and set it on the turntable. Aiming the needle, I find the groove and wait for the ebb and flow of the orchestra, the in and the out. The three beginning chords cause my arms to pimple with gooseflesh. I take two steps to the middle of the room and raise my arms above my head in a circle, fingertips touching.
I move, slowly at first, one foot pointed to the right—the most elegant ballerina in the most satin of toe shoes. At first, my right leg lifts poetically, delicately for such a long leg. The other knee bends in a demi-plié. The music swarms inside, splits into the tributaries of my veins and vessels, and becomes blood. Things become more primitive. I stamp the pressing beat into the floor. I bend to one side and then the other, my arms swimming through air. I am a willow, a genie escaping the bottle, the wind. I am the scars in the face of the earth opening to receive water that runs heedlessly in spring. I am light. I am air. The magic carpet of music carries me to places where I can escape—to the Masai Mara I have visited on television, where bare legs of tribal dancers reflect the light of a campfire and beaded hoops circle their necks, or maybe to the Greek islands I have seen on travel posters with their red-roofed white houses stark against the cobalt blue sky and water. The music lifts me out of this minute, this hour, this day. I am dancing to the opening and closing of the heart valves, to the beat of humanity, dancing, giving my all to the air, giving it up to the room. Whirling. Bending. Leaping. Twisting. Twirling and twirling to the beat. Yes! Dancing. Getting close to what God is.
After a dizzying finale in which the chords build until there is no more building possible, the climactic release comes. The final chord. The sound dies, as if it had never been. The room swirls, passing me by even as I stand still, panting, trying to return my breathing to normal. I am dizzy. I steady myself in the middle of the Persian rug and wonder why Prokofiev had to write an end to this concerto. I can hear the tick of the needle on the record in the black space left on the vinyl. I stand quietly until the room stops with me, until the sense of having traveled elsewhere fades away.
I look at this sky-blue family room in our home in Salt Lake City, where my husband and I are raising our children—the family pictures on the wall, including our first son, who was born with hemophilia and who died at the age of three from a cerebral hemorrhage. I look at his quizzical expression looking back from behind the picture glass. It is as if he is asking, "Why, Mama?" I pause, wanting to speak, wanting to answer him, but words have no meaning. Maybe they never did. My eyes shift to the framed copy of my husband's and my college diplomas; the Persian carpet with its blue stain where one son spilled a bucket of blue paint when he was two; the sandstone hearth where our youngest son fell not once, but twice, and split open his head, which had to be stitched together in the emergency room. Everything slipstreams in my peripheral vision: the bookcase with its many volumes of books, psychological tomes, scriptures, all of which are supposed to have answers; the leather wing chair peppered with the points of darts thrown when I, Mother, wasn't looking and before I, Mother, hid the darts in a secret place; the wooden floor I am supposed to polish once a week with a flat mop and its terry-cloth cover. I, the mother, stand here looking at the things that verify my place in the world and also at the evidence that I have not always been watchful at the helm—I, the mother who is supposed to make the world all right for her husband and children; I, the mother, the heart of the home, the protector, the nurturer. I think I should dance again, turn the music up loud before my mind chases me into that place where I feel bad about myself again.
I learned dancing from my father, who loved to polka when Lawrence Welk's orchestra played on television, and at dance festivals sponsored by my church when I was a teenager. We danced the cha-cha, the tango, and the Viennese waltz.
At age twenty-one, I danced myself into a Mormon temple marriage and made promises to help build the Kingdom of God here on earth. I gave birth to four sons, whom I dressed each Sunday for church meetings. I tried to be a good wife. I canned pears and ground wheat for bread, I taught Relief Society lessons and accompanied singers and violinists on the piano, I bore testimony to the truthfulness of the gospel countless times. Yet dancing to music seems to be my real home—the place where I can feel the ecstasy of the Divine.
Last night I twisted and turned in bed with my newfound knowledge that there is another woman in my husband's life and that my marriage may not always be there for me. I felt tempted to jump out of bed, open the blinds, and search the night sky for the letter of the law burnished among the stars—a big, pulsing neon sign that said, "Thou Shalt Not Endure to the End." Except that's all I know how to do: persist, endure, keep dancing. Things have to work out, don't they?
