Walking in Circles: Notes from the Middle of Nowhere

By Rita J. McNamara

Inspired by a startling midwinter dream of ancient hills and prehistoric shrines, the author builds her own stone circle in the wilderness and begins a journal of exploration into the nature of cyclical time, the sacred power of everyday, and the meaning of the eternal feminine. From the Art of Gardening to the Zen of Housepainting, Walking in Circles is a quiet chronicle of midlife passage and homegrown ways, reminding us that our lives are lived in moments, in the thoughts, memories, and rituals spun out in daily life. It is a book about time, the time of our lives, the remembered time we keep in our bodies and minds, the ticking time we use to measure out our days, and the hauntingly timeless time of dreams and moons and ancient stones.

Comments from Readers:

This book is incredible! Its great reading. I loved it and it made me remember a lot of things about my own life and rekindled a desire to read. I especially enjoyed its vivid descriptiveness and tempo. - T.M. (jazz musician, Chicago)

How amazing and awesome when the truth of a life contains such wisdom. Your imagery is often breathtaking. Sensitive and thought provoking with unending layers of revelation. A brave experiment. - J.S. (poet, Chicago, IL)

To say I liked your book would be a vast understatement; to say I loved it would be to leave so many important things left unsaid, like how it speaks to me and takes me to the place where I need to be. Thank you. If I could write, it would be what I would like to say and how I would like to say it. I read it straight through, stopping only to sleep.

- A.S. (businesswoman, Denver, CO)

Im only 53 pages into it, but I had to stop to write and tell you- its great! The language is fresh, evocative, and poetic. Great work, beautiful storytelling.

- M.R. (psychotherapist, Chicago, IL)

Your writing is beautiful, lyrical. I love it. Youve got a great book here.

- M.T. (college admissions counselor, Montpelier, VT)

Before I had a chance to get to your manuscript, something unusual happened. My husband, who rarely reads and never stays up past ten, picked it up and read late into the night, finally finishing at the breakfast table with the words, Wow! Youve got to read this book! So I was psyched. The book is wonderful. Deep, rich, and vivid.

- B.A.C. (therapist, Lake Forest, IL)

A friend sent your book up a few weeks ago and Im writing to tell you how much I enjoyed it. It was like being engaged in a long conversation with an old friend. All through the book I kept saying Yes! Yes! Now another friend is reading it and she says youve inspired her to begin writing a journal, and after that Bonnie will read it you already have a little fan club up here in Baraga County.

- M.D. (artist, Baraga, MI)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 31, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462812516

Rita J. McNamara

Rita McNamara is a Chartered Herbalist, therapist, and writer who was a finalist for the 1999 Annie Dillard Award. Published internationally in seven languages, she is also the author of Energetic Bodywork, a groundbreaking book that explores a new understanding of the body-mind connection and the vital link between emotional trauma and physical health. She currently lives in northern Michigan where she teaches, writes, gardens, and maintains a wildlife hospice. She shares her small slice of wilderness with her husband, three cats, a small flock of hens, and a bluetick hound.

Book preview

Walking in

Circles

NOTES FROM THE MIDDLE

OF NOWHERE

Rita J. McNamara

Copyright © 2000 by Rita J. McNamara.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Address inquiries to Rita J. McNamara, 1361 N. Forty-One & 1/2 Road, Manton, MI 49663.

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

Contents

Introduction

Long Night Moon

Wolf Moon

WOLF MOON CAFÉ

Snow Moon

WindMoon

EATING THE YARD

Birdegg Moon

Flower Moon

THE MOREL OF THE STORY

Honey Moon

Thunder Moon

CROCKED FLOWERS

Corn Moon

Red Moon

PEACH PRESERVES

Hunter’s Moon

Frost Moon

MUMBO

Sleeping Bear Moon

MOTHERTONGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

If there was something in the air

If there was something in the wind

If there was something in the trees or bushes

That could be pronounced

And was once overheard by animals,

Let this Sacred Knowledge

Be returned to us again.

