“I keep forgetting that I am alive.” - Benita

This is Benita. She is at a threshold. This is not her first threshold, but it is her last––at least as this woman, in this life, and who she has become over the past, we think, 97 years. “I keep forgetting that I am alive.” This is one of the first things Benita says to us. Benita is blind and lives with her younger sister, Manuela, who is deaf. They swing quietly in their hammocks in their small home at the top of a steep staircase that climbs from the town center in the Polochic Valley in the mountains of Guatemala. The fire on the floor is almost out; a thin smoke, like incense, wafts through the light cracking through the stick walls. Benita tells us that life now feels like the dream––her sense of reality shifts as she approaches the final threshold. It’s been awhile since anyone has sung to her. She misses singing. She hears our voices. Manuela does not. As I look at these sisters, I think about these lines from an Octavio Paz poem:

Music:
I hear within what I see outside.
I see within what I hear outside.

Manuela does not hear; she sees. Can she hear within what she sees outside?

Benita does not see; she hears. Can she see within what she hears outside?

Music:
I hear within what I see outside
I see within what I hear outside

Benita’s sight no longer responds to external stimulation––to light. Perhaps she is seeing on the inside what she is hearing on the outside––most of it silence in her quiet days. “I keep forgetting that I am alive.”

We find out that, in addition to longing for and forgetting how to sing, that she once had a child. But the child died very young because “its spirit was frightened away.” This is how the Q’eqchi’ explain death––the spirit is scared out of a person and leaves the body, causing illness, and if not properly treated, ultimately, the frightened will leave forever, and death takes them. Q’eqchi’ women are the healers, the midwives of health in their communities.

When Benita’s child fell ill, they would have tried to identify where and what had scared the child’s spirit away in order to call it back. They never did find the source of the child’s fright, and her child crossed the threshold to death long before Benita.

Wisdom Anthologies explores and reveals the thresholds of the feminine archetypes, the Heroine’s Journey through maiden, mother, and sage. At each phase, a soul must cross a threshold. From maiden to mother to sage. What happens at the threshold? What happens at those spaces between where one archetype dies and gives life to the next?

This is wisdom: to recognize and accept the thresholds as they present themselves. To take your time. To know these thresholds intimately. I believe in thresholds––they are the space between where the living happens, where, as O’Donohue points out, the heart wakes up and engages in a vital pulsating of confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. My own experience at thresholds has been rooted in a quiet stillness as everything swirls around me––observing the emotions and thoughts that move through me, knowing that, in a moment of great stillness, I will cross over the threshold. It is common knowledge for musicians that the music happens between the notes––it is how we mind the spaces, the places in between that will create the song of our life that will continue to resonate throughout this earth and our loved ones, even as we cross the threshold from matriarch to death.

Why begin the journey of Wisdom Anthologies at the final threshold of a life, with the matriarchs? Why not begin with the maidens and follow a natural progression of growth? I get mixed reactions when I tell people that I want to interview women on the threshold of death. Some immediately tell me I should interview their grandmother in excitement and tell me how much I’ll love her. And so I do. Others think that what I’m doing is morbid and deeply sad. I get a sense that they associate aging with only the loss, frailty, and loneliness that comes with age. Why is my response to women at the threshold one of curiosity, excitement, and awe? Why do I ache to spend so much time with my elderwomen?

Since I was a girl, I had a subconscious understanding that sage women, which I loosely define as women over 70 years of age, had a knowing that could heal me. They were the ones reassuring me that everything would turn out all right, that I didn’t have to achieve greatness to be loved, to honor the ebb and flow of generosity and receptivity, and that there was a lot of reason for laughter in this absurd world.

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The element that did and will always lead me to a state of awe and wonder is this: Eve chose death. She chose mortality. I never bought into any interpretation that Eve’s decision was a sin. It has always felt profound, brave, and deeply wise. I’ve always believed that her path was what I, too, wanted for myself. To experience for myself the expanse of knowing the full spectrum of a life.

As part of my graduate school research, I spent many months excavating John Milton’s Paradise Lost where I continued my curiosity of The Genesis Story that shaped my culture, and my own personal psyche. John Milton’s questions were my questions? What does it mean to know? How does one become intimate with knowing? In Paradise Lost, Adam spends much of his time visiting with and listening to angels sent from God to instruct the first humans. He righteously anticipates these angelic visits, eager to please his divine father, and to learn, to know. For a while, the couple welcomes these visitors together with a youthful eagerness. The couple is one in heart and mind. Milton describes how the first couple might have gone to bed each night, after a day of devotion to God:

“[Adam and Eve] lulled by nightingales embracing slept,
And on their naked limbs the flow’ry roof
Show’red roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.”

- Paradise Lost, Book IV, 771-775

What a lovely picture, yes? Falling asleep together lulled by nightingales in no need of a happier state, no need to know no more.

But, Eve begins to have dreams––Milton imagines that the dreams are whispered in her ear by Satan while she sleeps, but, again, I’ve never bought into any sort of “beguiled” narrative––I’ve always felt that Eve acted intuitively and bravely. So Eve begins to have dreams. She dreams about the tree. The tree of forbidden knowledge. She dreams that she and Adam eat the fruit of the tree. She tells Adam about the dream. He doesn’t like it, and tells her to forget it. She can’t. As the angels continue to visit them, Eve becomes obsessed with the meals she is making for their heavenly guests––I will haste and from each bough and brake, Each plant the juiciest gourd will pluck such choice To entertain our angel guest, as he Beholding shall confess that here on Earth God hath dispensed his bounties as in Heav’n (V, 326-330)

She wants to be in the garden. She wants to tend to the garden––to watch and observe and feel how life unfolds. For Eve, knowing no longer comes from lectures, let alone sitting alone in silence reading a text. Eve wants to know through living, through relationship with the earth. She wants to know for herself––through an intuitive presence. This desire to know the earth grows within Eve. And she chooses. She eats from tree. And she knows. Wisdom comes from within. And she makes the break with her angelic tutors. As I study this moment with Eve, I am reminded of a few lines from Wallace Steven’s poem Sunday Morning:

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in fallen snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.