Falling into Light: A Mother and Daughter Give Birth to Each Other

By Clare Morris

Falling Into Light is a luminous memoir, the story of a woman with
impaired vision, who sees with depth and clarity. Clare Morris sees the
undulations of her long life-river so vividly she transports us into her world.
A Quaker, Morris follows her spiritual yearning into Catholicism
and the convent. A fiery social activist, she follows her Quaker
conscience into the peace movement. A painful mother-daughter
estrangement is healed, in the context of protesting war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465348395

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Copyright © 2011 by Clare Morris.

ISBN:          Ebook                                 978-1-4653-4839-5

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.

This book was created in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

Romanesque Arches

From Strength To Strength

A Certain Sense To This

Falling Into Light

What Birds?

Snake In The Grass

Lucy Locket The Doll With A Pocket

Pearl Harbor

Perfect Report

Bewitched

Quaker Hill

Ruth

Without My Father

Wedding Gift

Grandfather Levi

Life In The Barn

Cave Of The Mother

Art Lesson

Silent Weapon

Beyond The River’s Bend

The Well Of Love

Joy’s Extremes

Arranged Marriage

Clearing

Into Wilderness

New Habits

A Time Apart

Haunted House

Coming To Myself

The Sword Of Success

The Ring

Vietnam

The Mother Ship Enterprise

Initiation

Convergence

Dark Mother Of Montserrat

Virginia Marie

The Brass Band

Bread

Crazy Mama

Doing Time

Another Leaving Home

Ring Language

Mother Of Transitions

Sheila Moon, Shaman Poet

The Mother Who Never Leaves Me

An Ancient Mercy

Birth Mysteries

Finding My True Mother

IN GRATITUDE

No one makes a healing journey alone. No one writes a book alone. To write this book, I needed Donna Hardy; her passion for writing ignited my own. Joyce Brady and Heidi Hardin inspired the memoir’s beginnings. Ann Denham, Rosemary Hayes, Beth Miller, Debbie Ogden, Ann Scott, Sr. Christine van Swearingen, O.S.U., and my sister, Ann Kawar, read and responded to the versions that followed. Margaret Ryan, Senior Editor for Psychological Perspectives, read an early manuscript and encouraged me onward. Naomi Lowinsky mentored me, as the work neared its final form. The crafts people at Ajalon Printing and Design brought my stories to press and to those who will read them. Thank you each for your friendship and skillful support.

Photographs are by Russ Dieter

ROMANESQUE ARCHES

Inside the Romanesque church the tourists jolted in

the half darkness.

Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.

A few candle-flames flickered.

An angel with no face embraced me

and whispered through my whole body:

"Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!

Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.

You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be."

Blind with tears

I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza

together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka and

Signora Sabatini

and inside them all, vault opened behind vault endlessly.

—Tomas Transtromer

Translated by Robert Bly, from The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer. Translation copyright © 2001 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

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FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

We rode in a paddy wagon, Mother and I, facing the rear window. From there we could watch cars come up close behind us on the freeway. Anyone we knew?

I noticed our wrists. They were so alike—flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. A single pair of handcuffs bound her wrist to mine. A new umbilical cord.

Our transport deputy switched on the radio, settled the dial at a rock station. I tried to escape its beat by sweeping over the past five days. Riding backward, I found it easy to think backward, from Tuesday to Monday to last Friday.

Early that morning, we arrived at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation in Sunnyvale, where the ground between us and the nuclear edge is eaten away. We were six and looking small in the shadow of the military industrial complex. Noting our numbers, my mother, Edith, remarked, Can what is enough be measured in quantity?

Besides Edith, a Quaker woman in her mid-seventies, and me, an Ursuline nun, in our circle of six were Marcia, a local activist; her mother, Louise, blind and nearly 80; Joe, founder of a Catholic Worker house for homeless teenagers; and Sam, founder of a Catholic Worker house for prisoners’ families.

As we had planned, Joe and Sam went immediately to the flagpole beside the main entrance to the Lockheed Navy Building. The two men took down and folded the Trident submarine flag. Next they lowered the American flag, turned it upside down, and raised it to half-mast, the international signal for distress.

Two United Nations flags were then unfurled by Edith, Marcia, and three helpful, though unsuspecting, Lockheed workers. The flags were placed on either side of the front steps. They had been given to us by a San Francisco city bus driver, who was passionate about the dangers of nuclear war.

