‘Where Past and Future Gather’
Matthew McCain is an author and fine artist with 3 of his novels reaching the top #10 on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. His fine art paintings can be found all around the world from London to Las Vegas with Bar Rescue’s Jon Tafer and Alice Cooper’s Teen Youth Rock Center in Phoenix, Arizona. McCain has developed a style he calls “extreme contrary”, which is meant to generate hidden meanings behind his pieces along with the titles.
Where Past and Future Gather
Ghosts walk this land with me. My ghosts are not spectres nor apparitions, but tender confluences of memories and gratitude for loved ones I have lost. Through Stillpoint’s tranquil meadows and untamed forest, they accompany me, their absence a gentle yet profound presence that has taken on their shape, and I feel them with me.
My ghosts are intertwined with the birdsong of this land, with the soft ripple that stirs inside me when I hear it. They are present in the supple motion of tall grasses swaying with the breeze, and in the majestic spruce and fir, the sturdy ponderosa, all reminding me of the strength and courage I witnessed when they encountered challenges in their lives. All I’ve learned from them continues to live in me. My sister Susan most of all, and especially at Stillpoint.
Susan brought Stillpoint into my life, and it was with her that I first experienced it, almost four decades ago. Until a few months earlier, it had been a Taoist hermitage, complete with a small intentional community, founded by the late Gia-fu Feng. From Shanghai, Gia-fu had come to this country for an advanced degree in the late 1940s. Over time and many adventures, including connecting with the Beat poets and Alan Watts, he ended up in Colorado, where he and two of his students bought this land, one hundred sixty-six acres in south-central Colorado’s Wet Mountains. A self-described Taoist rogue and oft-described sage, Gia-fu had been teacher, philosopher, tai-chi master, Gestalt therapist, and translator of Chinese classics, most notably Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. I knew that book long before I knew of the man, because Susan had given it to me when it was first published in 1972, more than a decade before she met him herself.
I remember when my sister told me about that meeting. Her blue eyes sparkled as she described how she and a mutual friend from the California Institute for Asian Studies had stopped by Stillpoint while on a road trip. Gia-fu, delighted by the visit, greeted the friend with an embrace and took Susan by the hand to show her around the place. She marveled at their instant connection and how, with her background in Asian Studies, they had talked about Chinese literature and philosophy for hours.
I knew that Indian philosophy and religion claimed first place in Susan’s heart. I recalled her telling me she’d titled her master’s thesis An Inquiry into the Nature of Knowledge in the Kenopanisad, then following that up by saying, “I’ve almost finished the Sanskrit part.” Of course, I thought at the time. My sister is writing her thesis partly in Sanskrit and about something I’ve never heard of. On that first visit, talking with Gia-fu, who was well versed in the Chinese classics, had enchanted her.
On her second visit to Stillpoint, Gia-fu surprised Susan by asking her to be Stillpoint’s attorney, which she agreed to be. While some may have thought her decision impulsive, I understood right away the satisfying connection between my sister’s two passions—law, through which justice could be served, and Asian literature, history and philosophy, which fed her soul.
Gia-fu died only a few years after they met and, much to Susan’s surprise, left his share of the land in her hands. She had been close to him, but she hadn’t expected an inheritance, one which also included the copyrights for his translations published through Random House. Looking back, I believe he chose my sister because she was not part of the community and could be neutral. She loved the land and knew him well. She also knew how to navigate the legal system. And, despite her slender frame and delicate features, she could be tough as proverbial nails when pursuing what she thought was humane and just.
Susan felt a deep responsibility for Stillpoint and what would become of it, and she worried about the possibility of the other two owners’ wanting to sell to someone who would develop that land. I worried with her and offered what support I could by listening and helping explore possible options. Her fears were not unfounded, and what would transpire over the next few years would test her resolve in multiple ways. Ultimately, through a lawsuit, trial, and public auction, together she and I would buy out the other owners. And several years after that, the land would be placed in a conservation easement, to remain undeveloped in perpetuity.
