Scatter and Settle (with Guided Practice)
by Kristine Kopperud, BJW Contributor
Fall is my season of stilled life.
Nearly each week ferries me past the hallowed date on which someone I love has died—my own extended All Saint’s. Many of my beloveds are decades gone, and yet I’m stung by clear, crackling memory in ways I am not at other times of year:
I use my thin-gauge pancake flipper and remember my benevolently neurotic organic farmer friend Chris, who insisted it was the only tool for soup-thin sourdough batter. “The bubbles have to be uniform but not burst before you flip,” he decreed, hovering over his cast-iron skillet. He made me demonstrate that I knew precisely when to flip. Satisfied, he gifted me the flipper.
A friend remarks on the sea-anemone paperweight on my windowsill—it’s the blue of sunlight if you’re 20 meters below the ocean surface, in a bubble of blown glass—and instantly I remember taking its smooth coolness into my palm from my grandmother’s windowsill, where it distracted dishwashers for 30 some years.
I knock an old photo magnet off the fridge and notice for the first time, on picking it up, that my Norwegian farmer neighbor, then north of 80 in the picture, was not smiling at the camera or even into the distance, but at my elementary-aged daughter, as she was squinting, shirt and jeans rumpled, held, dangling, on my late dad’s hip.
I am grateful for these shards of grief, like filaments of fiberglass I only sometimes feel embedded in the busy-ness of still-living. I feel in them the warm life that I shared with those who are gone, and I’m reminded of the privilege that, by a pinprick, I’m still here, sharing life without them, with others.
I love that fall is the season of both settling and scatter—of routines, of light, turning in on itself toward winter, of children, of leaves. I kick up the debris with the toe of my shoe, just because, knowing how close it must lie to what I want to remember.
Jackson meditation teacher DEIDRE NORMAN offered this guided meditation in our (free!) FRIDAY COMMUNITY ZOOM PRACTICE. Join us FRIDAYS at 8AM MT!