Mormons are taught not only to endure to the end, but also to persist in the process of perfecting themselves: "As man is now, God once was; as God is now, man may be." Lorenzo Snow, fifth president of the Church, penned the often-repeated couplet after he heard Joseph Smith's lecture on this doctrine. I have tried for perfection, but maybe I have not thought that word through to its logical conclusion. Maybe I have not wondered enough about who is the arbiter of perfection.
Perfection. Freedom from fault or defect. Is that possible? Perfection is a nice idea, but that definition makes the idea of becoming like God stifling. It is tied to shoulds, oughts, and knots that bind rather than release one to live a full life and to dance the dance. Even Brigham Young said, "Let us not narrow ourselves up." Trying to be perfect when the world and my husband have no intention of complying with my notions of perfection is killing me.
I hear the telephone ringing. I do not want to leave this room just yet. I want to bring back the music, to keep God here with me, even if he has places to go, things to do, and I, too, have my responsibilities. But, I think, if God is my Father, then I am his daughter. I need to trust that he will always be with me somehow, that there will be a next dance.
Ignoring the phone, I think of something William James said in The Varieties of Religious Experience about how a prophet can seem a lonely madman:
If his doctrine proves contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively.... The new church, in spite of whatever goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.
Why am I thinking about William James? Do I suspect that I am caught in the web of orthodoxy? Am I inflexible and is my spring dry? Am I living at second hand—unwilling to consider any options other than my parents' teachings and my Mormon upbringing? But I don't feel inflexible when I dance. I am the fountain that bubbles, even the source of this fountain—the water. I raise both arms to the ceiling as if to lift off, hoping I can stretch into the heavens. "Do not leave me," I want to call out, though I do not say that out loud. "I am with you," I hear God say, though he does not say that out loud either.
Daylight pours through the windows, exchanging the light in this room for that of the day. My hands press flat against each other in front of my heart. "Thanks for the dance," I whisper. "Thank you," I think I hear him whisper back. The telephone has stopped ringing. A floorboard creaks beneath my foot. I hear the refrigerator humming down the hall. Commerce and industry, motherhood and wifehood, calling again.
CHAPTER 2THE KNIFE HANDLER
I am weighing my options as I check out Vernon with his straight, pencil-sketch lips that rarely curve. He is wearing his soft felt hat at right angles and moves with his head plumb-line straight with the rest of his spine. He is a man of some reputation—the basket-making teacher at the Ozark Folk Center and a master with the edge of a knife. I am his student, currently constructing a white oak basket for which I am suffering greatly. My wrists are burning after four days of whittling. I can barely lift the knife anymore.
At this moment, he and I are driving together in his ancient Dodge truck while my three boys are back at the motel in Mountain View, my fourteen-year-old playing watchdog over the television remote and his younger brothers. Vernon has narrow bones in his face, eyes like pale blue marbles, and hands mean with the knife. (Mean here means "good." I pick up local color like a chameleon.) I am not at Vernon's mercy or anything like that, but my breathing is shallow. My lungs are hurting. I am thinking I have gambled one too many times.
Last Monday after class, Vernon peeked in on me playing "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano in a small side room at the center. He stood in the doorway, listening. I saw him and lifted my hands off the keys. "I love piano playing," he said, coming closer. We talked about music, then drifted into the topic of old-time religion. "Why don't you come visit my church?" he said. "Just a ways off."
Now we are driving into twilight and the deep, dark woods to who knows what and who knows where, some place he calls New Nata, and I am thinking for all the world that I am a fool who might get jumped or kidnapped or waylaid by crazy moonshiners or big bears. Or even Vernon.
But come on now. There is something about Vernon that is right-to-the-toe square. Being that curiosity is my deeply rutted habit, I had decided to take my chances and drove to his house, our prearranged meeting place, at the prearranged time. But why in heaven's name did I climb into this rumply Dodge truck with too many dents in one fender? Soda-pop stains shine off the dashboard. A scratchy radio plays local bluegrass. Keeping the beat, Vernon dips his stiff chin into the air in front of his poked-out Adam's apple.