                    Atharvaveda (VII 66)

Introduction

I am a Boomer woman, an old hippie. I don’t look my age, but people can still tell, especially when I slip up and use words like karma and vibe.

I grew up in the postwar hinterlands. Clusters of small houses huddled by the side of washboard roads or perched at the edges of reedy little lakes. Not quite farmland, but a far cry from suburbia where bungalow cadres stood sentinel over postage stamp yards. It took the schoolbus nearly an hour to collect us every morning like a scattered harvest, bumping along back roads, dumping us all, finally, at the concrete steps of a low-slung sprawling school.

Except for a woman who ran a beauty shop out of her house, none of the mothers on our street worked. They all wore cotton print dresses or skirts and blouses and bobby socks, sometimes dungarees or a slightly racy pair of capri pants. They tied on aprons when they cooked and there was usually a rumpled hankie, a few bobby pins, and a lost button stuffed down in the pocket.

My mother was one of the lucky ones with a car of her own. In the half light, when the men left for day shifts in carplants and city factories, most of those women were stranded ten miles from the grocery store, the doctor, the dry cleaner; ten miles from anywhere. They cooked, scrubbed, vacuumed, dusted, mended, washed, and ironed. They called it housework. And when the housework was done, they gossiped at kitchen tables, sipping coffee, puffing on their cigarettes. They traded magazines and recipes and put each other’s hair up in pin curls.

A new kind of stranger crowded into our living rooms-the grey flickering faces that snuck inside through the television screen. TV moms and dads were kinder, calmer, a lot less harried and angry than our own. They laughed more. Sometimes I blamed Beaver’s dad and Donna Reed for the close violent air we breathed. Sometimes I thought that all those nice smiling TV families infected us with something.

Nobody ever asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. They thought they already knew. The future was packed tight with assumptions, hemmed in by certain inscrutable laws. And so I pasted together my own version of the future. An adolescent fantasy, patchworked from bits of Hollywood and embroidered with daydreams.

Sometimes I was Kim Novak, slinkily elusive in black jeans and turtlenecks. The dark quiet queen of bongoed cafes. I imagined a wild kind of subterranean life blooming beneath the streets in half-hidden coffeehouses. Candles flickered in wax-encrusted wine bottles. Jazz tore through the night. Poets raved. My imaginary coffeehouse was a spiritual incubator, a place where a whole new kind of mind and art secretly matured.

Or sometimes I was Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Goggle-eyed but still beautiful behind her horn rims. The brilliant psychotherapist, a psychic Sherlock Holmes unraveling deep Jungian riddles.

Or Katherine Hepburn, snotty and sarcastic, quick on the uptake. The competent, tough-edged equal to any leading man.

But in the Seventies, when the dust began to settle on assassinations, the Pill, the civil rights movement, the riots and the war, nothing was familiar. I wasn’t Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Donna Reed, or even a hazy version of my own mother. I was a divorced mom with few marketable skills, a skimpy education, and almost no money.

In the decades that followed I had no time for women’s liberation, no time to wonder about my woman self, no time to go searching for the long lost feminine. I was too busy inventing a life for myself, conjuring a career out of girlhood hobbies and half-baked dreams. Too busy scrambling for bucks, rolling with the punches, blown around the country in shifting economic winds.

But lately I’ve come face to face with a wild wordless part of me living deep inside. She paces, restless as a big caged cat, itching to escape. She’s surly and disruptive, threatening to upset my tidy little routine, my neatly defined role, the small independence I’ve won for myself. She’s like the shouter in the library. Unruly, a disturber of the peace.

I ignored her at first. I tried to rationalize her away. A product of fatigue. A quirky side effect of ebbing hormone tides. I took a few months off, planted a garden, kept a journal, took up the study of a new interesting work technique.