With the flags in place, the Navy Building’s exterior was transformed, expressing our desire for inner transformation. I remembered that Daniel Berrigan had said, An act of civil disobedience is an act of contemplation. This was ritual for us, a hope that we might turn away from a nuclear path.

The new flag arrangement might have remained outside the Navy Building all day without notice, had we not begun to distribute a leaflet we had prepared, comparing the ash fallout from the Mount St. Helens recent eruption to the nuclear fallout from a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.

When Lockheed’s head of security, Peter McGivern, arrived, he held his gray head and exclaimed, You people. You’re really aging me! Then he caught sight of blind Louise standing by the front door, her fragile body bending into morning sun, her white cane planted firmly on US Navy property. Oh no! he moaned. Now you’ve gone too far. You’re really pushing it this time. Look—if you’ll just leave, no charges will be brought against you. All you have to do is walk away, and you’ll be free.

The six of us looked at each other. Free? Of conscience and its burden? Louise settled the matter. I know what I want, she declared, pounding her cane on the porch, I’m going to stay right here.

There was nothing to do but arrest us. As a cadre of Sunnyvale police approached, I turned to Edith and said, Aside from the gift of life itself, you have given me nothing of greater value than this moment.

A CERTAIN SENSE TO THIS

How could it have happened? Mother and I in a police wagon, handcuffed together, disobeying civil law? She a Quaker and I a Roman Catholic nun? What sort of mother-daughter connection could this have been?

It all made its own kind of sense. We weren’t out of our heads, lost in some chaotic miasma. Our lives had unfolded, our rivers had turned, from beginnings that weren’t easy for either of us.

I was born into a Quaker family, to a good and gifted woman. She was kind, intelligent, generous, and supremely competent in whatever she undertook.

I, however, was a conundrum to both my parents. I squinted, stumbled, fell and fell. I couldn’t open my eyes in bright light. I toddled down the street with my eyes closed, so that strangers asked me if I were sleepwalking. I cried and screamed often, about nothing apparent. Something was not right, and my parents noticed.

When I was 14 months old, they took me to an ophthalmologist, who discovered that I had anomalous retinas. This meant that I was light-sensitive, without color vision, and myopic. What would be the consequences of this condition? No one knew. We would all have to wait and see, or not see.

Decades later, Mother told me, I used to think I didn’t have any real problems—until I had you. My limited vision was a summons to us both to reach beneath the surface of our lives, to find a deeper journey. This was our destiny: to live and die into discovering the possibilities hidden within limitation.

Our path was difficult. Mother tried to shape me into who I could never become. I wanted to comply, even as I railed against her powerful control. Meanwhile, I looked everywhere for whom and what could call me forth into my true being. Each phase of my search found mothering in the mirror of where my need led. Each promised an ideal. Each disappointed by falling into the earth of the real. Through it all, Mother and I helped to give birth to each other.

What follows is my version of how this mutual emergence happened. They are true tales, as I remember them. Their words and deeds come as close as I can to the essence of what happened. Though not to be taken literally, they catch the wind, the spirit, of what I recall.

As I tell these stories, I tell them to Mother, though she died many years ago, and I tell them to my psyche’s inner mother, for they reveal how she has come forth as the mother who never leaves me.

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FALLING INTO LIGHT

One summer midday, when I was about three, Mother lifted me onto the lawn-swing in our patio, saying she would be right back. Honeysuckle grew over and around the swing’s awning, like sweet, embracing arms. I loved to pick and suck the fragrant trumpet flowers, as though I were a little hummingbird.

On this particular day, I sat in the awning’s shade, listening to bees circle every flower bed, and a bird family’s music in the apricot tree. Butterflies hovered around the swing, seeking sun and the floral feast laid out before them in every direction. I could glimpse these beguiling winged creatures when I blinked or squinted. There they were. There they weren’t. None landed close enough for me to steadily study it in my protective shadow.

I wanted to explore this garden. It held more than my position on the lawn-swing could encompass.

My first problem was to find a way to the ground. I peeked over the edge of the canvas cushions. No telling how far down the grass was. It looked cool and soft, so near, so far. I could smell its fresh, thick mat below me. I dangled my legs down as far as they would reach. My sandals couldn’t touch even the tallest blade. So I made my legs longer by lying at the cushion’s front curve. Stretch, stretch. No luck.

Then it happened. Gravity claimed its own. Thump. I lay on the lawn. I stayed still for a moment, out of surprise, not pain. I wasn’t hurt. I was on the ground by my own doing.

