The Sunday Letter #12: Finding the North Star
The Sunday Letter #12: Finding the North Star
In May of 2008, Jess and I went to Ireland. It was a congratulatory last-hurrah trip. We had both finished our dissertations and would be leaving our St. Andrews residence at the end of May—me for the stones of Edinburgh, and Jess back over the ocean to New Jersey. We were excited and sad to be leaving and worried about the future but mostly excited for it. School was done, at least for now. (Jess would go on to do a PhD—I would flirt with the idea, but ultimately decide not to pursue it.) We were ready to get on with the business of Real Life, whatever that meant.
For my part, I was sure (sure???) that a good job was in my future. I’d done everything I needed to do, after all: I’d gotten the terminal Masters degree in Creative Writing; I’d spent all that time pursuing craft and thinking about craft and writing about craft and reading all the books; I’d finished the first draft of my master’s thesis, the book that would go on to become The Miracles of Ordinary Men. I had the possibility of an agent who’d passed on my earlier work but had expressed interest in any new projects I might be working on in the future. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, finding a publisher, but I didn’t think it would be impossible. Good things come to she who works hard, right? Work hard, keep the faith. Something something. I knew that’s how it would go.
At the customs check on our way to Dublin, the border guard noticed where we were from and asked us if it was hard, traveling together. “A Canadian and an American?” he asked, grinning. “Don’t you get into arguments all of the time?”
We laughed and laughed. At that point we’d done a few trips together—tours of the Highlands, trips down to Edinburgh, to Glasgow, to London. “We don’t!” we told him, giddily. “We’ve never fought, not once!”
That weekend, we meandered around Dublin, our inner clocks perfectly aligned. We’d wake up at the same time, get hungry at the same time, be walking on the street together mid-morning and look at each other and know without saying: let’s stop for coffee. Let’s get a treat. It was the best of all possible worlds: the freedom to do exactly as you liked, as though traveling solo, but with companionship never very far away. I felt, many times, like we were one person.
Except, that is, when it came to figuring out where we were. I am not great with directions, but Jess was exponentially worse. At one point, after meandering down a dozen meandering streets, we stopped and tried to get our bearings.
“Hmm,” I said. “Which way did we come from, again?”
Jess just looked at me, shrugged, and laughed. And then laughed and laughed again.
Oh, I thought. I guess this means I have to be the navigator. And then I laughed too.
I guess this means we might be in trouble.
Polaris, the North Star, sits above the North Pole, along Earth’s rotational axis. For thousands of years, humans have used the star as a way of finding true north. Because the star is located along the rotational axis (at least for now—in a few tens of thousands of years, the position of the stars will change so that a new star takes Polaris’s spot), it doesn’t appear to rotate through the sky the way that other stars do, particularly the ones that are located farther from the axis of the planet. It’s been a way for sailors and other navigators to find their course in the dark for centuries.
Polaris is located approximately 323 light-years away from Earth. Which means that the light we see today left the star in 1700, and the sailors who were navigating the globe using Polaris in 1700 were actually seeing the star as it existed in the year 1377. And the light that leaves the star today will guide someone on the ocean three centuries from now, when all of us are long gone and forgotten.
Every time we look up at the sky, we are looking back in time.
But also, every time we look up at the sky, we are looking into the future. I can’t see that light yet, the actual light of now, but I know that it will come.
I went to a mindfulness retreat this past weekend. It was held at the European Institute of Applied Buddhism, an intentional community in the Plum Village lineage tradition located in Waldbröl, Germany. I flew to Cologne and then took a train to the northern German town of Hennef, and from there got on a bus that would take me another hour into the countryside, dropping me off steps from the door of the retreat.
Except that, in my rush to catch the right bus and make sure I paid my fare (good news: you can purchase bus tickets via an app in Germany! Bad news: it is hard to figure out exactly which app you need when you are on the go!), I got on the wrong bus. Instead of heading for Waldbröl, we went into the mountains. I sat for a while and watched our bus deviate from the route I was supposed to take (thanks for the directions and the anxiety, Google Maps), and then finally got off outside of a Lidl supermarket in the hilly town of Overath and tried to get my bearings. It was…a little intense. I went into a gas station and asked the clerk if he spoke English, which he did.
“Is there a taxi service nearby that I can call?” I asked him, and he blinked, looking confused.
“Yes of course,” he said, politely. “You can Google the services that are available nearby.”
Aha! I thought. I am officially old. No dedicated taxi phone, no business cards on the counter to hand out to flummoxed tourists. Just, you know, Google. I went back outside and stood in front of the supermarket and Googled as he’d directed, then called the first number that came up. My phone battery was at 20% and the man who answered the phone knew some English, but not very much.
