Work in Progress

Again I haven't written here for a while. John and I have been posting to the Casa Chiara site more often. Over the last two months I've been trying to bring more focus to each of these blogs and have realized that the blog from Sunshine Hill has more to do with the writing life, while Casa Chiara has more to do with our contemplation, reading, spiritual practices, and insights concerning the Sacred.They will overlap, I expect, but hopefully also move towards more refinement.

Since last summer I've been writing a memoir. It might be the most difficult project I've undertaken because of life's many sounds or calls here or there, to this or that, and finally into the non-dualistic All Present Now. I seem to myself to have lived at least five lives: Child, Nun, Spouse to Three Very Different Men. The writing, by its nature, separates out what really is only one sound connecting them all--that of a divine pulse pervading everything. The task is paradoxical. Life finally is recognized as a mystic journey. It is a dance to an eternal song. So the sound connecting everything must be the tonic note in the song of our lives.

This morning I revised the beginning of the memoir a bit to place it firmly in key:

The journey began on a chill night in November, under the sign of Scorpio just as Venus crested the  horizon. Snow, soon to develop into the great Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940, already was beginning to fall, covering the streets and sidewalks around St. Joseph's Hospital in Souix City, Iowa. This was not home.

               Home would be a lake spanning the border between Minnesota and Ontario, and before November passed I would have been taken there to be baptized in the small Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart in Baudette, Minnesota. It was summer before I awakened to Lake of the Woods. Years later I would write about this lake, calling it by a different name.

               Sound moved over the water of Black Sturgeon Lake. Gulls heard. Sound lifted under their wings as air, passed through their hearts and lungs, issued in a cry. Sound moaned in the rocks. Fallen needles of tamarack and fir blanketed the ground, and sound filled them, too. Wind, bees, and the delicate feet of mice scattered the needles. A spider’s web became a harp and it sang.

               Wild, sound luged through a granite pass the Eagle River carved a thousand thousand years ago and surrounded the bones of deer licked clean by wolves.

               Earth opened to sound like a love. Sound entered every cell, vibrating, setting in motion the circle of the world.[1]

               The sound, I now know, was “Ahhhh,” the beginning of all sound, the first sound in the Aramaic name Abwoon, now translated as “Father” in the prayer of Jesus. “A”=The Absolute, Only Being, pure Oneness and Unity.[2] It is the first movement of creation, the pre-existing, the no-time-or-space emanation before the Big Bang, the moment before moments before time, that deep vibration that continues to keep in being all that is.

               In my novel, this sound became the “perfect A,” that Elise recognized as the core of her own life, the origin of all her music, and the connection between her and the animating power of the universe: God.

               Within and around the lake I found wilderness. And these two images—water and wilderness—became the first lenses through which I saw the world and my own individual life.

copyright, 2013, Christin Lore Weber

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[1] Weber, Christin Lore, ALTAR MUSIC. Scribner, 2000. New York. p. 10

[2] Klotz, Neil Douglas. PRAYERS OF THE COSMOS. Harper/Collins, 1994. p. 13