I rose unsteadily to my feet. Although I had been put on the swing, no one had told me, Stay! Yet, I knew Mother expected me to sit there until she returned to the patio.

Making the most of this world beyond the lawn-swing, I began to explore. I toddled to a thicket of rosebushes and spied the coiled water hose, which yesterday I thought was a snake. Even if it were a snake, Mother had said, it wouldn’t hurt you. Garden snakes don’t bite.

Then I took a left turn to a white picket fence. It wasn’t far away, so I reached it after only a few uncertain steps. The pickets seemed to offer themselves as friendly handles for holding on. They let me move slowly toward a closed gate. Beyond this gate, I could tell that a gigantic shady tree spread out over swaths of ivy and ferns. As I leaned toward the tree, the gate moved too. It was not latched, and easily swung open. I helped it do just this, and soon was making my way along a leaf-crunching path across tree roots. It was so dark beneath the tree that I could open my eyes and look around. I could relax, squint-free. I picked up leaf after leaf, smelled it, crunched it in my hands. What pleasure to feel each cool, wrinkled creature turn into a small rain of shards.

My attention shifted toward a patch of brilliant light beyond the tree’s outermost branches. What was that? My eyes hurt to look into it, but I wanted to know what was there. So I shuffled through leaf piles to the edge of the great tree’s shade. Then I stepped boldly forward—into nothing but sun-bright air.

Down I fell from a rock wall’s edge to the gravel driveway below. I screamed. Mother flew out of the garage, swept me into her arms, held me close, rocked me. She was crying as much as I.

WHAT BIRDS?

What I could and could not see was impossible for anyone to comprehend. Because I did not realize that my seeing was different from other people’s, I often felt bewildered by expectations of me. For instance, sometimes Mother would drop what she was doing and point to a tree, the lawn, or the birdbath, saying, My! Look at that! Oops—there they go. What a sight! She would thus announce the presence of birds, as if I too saw them clearly. I would smile and say, Oh. I was happy that she was happy. And sad. Did she forget again that I couldn’t see what she saw? Or did she not believe me?

One of my earliest experiences of trying to enter into her vision happened when I was about three. I was lying on my stomach on our dining room floor, drawing pictures, when Mother called: Come see the birds, Mary Bond! I repeated, Birds, as though looking it up in my three-year-old vocabulary. Birds.

Mother stood next to the living room French doors to our patio. When I came to her side, she opened the doors wide to the smell of wet earth, grass, and tree bark. The morning rain had stopped, and she could see birds hopping across wet bricks, pecking at the grass pushing up through cracks. I heard the birds chatter, but where were they?

See? She bent over me. There they are. Robins and finches. Aren’t they lovely? I nodded, pretending to see them. I nodded to please her.

They’re playing in puddles on the bricks. See? Squinting at the patio path and wet lawn, I made out vague, moving specks. Were those birds? My picture books showed birds that stayed still on the page and were much larger than these tiny darting specks.

Mother bent lower and looked into my eyes, as though she might be able to see what I saw in what was reflected there. Do you need your glasses, Mary Bond?

Yes, I whispered.

She found them on a nearby table and gently curled their wire bows around my ears. Now do you see the birds, Mary Bond? I didn’t answer. Nothing much had changed because of the glasses, except that now sunlight had come through the garden’s picket gate. The ivy framing our French doors had become a garland of jewels. I heard flutters of wings and saw arcs of darting blurs. Bright light erased everything else.

Do you see them yet, honey? Mother insisted. Slowly, I shook my head as her frown lines deepened. She was unhappy with me. I didn’t know what to do. Neither did she.

SNAKE IN THE GRASS

One of the early messages to me from my Quaker mother was that anger must not be expressed, unless disaster provoked it. Rarely was Mother overtly angry with me or with my brother and sister. Rarely was Dad angry with any of us. Never did I see my parents angry—or even irritated—with each other. They disciplined us. They raised their voices to us. They spanked us. But they were always restrained.

For me, however, Mother’s true anger was without word, slap, or sound. The silence of it terrified me. It slithered somewhere, hidden. Or it hung heavy in the atmosphere and I breathed it.

When I was about four, my older brother, Bobby, and I went hand in hand to the upstairs guest room where Mother was dusting. We wanted her to play with us, though we didn’t know how to ask. She was busy cleaning and thinking.