Why didn’t I keep up with Duolingo, I thought. Das ist nicht gut! The sun was out, but would soon begin to sink. Once my phone died I’d be in real trouble. After a few halting minutes of conversation (“Where are you?” he asked, and I said, “I don’t really know…in Overath? I think? In front of a LIDL?”) we decided that I would email him my request and he would send a taxi to pick me up and take me all the way to Waldbröl, which was still roughly an hour or so away. Soon the time for check-in at the retreat would pass and I would officially be late.
Except that I sent the email and never got a response. I was afraid to constantly be checking my phone lest the battery disappear completely, so after a while I walked back to where the bus had dropped me off and crossed the street, then took the next bus that came all the way back to the train station. Then I transferred again, this time to the correct bus, and off I went.
It was dark by the time I arrived at the retreat, and orientation was already over. The monk who checked me in told me to go right to my room. (“It’s too late to join the evening’s activities now,” he said, and I wanted to sink through the floor. “You should just rest.”) Room 23, he said then. It’s in the next building.
There was another young monk who met me outside as I was walking to the next building. He took my bag and asked me where I was from. Have you eaten? he said. We went into the next building and found room 23, and he left me by the door and smiled.
But when I opened the door, someone’s clothes were already in there. I had asked for a single room, so perhaps there’d been a mistake. I took my suitcase and walked down the stairs and back to the other hall. The lovely monk who’d helped me with my bag had disappeared.
When I tried to ask for help with finding my room an elderly German Buddhist nun—the kind of person you might imagine had once been a schoolteacher—scolded me gently but sternly. “You can’t just walk into people’s rooms!” she said.
I know, I wanted to sob. At that point I’d been travelling for close to twelve hours. I hadn’t eaten dinner. It was hotter than I’d expected it to be and I was sweaty and anxious and keyed up about being late, about already starting this retreat off on the wrong foot, about arriving at the wrong door and asking the wrong questions and not even being able to find my own room.
The registration checklist was still on the table, even though there was no one around—I went to it and found my name. Room 32, it said. He’d read it upside down.
I went back to the hall and found the room, eventually. Dropped my things and went down the hall to the shower and stood under hot water for a good fifteen minutes, trying to breathe.
You’re here now. It’s fine. All you need to do is sleep and rest. And anyway, isn’t this a mindfulness retreat? Why bother being anxious? Go to sleep, Leduc. Everything will be fine in the morning.
Except that I couldn’t sleep. Instead I tossed and turned on my little mattress for most of the night. When I dreamed, I dreamed that I’d brought Sitka to the retreat, despite the instructions very clearly saying no pets, and woke up even more anxioius than I’d felt before going to bed.
In the immediate days after Jess died, her brother and sister both joked about her less-than-stellar sense of direction. I hadn’t known it at the time that we were traveling, but Jess was also notorious in her family for having no sense of direction at all—and having a good sense of humour about it nonetheless.
“I am an excellent navigator!” she would often say merrily to her family, finger in the air, pointing in what was clearly the wrong direction. The consensus crossed family and friends—if you wanted to know where to go in life, Jess was not the person to ask.
And yet, if you actually wanted to know where to go in life, Jess was the first person you wanted to go to. Her faith in the world and in the people around her was unshakeable. She had such conviction—not always about exactly where to go, but always about where to be. She knew that the path you were on would teach you things the same way that she’d known, all those years ago, that the meandering steps we took in Dublin would lead us to delightful adventures even if we had no idea where we were going.
When I was with her I felt invincible, like a superhero. As though everything in the world would be okay as long as we were together. Getting lost? Didn’t matter. Not knowing what to do? Didn’t matter. Being in the moment and having adventures big and small with those you loved was what mattered. That was all.
Despite this, in the years that came after our time in Scotland, we both struggled—me with depression, Jess with falling in love and finding a life with someone else and then, eventually, with her illness. Finding our respective places in the world was such hard and lonely work except when we were together. When we were together things felt perfect. Like everything was exactly where it was supposed to be even if you didn’t like where things were. Like even getting lost wasn’t a big deal, because at least you had each other to steer by.
On Friday morning, I woke up at 6 and headed in for meditation at 6:30am. The meditation hall was warm and hushed and beautiful, the smell of beeswax strong in the air. We slipped our shoes off outside of the hall and went for the meditation cushions in silence. And even though I was exhausted, as we sat and breathed together I felt something shift—the anxiety, lessening just a little, a fist slowly easing its grip. I felt even better after breakfast (amazing, isn’t it, what food can do), and when the time came for working meditation and the monk leading our group took us out to work in the garden I felt myself sinking into it, the delight that comes when you realize you’re exactly where you need to be.
