On Memories and Redemption
The Quakers looked to shake off the physical dirt of this world in order to find another. In order to find a true non-physical world beyond our reach and therefore closer to God.
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I’m helping my daughter with her new house this week. Doing a bit of painting and waiting for workmen to show up and do their thing. Today I needed to meet the guy who would clean the carpets in the morning. The appointment was at 9:00 AM and put a bit of unwanted pressure on my morning routine.
I threw Ollie the Collie in the truck and drove the next town over to be on station at the apportioned time. Squeezed as we were for time I didn’t get a walk for Ollie into the morning agenda. Ollie, being a puppy and a working dog gets a bit psychotic if he doesn’t get enough outside exercise. Actually, for Ollie there is no such thing as enough outside exercise time, but I do my best.
After getting the workman set up to go I figured I’d take Ollie for a walk. I, of course, have run the roads around here and was fairly certain there was an interesting Shaker village less than a mile away on the adjacent back road.
We set off. We took a curious, leash tugging circuit around the condo complex look for maybe a trail to avoid the main road. We found through a backyard and an active construction zone a way to the next road and began to wander up the shoulder towards the Shaker houses.
After two solid days of gray, cold drizzle that would make London or Seattle proud, the day had dawned bright, sunny and happy. Temperatures danced with the freezing mark leaving treacherous black ice in the parking lot. Leaves and fall plantings turned into cathedral paintings by frost and slanting morning sun.
Ollie was wound up. Not enough exercise. He wasn’t around when I ran my Tuesday trail run and you could tell he was a pressure cooker of energy. Would up tighter than a rubber band.
We walked and bathed ourselves in the beautiful morning, him tugging me along, up the shoulder.
About ¾ of a mile down the road, before we had come to the scenic village, there was a trail opening leading off into the forest unmarked. Those who know me know that I am constitutionally incapable of passing by an unmarked trail head with exploring.
And we descended into the sparkling New England wood like Thoreau striding into the Walden wood.
It soon became apparent that we had discovered a good-sized chunk of conservation land. I was able to let Ollie off leash to sprint about the trail, which salved his pent-up wanderlust, and hopefully, solved my need to sit peacefully without being barked at and/or bitten for a couple minutes later in the day.
This trail led us through the old Shaker farmland. With the leaves down we could see the occasional works of man on the land. Long, solidly build stone walls with square-cut granite pillars in the gateways. The occasional cellar hole from a house, or barn or shed long lost in the mist.
As we ambled along on our unplanned reconnaissance I began to think of the men and women who built these things and tended these farms a hundred years ago before the great pines and oaks reclaimed them.
I don’t think there are any Shakers left. They were a sect that eschewed all things of this realm including those elements of physical communion necessary to create little Shakers. But that holy energy made its mark here in these stones and works.
You see the earth and these rocks are a form of deep memory. As much as the electrons that I am chasing around in this computer to tell you this story, these people told their story by working their memories into this landscape with stone and spade.
This granite pillar is more than the boundary marker of a gate or an entrance to a road. It is the physical manifestation of the men and animals that put it here. Their sweat and bloodied knuckles are recorded here.
These thoughts made me think of how I am just part of one great historical memory. How what I do leaves ripples on the land. Echoes. My footfalls in the leaves and broken acorns lay as one more layer in millennia of memory.
In this context it can make you feel small in your impact when measured against the memory store of eons. But if you squint just right it can also focus. Pull you out of yourself and into the small part you can effect in this time, your time, in this moment, in this day. You can feel part of something bigger and feel the gratitude of that belonging.
And in that same context, as one of the makers of an inherited memory, you can ask yourself a simple question:
“Are you being a good ancestor?”
Are you?