I felt it with us then, that subtle anger. It filled the room, filled me. I felt the same lumpity-bumpity that curly roads in the mountains always stirred up inside my stomach.

Are you mad at us, Mommy? Bobby asked, wrapping his seven-year-old arms around her waist.

No, I’m not mad at you, she said firmly.

You look mad, I told her, coming closer to study her face.

That’s because the corners of my mouth turn down. My father’s did too. All the Johnson mouths do.

Mine don’t, I said, pulling at the corners of my lips, as I leaned toward the closet door’s beveled mirror. You have your father’s mouth, Mother said, as she pulled back her star-patterned quilt to change the sheets.

But I feel something, I insisted.

What?

I don’t know. Something in my tummy—or under the bed.

She shrugged and snapped out a clean sheet.

*     *     *

What the others in my family didn’t express through anger, I bellowed and screamed in mine. My tantrums came easily and often. Trying to open my eyes out of doors in the daytime felt as though needles were piercing my pupils. I couldn’t stand it. I was furious with the light and with anyone who made me sit or stand or lie or walk in the light. Sunglasses worn in early childhood would have been a mistake, my parents were told. My retinas might yet develop some natural pigmentation, which would be hindered if I wore dark lenses.

My rages tarnished the reputation of my well-bred Quaker mother and her lovely family. I didn’t care where I exploded. Public scenes were my specialty. One of the most notable of these was at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco. We went one Saturday, dressed in our best, and stepped into the vast human family celebrating itself.

I felt bewildered and ecstatic. What was all this? Who were those men I could barely see, climbing on chairs and each other’s shoulders? What was that cotton that could be eaten? Why was a long weenie wrapped in bread called a hot dog? Was it made from a dog? Most of all, what was that whirling circle of lights, animals, and music that went round and round beneath a huge striped parasol?

Toward the end of the day, Daddy took me on his shoulders to buy a ticket to ride one of those animals on what he called a merry-go-round. He helped me onto a white horse and stood by me while the music began. The floor moved round and round; my horse rose and fell, rose and fell; and the outside world passed by turning, turning. I had never known this kind of pleasure and could have ridden into all time to come.

But the music stopped. My horse grew still, its front legs high in the air. No. This must not be. I had to go round again. Time to leave, Lady Girl, Daddy said quietly. Time to go home. Without letting go of my horse’s mane, I pleaded, Another ride— No. We are going. Now!

Disappointment and fatigue brought a cloudburst as he lifted me from my mount. Joy had been snatched too soon. By the time we reached my mother and brother, I was kicking, screaming, biting, and beating on my father’s chest. Daddy stayed the course to a distant parking lot, turning heads as he hurried, holding, as best he could, this tempest of a toddler. The Lindbergh kidnapping was still fresh in people’s memories. My parents expected someone to call the police.

*     *     *

Whenever our family traveled, my fatigue became an issue. Once, during the long drive from a vacation, late-afternoon summer sun shone relentlessly into our faces. I had the usual headache and nausea these journeys brought. Dad was chain-smoking, sending Chesterfield clouds into the backseat. We were all tired and cranky.

I alone complained. I’m hot—I’m thirsty—I’m hungry! I was told by Mother that we couldn’t stop. How long till we get home? was my next question. Maybe seven hours, Mother replied. I couldn’t stand the thought and began to scream. Dad drove faster.

Through my considerable lung power, we heard another sound: a police car siren. Dad growled as he pulled over, and I yelled even louder. An officer sauntered to Dad’s open window. He asked for a driver’s license and glanced at the three of us children in the backseat, looking hard at me going full throttle. Then he bent toward Dad and said, You were speeding, Mr. Morris. I think I know why, and, believe me, I understand. You go along now and be careful. Get this family home as quick as you can—but safely.

*     *     *

These tantrums continued. They weren’t passing squalls, but mighty storms, worthy of operatic rages. Neighbors sometimes inquired if everything were all right. Guests in the living room for tea or supper looked alarmed. Mother seemed desperate. She tried everything she could think of to stop me, clamping her hand over my mouth, flicking my lips with her thumb and forefinger, sending me to my room, denying treats, assigning me to a chair from which I must not move. Nothing worked. Everything added to my wrath and her frustration.

Fortunately for the entire family, my parents bought a piano. I was five when two huge men appeared and set up a ramp on our front steps for a worn and lovely antique of an upright. They rolled it into my parents’ bedroom