Our task was to weed the path, and weed I did. It was so wonderful it almost felt like a trance. I could have been there in the garden all day. (My knees, however, were happy when the hour was up.) And then, while weeding, I came across this.
I’d never seen red clover in the wild before. I hadn’t realized red clover was even a real thing. But last summer I asked Jess for a red clover as one of the many signs we share, in this new life where I am here and she is wherever-she-is. She delivered last year, and now she has delivered again (even if the clover above has only three leaves, and not four!).
The next day, during a dharma sharing circle, the monk leading our group spoke of how Buddhism has been, “The North Star that I can see by, the compass that guides me forward through the dark.” And I felt it again, that little ping of recognition.
Last week I spoke of touchstones, the little moments when we recognize something from our past and see it/them in a whole new light. Sometimes I think there are touchstones that point us toward the future, too. My dearest friend, who was so terrible with directions and whom I miss so wholly some days it feels like there’s a black hole beneath my ribs, was always that for me. My compass, my north star, my navigator. I miss her so fiercely some days it’s like trying to find my way through the dark without stars.
Yet somehow, always, she finds me.
This way, she says. Meander this way.
What can I do except listen?
It fascinates me, this act of navigating by stars. Because to navigate by stars is literally to navigate by light that no longer exists—at least not in the way that it existed at its beginning, however many hundreds of years ago. We navigate by the North Star as it looked three hundred years ago. We see into our future using light that illuminated the past. How many comets and specks of cosmic dust and possible worlds and perhaps even other possible beings in this universe did that light illuminate on its way to us? It’s the kind of thinking that makes my mind go quiet. I have not always liked feeling my mind go quiet like this, have struggled with feeling insufficient and small and you-with-your-tiny-insignificant-brain about it all.
But in these years after Jess, these years of grief, there’s been no choice sometimes but to huddle in the smallness of it all. Nothing to do except sink into the shame/frustration/anxiety of it, in the same way that sometimes there’s nothing to do except sink into the shame/frustration/anxiety of, say, arriving at a retreat much later than you’d planned to. Nothing to do but sink into and accept that things have not gone to plan. The retreat you’d envisioned is not going to happen. The life you’d envisioned is not going to happen. You don’t get to navigate the world with your favourite person at your side anymore.
Acceptance is a small, quiet room, Cheryl Strayed says. And she’s right.
The thing is: the universe outside of the acceptance room isn’t small at all. And I think—in some other strange, hard-to-fathom, here-you-are-with-your-tiny-Amanda-brain-again way—I only really began to understand this when I gave myself to that small and quiet room. Yes, grief is small (enormous) and quiet (impossibly loud) and hard (but also so soft, so porous, that it bleeds into every element of your life).
But the universe outside—and inside of—that small and quiet room contains multitudes. The light that reaches us today from Polaris is not coming from the same star that sent it out 323 years ago, and yet it illuminates our way nonetheless. It is the same, but different. In the same—and yet different—way that Jess continues to light my path forward. It is not the path I envisioned when we were in Ireland together. It is not the North Star of 323—or even fifteen!—years ago.
But it—she!—is still lighting the way.
Needless to say, the rest of the retreat was wonderful. I did not sleep as much as I might have liked (the monastic life is not for me as I like my sturdy mattresses too much) and I definitely went for the sweetest, choclatiest pastry I could find when I made my way to Cologne on Sunday. It’s nice to be back in the world. But it was even nicer to have those few days of time in a a different kind of small and quiet room. A few moments of slowing down even further so that the universe and Jess could reach forward from the past (and the future!) and ping me with signs and reminders that the path, even when it is difficult, is always the right place to be.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance
— from “The Weighing”, by Jane Hirschfield
It’s taken two months, but I finally feel like I’m ready to start working again. Maybe I was more burned out than I thought. It feels lovely to have this happening just as the cold weather seems to be settling in. Yay for the rain and drizzle and this beautiful, warm little apartment. Yay for days ahead spent warm and writing and for the adventures still to come—Edinburgh this weekend! Wales the next! The Hebrides and Isle of Skye later in October! And in November, a flight home and months ahead in another warm apartment, writing and dreaming ordinary things. An adventure that Jess would have loved.
I hope, wherever this finds you, that adventures of your own await, and that a compass of your own shines brightly in the sky above, pulling you forward.
Currently Reading: “The World After Rain” (three cheers, Canisia Lubrin!)
Currently Watching: Star Trek Lower Decks, Season 4
Currently Eating: shortbread. I mean, what else?
This is such a wonderful piece of writing. You so beautifully conveyed the way it feels to simultaneously long for someone who has passed even while knowing they’re right there with you, guiding you--from the past and from “out there” but also, somehow, inexplicably, “in here.” To have that feeling articulated and mirrored back is a gift. Thank you. ❤️