Beach refuge, the Fall, & What to Call My Book

I am coming to the end of my ten day retreat here at the beach where I set out to edit and rewrite the final chapter of my memoir.  Have abandoned my earlier critique that memoir is simply a narcissistic exercise, and have forged ahead because time is running out and I'm the only one who can tell my story.   I followed through with my plan, did the work, and managed to practice the piano, walk on the beach, and daydream while watching the wild birds come to their feeder.  A rarified opporutnity for sure.  This house sits perched over a creek, Salmon Creek, and has a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, which both inspires and distracts.  I can hear the waves crash and roar on the beach five minutes away and feel comforted that I live in the container of the natural world.  The rhythm is hypnotic at times, and I find myself slowing way down to be in the middle of everything.  The egrets swoop down and root themselves in the creek to dine, the ducks perk along, and the Canadian geese go honking overhead to some unknown destination.  The place has magic.
The air is cooler now, and the darkness descends earlier.  I've noticed how crisp everything looks in the briskness of fall, and inhale deeply to take it in.  I love this season called Fall, that time of letting go and falling away, only to be re-formed in time.
I have struggled with what to call my memoir - this fragmentary journey of the mind through my past and present.  I keep thinking I will find just the right words to capture what lurks in the book.  To that end I decided to write something I called a "preface" - a piece that summed up my thoughts about the experience of crafting this work.  And in doing this, I think I found one beautiful phrase that said something essential.

The Preface:

Pablo Neruda wrote in the beginning of his Memoirs:  "Many of the the things I remember have blurred as I recalled them, they have crumbled to dust like irreparably shattered glass."  These words come close to the sense I have about my collection of narratives -- the various momentss in time when I was a traveler that elicit both philosophical and emotional responses, that pose the questions one might ask when faced with the disturbing facts of foreign-ness, and lead back to the haunting journey that came before all of this, that tortuous path through childhood.  From the beginning I felt as though I was looking through a kaleidoscope, with beautful, seductive colored shapes of glass dancing about separately but rarely forming a solid image.  Memory is like that, I think, offering up very parrticular pictures and sensations that we believe to be real.  There is always a feeling of uncertainty and doubt that any of what I have conjured of the far past is "true."  The moments land on the page because at the time I was contemplating my story, they seemed authentic.  Anyone who has taken on the writing of memoir knows how painfully subjective and unreliable memory is.  But because I agree wholeheartedly with another great writer, Joan Didion, when she says that we write "in order to live," I place these kaleidoscope bits and pieces before you so that you can see that the beauty and chaos of one person's journey is connected to your own, and perhaps recognize yourself in this person who was compelled all her life to travel and disappear and return again to home -- and to herself.


New thought about the title of the work:

    Bowing Camels & Bloody Red Roses
  Travel and Life Seen through Shattered Glass


We do write (create) in order to live, to understand, to be complete, and we travel because in the journey we understand more clearly who we are.  Paul Theroux wrote this:  "On my own, I had a clearer sense of who I was."

Think on this, if you wish, as you pursue your own journey...