Bennett's Entries
Insights from my one of mother's journals, filled with art and poetry, quotes and entries about her life back in 2006.
June 30, 2006
“I believe that everything happens for a reason. I do not mean this in a reasonable way. I believe in God but only in One I can not fathom. That everything happens for a reason does not mean it feels okay for me to twiddle my thumbs while other people suffer. If there’s such a thing as what is frequently referred to in the U.S. as ‘God’s Will’ then I suppose myself a part of that, for good or not.
I think this is all a dream and is absolutely real at the same time. The fathomlessness of God has to do with our own being trapped (perhaps that is too negative a word?) in time.
I love the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer and Vipassana meditation. I do not believe I need to be perfect. I believe this ‘un-ease’ I chronically experience is part of the natural human experience. I suspect at times that I (me with my name, body, etc.) am given exactly what I want over and over though at times this does not feel so. (I don’t mean ‘want’ in the usual sense).
I believe the silent blank space around poems holds all the secrets. I believe we are galaxies walking around smiling at one another or doing terrible things to one another.
I believe most of us rarely if ever get past the first experience of Identity we notice as children. The ‘this is I.’ The ‘Here I am.’
I believe I am the mother of the right children, married to the right man, daughter of the right parents, sister and friend to the right people.
We live in the places we live for some essential reason that is worthwhile even if I don’t understand in what way. I believe in more than psychology. I do believe in healing.”
I’m back in Bangkok now and reunited with some of my mother’s journals. Her reflections and poetry remind me not only of who she was, but who I am. Why I am the woman that I am today. I thought I’d share snippets of her entries, some quotes that inspired her, and one of her unedited poems.
June 2006 Poem
Each morning I pick up last night’s moon
Sometimes a sphere sometimes a
Small shimmering slice
(and sit it on my desk)
And touch it until it laughs.
If in the house it is cold
I cover it
if warm I open the screened window
Until it dissipates in daylight.
When it is cold and covered in cloth
Its shape remains apparent
breathing and sleeping is it
dreaming of a resolution
In any case it lasts all
Day this luminous invisible ghost.
Her looping handwriting tells stories and excerpts from whichever book her nose was buried in at the time. She drew, collaged, and split her pages with color. This was the summer before her messy divorce, before an era of great hardship. But there was trouble, always. She wrote about the psychiatric evaluation she had to take my then-ten-year-old brother, Quentin, to receive. For any parent of a disabled child, it rings resonant.
I don’t need to tell you about her creativity or the depth of her faith. She can express it in better words than I ever can. The tone of her writing is so honest; so hopeful, yet now and again very demoralized (“crawl under a rock” was on her to-do list, one day). Still, as of yet, it isn’t despairing. It will be. Hopelessness occupies a large part of her story, and eventually brings the story entirely to a close.
But the mother I was raised by and the woman that people recall Bennett to be wasn’t a hopeless creature. She was this writer: A woman filled with profundity and creative vision, a fearless pioneer of her inner world. Quick to question her own thought patterns and belief systems, deliberate in her acts of tolerance and wide love.
I’m grateful to have these writings, and they inspire my own. My journals are less colorful, but quickly amassing. One day I will need a personal library for all of these tomes. I have a long-held vision of a writers’ hut, a room with one door and one window looking out into the woods, with nothing but a desk, bookshelves, and perhaps a woodstove. Our collective journals could occupy the entire space.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that my mother loved and quoted extensively while reading it.
“I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that, too. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is the truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.”
—Marilynne Robinson
