The Memory Exhibition

One of the delights of maturity is the memories! All the firsts in life, and the only’s, and the milestones that marked our successes. Some people record these in scrapbooks, and today, many young families are recording digitally, making instant access to memories possible...and somewhat accurate. Traditionally, in my family, memories are just that...memories. So, by now, lacking pics and scrapbooks and even broken family ties, many memories are a bit out of focus. I don’t remember any of my report cards from the first 12 years of school, or details of the birthday parties, and there are very few pics of my childhood as I was the second child. By next Christmas, I’ll forget some of the gifts I received, or gave, this year. But I do remember that I am a kindergarten drop-out and why. And I remember college well, but mostly because I left campus with one of the ‘prizes’....a handsome, 6' 3" dark haired love-of-my-life man. How could I forget?! Emotion is the branding iron of memory.

The degree of emotional drama, trauma, joy, surprise, awe, love...all these seem to determine how much we remember and how often the memory arises. Emotion injects power into memory more than recorded or unrecorded fact does.

For years, or maybe forever, I can recall everything about the moment my husband took his last breath, when we were yet young adults. I can still hear it, feel it, taste it, smell it...the force of his arm falling away from mine onto the bed...the amazing instant when life drained away...abandoning those beautiful brown eyes, where just an instant before, life had been present. So sad, the lips, no longer able to respond to my kiss.  I recall the anger of the a few  following months as the unfairness of life became my walking existance.  A life-saving medical experiment bringing promised healing...dashed by sudden death.

I remember LOVE walked through the door when Dad came home from work each day of my youth.  My sister and I argued about who would take Dad’s hot shoes and socks off and rub his feet with a cool, wet cloth when he returned from work on summer days. I remember because of love...I loved him and saw from the blisters on his feet that he loved us enough to suffer a little for our good. I remember Mom always made fresh rolls for dinner and she kept the house so pretty, all because of love. I recall our fun summer vacations, touring every state and national park from Arkansas to San Jose, California...both the southern and the northern routes of that era. This I remember because we were so relaxed and so far away from the telephone and mail and Dad’s work addiction to his Esso station. The contrast made vacations memorable...time for nothing but new adventures wrapped in family love.

Memories are fascinating! But they can be deceptively selective. Perhaps this is one of their advantages over the present reality we live in...we can polish a memory, but have to wear for a while the detailed scratches and scars of NOW.

The happiness and joys of being loved by students, admired by some parents, career successes which sometimes I celebrated alone...these created emotional impressions that are not easily forgotten because they became more of ME. As to the facts...scores on professional evaluations are forgotten, but the resulting compliments of Principals remain.  Opening my first business, Gift Menagerie, had a business plan whose details are forgotten,  but I still feel the pride of having built the dream. The sense that something powerful happened as I came up out of the Baptismal waters of youth remains, and even sustains, but the date has vacated the brain.

Over years of time, the mind amazingly weaves a tapestry portrait of life, laying these memory snippets in connected and overlaying patterns.  By running our hands across the tapestry grain, we may occasionally feel the little ‘knot’ where a sadness happened...or prick our fingers with a tiny, stiff, loose-end of a thread, revealing the starts and stops that tore the threads of our life... the pauses life thrust upon us.

Seeing life with some accuracy requires that we allow our tapestry to be mounted on the gallery wall so we can move farther from it, step by backward step, until our eyes allow the  threads to begin blending with others, and at this point we see a new and more balanced image of our life. And it’s beautiful. Each misstep is lost in the ongoing movement we made in spite of all that would have stopped us. Perhaps a few gray spots here and there when the trials were long and deep, but mostly the tapestry is an abstract flow of color and texture. It can even be hung from any of the many sides and still be beautiful...there’s no right or wrong way for viewing the tapestry...it is meaningful from every direction because life is like that...providing us with many interpretations of what was experienced, why, and what it all meant.

Only through the Beholder’s lenses of grace and acceptance can the tapestry become the reality we lived. Though claiming it; we must claim the past from afar. And it is best never to walk close enough again to take the threads apart and separate the colors because life’s full reality disengages when we do.

In a way, accepting the beauty of the tapestry represents our gratefulness for what has been given and entrusted to us. Taking apart the strength and structure of the weave to relate to one imperfect thread only, is like dishonoring what the artist designed.  How tempted we are, through memory, to pull one single thread from the tapestry so we can examine it again and perhaps even dispose of it's seeming ugliness as it lays lifeless in the human hand.  But the weaver knew by design, where it fit and how it's contrast with the other yarns added depth and perspective to the effects of color and form.  He schemed the composition so that stronger supporting threads surrounded the weaker ones.  One lost thread might render the composition unstable; unbalanced.

One cannot really forget the beauty, nor the depth of perception, that the visit to the museum begat...the tapestry forever displayed and viewable, arousing memories of some individual and unique threads, and of some blurred by the tightness of the weave where strength was required.  Now we understand better the whole, and marvel at the weaver's intent to make of our muddy threads something beautiful, thread by thread.  The richly colored threads in our tapestry may have been a birth, a significant accomplishment, when we fell in love...yet, a death, a lost fortune, a broken bone or spirit; the muted neutrals...As we stand at a distance and view anew through the real lense of life...authentic, grateful, and humble...

We will find indeed our lives have become a beautiful tapestry... every needle sharp broken thread or knarled thickness has been redeemed by the weaver's grace.

What God has woven, let us not unravel. 

                                                                              And no one needs this post more than I....December 28, 2015

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