Kathleen Hirsch - A Sabbath Life: One Womans Search for Wholeness

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ALSO BY KATHLEEN HIRSCH

A Home in the Heart of the City

Songs from the Alley

To Elisabeth Dyssegaard

There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later, everything points towards the center.

C ARL J UNG

I dont believe in aging. I believe in forever altering ones aspect to the sun.

V IRGINIA W OOLF

I am sitting in a room high above a city of hills. The light is turquoise and white, brilliant turquoise from the sea, brilliant white from the sun glancing off stucco compounds that form a continuous epic of habitation as they descend to the place where they began centuries ago, by the boats where boys still dive for the days food.

I am waiting. I am waiting without impatience or urgency. I look out on the hills in the distance and at the azure sea below through the open arches that form three walls of my room. Above my head is the same unimpeded openness, the endless turquoise sky.

This room is my private chamber, and I dwell in it by virtue of a lifetimes devotion to the sacred mysteries. My collection of seashells sits alongside my pens and paper and my wisdom texts. A carved chest at the foot of my bed holds my needlework. My needs are thus more or less completely satisfied.

The simplicity and sensuality of the room mark it as a distinctly womanly place. Indeed, the atmosphere of the dream, with its scent of incense and salt water, my white and azure robe, the lapis and opals that I wear in my ears, all seem to suggest that in this room I sustain the deep truths of the feminine.

One detail in particular seems to affirm this. It is the bed. The bed is the most beautiful object in the room. It is draped with a coverlet into which has been stitched a kind of compendium. In vivid threads and entwining vines, creatures of the sea and air and land depict the tale of Eden.

It is more than an ornament, this spread. It suggests itself as a text, a statement about the relation of the woman to the rest of creation, which one might learn to read, if given the time and the proper keys. As indeed I, the dreamer, must learn if I am ever to become the dreamed.

The I of the dream is a different matter altogether. Not only is she at ease among her books and the objects and creatures that are her companions. It was she who created them, she who stitched them. She is at once familiar and Delphic, at home with the earthbound lessons of Eden, with the timeless mysteries of Greece, Byzantium, and Jerusalem. She might be in Turkey or in India, in the East or the West. In my dream, they are one and the same. She transcends time and geography.

As I said, she is waiting. She is waiting for the arrival of a lover, or to stitch, or to read a page from the book of wisdom. All of these, the detachment and engagement, the passion and the poem, the flesh and the page, are one and the same.

* * *

AT THE START of this story I am standing in a field of something that I cant name, taking in the heady scent of it. I do not have the names for any of the multitude of things that grow or fly or flower in front of me. Not the fruit trees, not the flowers, not the birds.

For twenty years I have occupied the same room of life that I have called my career. I have worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, on weekends as well. What I have achievedmy relevance, my currency, my visibilityhas constituted my sense of who I am.

I am childless. My relations with my family and friends are minimal, defended, graciously superficial. My marriage is settled. My home with its collection of handmade pots and art books, spare. I attend symphony, see the seasons major art exhibits, and spend long country weekends with friends who do the same.

I do not know the names of the wisdom books that I would gather around me because, though once a student of poetry, philosophy, and art, I have become a purveyor of facts. I would need a lover of the stature of my dream to stir in me the deep ecstasy that flitted briefly through midnight. I am no longer sure of the names of my feelings, or the currents of my desires.

As I stand and gaze at all of which I am so appallingly ignorant in the natural world, in the geography of my dream life, in the indistinct reach of my desires, tears come to my eyes and I hear the words of my beloved Proust:

We must rediscover that reality from which we become separated as the formal knowledge we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousnessthat reality which there is grave danger we may die without having known, and which is simply our life.

It has not yet occurred to me that there might be another woman, or several, inside of me. I wouldnt know what to do with such information. I have been trained to believe in the achieving self as the ultimate goal and justification of life.

A graduate of a Seven Sisters college, with an advanced degree from an Ivy League university, I believe that women ought to assert themselves in a manner similar to that which for generations had been sanctioned by and for men.

Specifically, I accept that this self-expression is to be accomplished according to the same norms of success, the same terms of performance, the same operative structures, as mens.

* * *

AT TIMES , it has been exhilarating.

It has greatly simplified the substrate of warring motives and unwanted ambivalences that has occasionally appeared.

Over the years it has grown easier and easier to accept the lost parts of the Self as the inevitable cost of maturation and success

* * *

THE WOMAN of my dream caught up with me. In a rare moment of vulnerability she of the lost wisdom, buried for years in the detritus of ambition and distraction, confronted me with my own inner fragmentation. She demanded to know why it was necessary to surrender parts of myself in order to be successful.

I began to wonder if achievement could take a form uniquely my own as a woman, and whether my mature vision of what matters in life, and the means of best going about what matters, might quite naturally and inevitably part company with mens; indeed whether it might not contribute something of unique and irreplaceable value to the culture in which I live.

This is the story of a journey of awakening. My intention is to share my efforts to achieve in my middle years a wholeness that I did not know (and didnt care to find) as a younger woman. Simply by listening to my inner soundings, and to the many inspiring women whom I have met over the past few years, I have learned what it means to genuinely honor the Self. Today I live a life not as the culture would have me live it, but as I understand its underlying purposes from within.

Success is a manifold and changing thing. When women embrace their own ways of seeing and attempting to influence the realities around them, their norms of what is sacred, and their seasons, they create lives that are varied, abundant, fruitful, and, at days end, rich in wisdom and peace. Sabbath lives. In honoring what makes us women, we transform the world around us.