But when I returned to my therapy schedule she was still there and things were even worse than before. My client sessions, which had once been a rich source of insight and discovery, transformed themselves into dull plateaus of twice-told tales and finger-tapping boredom. My empathetic function flat-lined. I sat with clients and absently daydreamed about the moment when they would leave. On days when I scheduled appointments, I secretly hoped that the ringing telephone was bringing news of unexpected cancellations. And when it did, I felt liberated, free at last, delightfully relieved. I couldn’t stand my therapist self. The Wild Woman questioned her authority, sniggered at her expert opinions, mocked the whole concept of helping. She made me feel like a fake.

Clearly, something was going to have to give. But the thought of abandoning my work was frightening. Who would I be? What would I do? How could I justify it? And if I surrendered to the Wild Woman wouldn’t I just be giving in to my lazy, undisciplined, selfish side? I became more and more aware of how tightly my identity, my notions of self-esteem and self-concept, were tied to work and the public hat I wore, bound up with pride, opinions, superficial images.

In the middle of incessant internal arguments, the snarled deals and arrangements I was trying to make with myself, I had a startling dream.

I met the Wild Woman in the dream. She was my own ancient twin, my eternal reflection, a self I’d sensed a thousand times but never really known. I opened my dream hand to find eight smooth stones, a tiny Celtic shrine, arranged in a perfect ring on the palm of my hand.

Instead of struggling to keep what was passing away or rushing to fill the void of not knowing, the dream counseled me to reclaim the lost and forgotten. It pointed the way to the center, into the ancient circular scheme of time.

In some cultures there are rituals of return, sacred treks undertaken to recover a lost self, a sense of attunement, a state of grace. An Australian Aborigine goes on walkabout. A Plains Indian fasts and seeks a solitary vision. A Medieval Christian set out on a long, sometimes dangerous, pilgrimage.

In the spirit of a quest, I built a stone circle and began a journal. Nothing big happened. It’s a diary of small life. A modern book of hours. Voices in dreams. Antique goddesses. Homemade shrines. The speech of birds. The shapes of clouds. The white noise of my own thoughts. The memories that come with peaches and snow. The little things that are easy to lose.

For, as Günter Grass once wrote, Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.

Long Night Moon

YEAR’S END

I steer clear of New Year’s Eve parties. I can’t take the grief and regret hiding behind the masks of alcohol and noise. No matter how much hoopla they make, the eyes of revelers do not seem to shine out joy and eagerness as the big ball drops and the clock ticks past the witching hour. Quite the contrary. And while I might be able to escape time’s celebration, I can’t escape the clock, the knowledge of another year melting into the past. I have to go around the house hanging up all those new calendars and their unfamiliar digits glare at me from January letterheads and bills. Another year. A new year.

This year I will celebrate my own time feast. This year I turn fifty. When I was a kid, people who were fifty seemed old, one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. People who were fifty seemed settled and harder to surprise, as though they’d seen it all. When I turned fifty I thought I’d feel more certain, smoother. I thought I’d have a finished quality, not the same uncertainty and rough edges I had when I was twenty. When I was a kid, fifty felt like an unreal future, something that wouldn’t happen to me.

Last week I finally had to break down and make an eye appointment. The frequent incidence of blurred reading type, the increasing chanciness of threading sewing needles or etching in the fine tiny lines of an ink sketch finally drove me to the doctor’s chair. The prescription for presbyopia didn’t surprise me. But the word did. Presbyopia. Noun. A form of long-sightedness characteristic of old age. Derived from the Greek word presbus, meaning old man, and opos, meaning eye. Old man eyes. I like the sound of the farsighted part. Seeing further, getting a view of the long haul seems appropriate to fifty years on the planet. But the suggestion that my body is slouching toward decrepitude, beginning a long descent toward a thousand small betrayals, didn’t thrill me. Now with my new glasses, I thought, I’ll be able to carefully study the liver spots that finally float to the surface of my hands from unsuspected pools of hidden darkness. Just great.