It is the summer of 1981. My sons and I are spending a couple of weeks in Mountain View while my husband is a guest professor in the law school at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville. I hoped to steep our three sons in Ozarkness—classes in fiddling (middle son, Jeremy, a wizard on the violin), bluegrass music (oldest son, Chris, hot on the guitar), whittling, broom making, whatever they might be interested in, though Brad is too young to be interested in much more than the fishing pond. Me, I am taking a basket-making class in which we chopped down a tree, shucked off the bark, and cut strips of wood for our baskets-to-be. Hours after class and its exertions, my wrist aches. Even while Vernon is turning onto another narrow road and we are cruising farther into the holler, I feel jabs of lightning in that delicate wrist that operates my right hand. I am a tall girl with small bones, except in the hips, of course. My hips were made for birthing—big basket of bones to hold a baby, cradle it until it decides it is time for open air, where there are people intent on music, God, and how to get back to the unmessy place peaceful enough to house angels.
About half an hour ago, I braked in front of Vernon's house, stretched my arms, and wondered what I would find inside this low-lying, cinder-block house with dark-brown curtains. I unlatched my car door and unfolded my tired pony legs. I stood tall on hard dirt, stretched, and then took cautious steps toward Vernon's. Some eyes might be watching, I thought as I sidestepped some puddles. Someone could be assessing this young mother from Salt Lake City, this big-city girl from the West. I sighed in relief when a dumpling of a woman answered the door. Greeting me with a tired gray smile, her blue-checked apron tied high around her waist, she said she was Ella, wouldn't I come in, she and her husband were expecting me.
Vernon appeared out of the misty-moisty kitchen, sleeves rolled up and an embroidered potato-sack dishtowel in his hands. It had seen some days—coffee stains, burnt grease, holes in the cloth. His wife excused herself, saying she had to look after water boiling around the lids of her Mason jars. "Snap beans," she said, smiling as if snap beans were the essence of life.
"Sit you down, girl," Vernon said, and I took a seat on a sofa that had seen a few too many bottoms in its time. The springs protested.
In class after my wrist gave out, I had watched Vernon, who could do more with wood than anyone I had ever met, treat my portion of tree trunk as if it were a cold slab of lard. Without rulers or measuring tapes, he stripped pieces for my basket, the same length, the same width, time after time. No rehearsing. No false starts or nicks in the damp insides of the trunk. Then he whittled my basket handle, all the time whistling, sometimes singing a few lines from songs I had never heard. And after class, when he overheard me playing those few bars of "Moonlight" on an old-timey piano I had asked permission to play—that was what got us started with all of this. "Music is my blood," I told him. "And I am curious about other people's music and their worship—how religious people think they are getting to the other side they talk about and what they do to hook up with Spirit, that something that keeps us all wondering."
Then he was walking to a cabinet where an old Victrola on top held its curvy head like a proud goose. "I've got something here," he said, shuffling through a neat stack of pamphlets, sheet music, and loose papers. "I've been thinking you need to know about this." He grabbed two thin, paper-covered books from the cabinet and sat next to me. The sofa sank even lower.
"Shape notes," he said. "You ever heard of shape notes?"
"Can't say I have," I answered, watching him open a small book called Joy in Singing: 135 New and Favorite Gospel Songs for Group Singing, Singing Schools and Singing Conventions. At the bottom of the first page, I saw that it was published by the editorial staff of Stamps-Baxter Music of the Zondervan Corporation out of Dallas. Bible Belt stuff. First song: "Jesus Is Coming Again."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To the Mountain by Phyllis Barber. Copyright © 2014 Phyllis Barber. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Prologue: Searching for Spirit,
1. Dancing with the Sacred: Part One,
2. The Knife Handler,
3. With a Stitch in My Side,
4. Of Saints and Goddesses,
5. Dancing with the Sacred: Part Two,
6. Looking for the Dalai Lama,
7. In the Body of the Serpent,
8. Dancing with the Sacred: Part Three,
9. Sweetgrass,
10. Three Monks over Kanchenjunga,
11. A Reflection of the Sun,
12. At the Cannery,
13. An Uncertain Theology,
14. Who Might We Be?,
Notes,