Today is one day before my girls begin 5th and 7th grade, so I’m using this space to explore beginnings. Not so much their first steps into the school year or my first steps into autumn, but rather, I’d like to explore those steps we all take to grow and change — processes we all go through continually, though I think I feel the urgency the most in September.
It is a heavy feeling, mixed with sorrow and wonder, doubt and hope. What will those first steps lead us to? Where will we lead ourselves?
This summer I’ve been turning over a scene from The Last Days of Café Leila by Donia Bijan, a book about (in part) a daughter whose mother uproots her from one country — a country she knows and loves and feels familiar in — and takes her to one that is, well, foreign. The food is different. The people are different. Everything is different. She can’t even speak the language. The girl, a teenager, is beyond upset, and I feel for her, though I also feel for the mother.
In the scene I’m thinking of the girl is alone and making a snack for herself — choosing items from the pantry and fridge, not sure what she’ll like — when she realizes this is what it feels like to think independently. She considers her friends back home, who no longer email, text, or connect with her on social media, and it is with equal sadness and curiosity that the girl relishes in a newfound freedom of deciding for herself whether something is good. She gets to take in the world and its people and decide for herself what she thinks of all of it. Understanding this, she’s not sure whether to feel upset or joyful. What’s more, it makes no difference how she feels. This deciphering what she thinks is happening, regardless of how she feels about it.
In a recent conversations with a friend, we were discussing the mythical phoenix bird — the one that, after a certain time, bursts into flames and grows again from its ashes. We took on the metaphor for ourselves: We know the burn of unraveling.
“But I think we’re also becoming,” my friend added. I’ve been thinking about this conversation too. It seems we must unravel in order to become. The two go together. We can’t stop ourselves from becoming. If we believe we are never finished, then we will burn in order to fly for the rest of our lives.
I think of my daughters who will be carried away on a big, yellow bus hours from now. I think about my walk back from the bus stop, brewing coffee and spreading out ingredients of my life and deciding for myself what it is I’ll do with them. I think of the phoenix and her rise from the ashes, perhaps still smoldering from the fire, and I think of the girl, alone, snacking on the first taste of independence, bitter and sweet at the same time.
We climb the bus steps, we open our notebooks, we wonder at our new wings, we consider our new surroundings in a brand new world. It’s good to take note of how we feel about all this, but I think what matters is what we do next.
Try It
In this poem from Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson expresses the bittersweet feeling of beginning and ending, of unraveling and of becoming:
after greenville #1
After the chicken is fried and wrapped in wax paper,
tucked gently into cardboard shoe boxes
and tied with string…
After the corn bread is cut into wedges, the peaches
washed and dried…
After the sweet tea is poured into mason jars
twisted tight
and the deviled eggs are scooped back inside
their egg-white beds
slipped into porcelain bowls that are my mother’s now,
a gift
her mother sends with her on the journey…
After the clothes are folded back into suitcases,
the hair ribbons and shirts washed and ironed..
After my mother’s lipstick is on my father’s
scratchy beginnings of a beard now gone…
After our faces are coated
with a thin layer of Vaseline gently wiped off again
with a cool, wet cloth…
then it is time to say our goodbyes,
the small clutch of us children
pressed against my grandmother’s apron, her tears
quickly blinked away…
After the night falls and it is safe
for brown people to leave
the South without getting stopped
and sometimes beaten
and always questioned:
Are you one of those Freedom Riders?
Are you one of those Civil Rights People?
What gives you the right….?
We board the Greyhound bus, bound
for Ohio.
—Jacqueline Woodson
I like all the sensory details that mark the ending of a season, but I also like the observation of how difficult it is to move on. It is both sad and dangerous. This week write a poem that combines the unraveling with the becoming. What first steps are you taking this season to continue to change and grow? What must burn so that you can spread your wings again?
Photo by Claire Whitehouse, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Callie Feyen.
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Richard Maxson says
Callie, I don’t always comment on your prompt essays, but they are always written in a way that reveal aspects of your life even as they extend into the lives of your readers. You are remarkable for that ability.
This week I especially taken by this: I think about my walk back from the bus stop, brewing coffee and spreading out ingredients of my life and deciding for myself what it is I’ll do with them… and then: It’s good to take note of how we feel about all this, but I think what matters is what we do next.
Callie Feyen says
Thank you, Richard. I am pleased to know what I share extends to others’ lives as well. It helps me bear it, I suppose.
Here’s to noticing how we feel, and then deciding what it is we will do next.
Richard Maxson says
Sagrada Familia
Like another Mary, my mother fled
with her children and a simple man
with hands cut and scarred
making lace from glass.
In Barcelona, we stood
in the shadows of Sagrada Familia,
its web of symbols, like wet drippings
of a sand castle for its spires.
Too young then to realize the sadness
frozen in the cowled heads,
the toil and beauty of Gaudi’s
impossible basilica, I remain
captured with them, listening
to the mourning doves coo.
Listening for the silent Christ to speak
his lines of no escapement;
listening to the sound of machines
drowning a vision; a baby born, simply
a dream of hope, buried in monuments,
and this photograph of a family lost in time.
Bethany R. says
What a beautiful poem.
Like another Mary, my mother fled
with her children and a simple man
with hands cut and scarred
making lace from glass.
Richard Maxson says
Thank you, Bethany.
Callie Feyen says
“a dream of hope, buried in moments” – That is a line I will imagine for a long time.
Bethany R. says
I appreciate the hope in this thoughtful post, Callie. 🙂
“We know the burn of unraveling.
‘But I think we’re also becoming,’ my friend added. I’ve been thinking about this conversation too. It seems we must unravel in order to become. The two go together.”
Callie Feyen says
Thank you, Bethany. I found it hopeful writing it. 🙂
Monica Sharman says
Second Crochet Project
The first one was too easy—
single crochets and a chain stitch
to make a simple acrylic trivet.
Row on even row, and as long
as you counted, it came out
right. This time, a cardigan.
Nothing is a pattern
for long. Tension
determines the gauge,
how many stitches to fit
within in an inch of the life
you’re both weaving. Start
at the yarn from within
the skein; pull from the outside
and you’ll work yourself
into impossible knot
after tangled knot.
Bethany R. says
“Nothing is a pattern/ for long.”
Thanks for writing and sharing this, Monica. 🙂
Callie Feyen says
That line grabbed me too, Bethany.
I also am thinking metaphorically through much of this poem. I love when poets play with metaphors.
Cathey Capers says
Beautiful themes of back to school, passages, beginnings and endings. It recalled to me this piece written as I took my son to his first Firefighting practice with giant hooked ladders, as he was preparing to leave high school…I titled it “Ascending”. Thanks for this lovely reminder of those moments.
Warm, rumpled waking.
Foraging for fleece.
Hot breath and tea cloud the windshield
as we noiselessly roll down the drive.
A sterling day.
Great glass skyscrapers and stiff
blades of grass glisten with our first frost.
Fog hangs over the shrouded river.
Birds huddle wing to wing on the wire.
He disembarks.
Eager to climb new heights
on steps of steel.
I take the same trail home
recalling another morning-
when everything surrounding me shone
as I surrendered him.
Still grateful for that engraved memory.
Coming through the gate,
the garden draped in winter white.
Birds begin their song.
The fog, the birds, the boy,
great hooked ladders and my heart-
I sense them all and at once,
—ascending
martin gottlieb cohen says
arctic thaw
a wolf tastes
the air