During biblical times, a fiftieth year was a Year of Jubilee. It was a year when all debts were wiped clean, all bills marked paid. It signified a blank slate, a real new year. The shortfalls of the past were forgiven. What you owed and what was owed you somehow reached an egalitarian bottom line.

From this historical perspective, my fiftieth year, my Year of Jubilee, seems like a potent psychic opportunity. One I don’t want to blow or sabotage by persisting in dragging along old baggage or clinging to familiar crutches. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. But this year feels different. This year I feel a deep desire climbing like a rogue wave, rising up to sweep away the tangled kelp of outgrown habits. This year I want most of all to reclaim the moments of my life, the molecules of my own time, and turn my attention toward finer inner tunings. Instead of hustling from one chore or obligation to another, always focused on the next thing, I want to remember the feeling of time. What I miss most of all in my life is a sense of being in it. Simple. Now. Expanded hereness. What I want this year is more and more of less and less. I’m a card-carrying member of the Be Here Now generation, but in the last decade or so it sure seems like it was easier to be there then. I feel like my life has slipped away from me, not in years, but in awareness. I allowed it to be snatched by economic pressures, artificial priorities, importantly busy days. I used to honor my days with small ceremonies, simple rituals that helped me to spin out time and taste the present. When I opened the door to pushy agendas those old practices withered and died. I told myself I didn’t have time for them. The less time I carved out for still moments, the less time it seemed I had at all. Everything went faster and faster.

Last year I used the excuse of a writing project to reduce appointments and commitments. In a way it was a convenient evasion, ducking the real conflicts underlying work. Along with writing-in itself a peaceful practice, an observant form of meditation-I found my old familiar rituals sneaking in. Days lengthened. A sense of connectedness returned. A sense of coming home. I can’t go back now. I have to follow the peace of my own body.

For more than twenty years I’ve worked as a so-called healer. It’s a lot like being a nun. People tend to see my work more as a vocation, a calling, than they do a job. They wrap me in a cloak of abracadabra, in a cloud of pseudo-sanctity. As the years went by and fringe healing methods gained a wider audience, the pace of my practice accelerated. I made little compromises with my time; I struck bargains with my flexibility and power. Clients merely transferred their allegiance and responsibility from one kind of expert to another. I wanted healing partners, companions for the road. They wanted bosses, stand-in mothers, arrogant authorities, small gods. I began to feel squashed by the same claustrophobic systems, the same hierarchical structures I thought I’d left behind. My clients fail to understand that they rob me of my freedom when they deny their own. Our interactions became more and more draining, more and more lop-sided, less and less fulfilling.

Meanwhile the field itself became politicized, awash in tidal waves of doubtful claims and credentials, increasingly competitive (as though there’s not enough sick people to go around), and gridlocked with ego contests where practitioners battled to out-heal each other. Alternative healing and all of its accoutrements became big business.

To put it simply: it’s time for me to move along. And even if things had gone differently, it might still be time for me to move along. I want to go dreaming deep and my new work may seem for awhile invisible. That’s okay. Like Rene Daumal on Mount Analogue, I feel like saying: I have brought you this far and been your leader. Right here I’ll take off the cap of authority, which was a crown of thorns for the person I remember myself to be. Far within me, where the memory of what I am is still unclouded, a little child is waking up and making an old man’s mask weep . . . a little child looking for help in order to become what he is without imitating anyone.

It’s hard to change, to put down your paddle in the middle of the stream and just see where the river takes you. It’s hard to let go. And maybe the hardest part is dismantling the public self. People are comfortable with who they think I am. They have me figured out, painted into the village landscape, off in a corner somewhere appropriately placed and known. Sometimes I think that social expectations are a kind of black magic, a collective binding spell that tries to lock me in a puppet’s dance.

But this year is different. This year, with the