All those decades ago, Susan wanted to introduce me to Stillpoint, for me to experience its varied beauty—the wild forest, burbling creek and tranquil meadows. On my first of what would become many two-hour drives to the southwest from Denver, I turned off the highway onto County Road 387 and watched for the landmarks Susan had given me. When I saw the old barn up on the hill pop into view, my heart began to beat a little faster and a surge of joy rose in me as I headed down the long dirt drive she had described. And there she was, my sister, so often serene and thoughtful, now waving and jumping up and down, her long, dark hair rippling with her movement.
I parked the car and opened the door to hear her say, “Welcome, little sister!” We hugged and laughed, partly at her usual greeting because, though she was five years younger, she was two inches taller. And I had always thought she was by far the wiser. Some called her an old soul.
For the rest of that late summer day, Susan and I roamed the land as she told me about it. She said that, to some, the still point means settled heart. Others think it the point between the in breath and the outbreath. I offered T.S. Eliot’s words for, after all, my undergraduate degree was in English literature. “At the still point of the turning world,” I quoted, “there the dance is . . . where past and future are gathered.”
And Susan, still full of surprises, quoted back, “Except for the point, the still point,/There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
As she led me into the barn, we bantered back and forth, Susan with some lines from Aurobindo, whom she revered and I never quite understood, Lao Tsu, Willa Cather and others she knew from her insatiable reading appetite. Then, her voice softer, she said, “This was where morning meditation, tea, and community forums were held. And it’s the library. Gia-fu was a reader.” Smiling, she added, “Kind of like us, though our magazine of choice is Saturday Review, he liked Time. He never missed an issue.” Stretching her arms wide, she said, ‘All of these books are ones that he and others in the community valued and wanted to share.”
In the scent of weathered wood and the well-kept bookshelves still brimming with tomes of all kinds, I could sense memories. Running my fingers across hard and soft-bound volumes of history, philosophy, comparative religion, economics, farming, fiction, poetry and more, I wanted to absorb a touch of the wisdom they held. In that loft, I thought that, if peace and contentment were a wooden structure, I was standing in it and, best of all, with my sister.
Susan wanted me to meet Tomi, who had been part of the now dispersed community, so we dragged ourselves away from the barn and made a brief stop at her cabin. At Susan’s request, while she tended to her law practice in Gallup, New Mexico, Tomi had stayed to keep an eye on the place and feed the goats. I think now of that meeting with tenderness, for Tomi and I would become friends, staying in touch until her death some twenty years later.
Strolling down the path that led into the forest, we paused at Gia-fu’s grave, which lay down the hill from his eccentric hermitage. A small wood building fashioned somewhat in the style of classic Chinese hermitages, this one had ample windows from which to gaze north at Pike’s Peak and its surrounding mountains rising from the plains. To the east a large, terraced meadow reminisced its bygone days of dry-land farming. Stately ponderosas cradled the south and west sides. I remember vividly how the scene transported me to another place, another time, yet struck a familiar chord within me, one that I wanted to hold on to but knew it would be like grasping the air.
White quartz rocks and crystals covered the grave, which was marked by a small headstone bearing these words from the ancient Chinese classic, Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters:
When the master came, it was at the right time.
When he went away, it was the simple sequence of his coming.
Standing there beside his grave, reading those words and listening to chimes a soft breeze was coaxing from bells tied to a nearby tree, I felt a heightened sense of Gia-fu as an actual person, not just some abstract personality I’d heard about from my sister. And I longed to know more. Who was this person, so different from anyone I knew? So different that I didn’t even know the questions to ask. I couldn’t have known at the time that questions would come, that, along with much more, I would learn that Gia-fu would be the first to protest the term “master,” that he considered himself a teacher, just like everyone else for, in his eyes, we all have something to learn from one another. As an educator who had learned a great deal from students, I would resonate to that notion. But at that time, I had no idea that all the beauty and mystery would become an inextricable part of my life going forward.
For the next few hours, Susan and I scrambled up and down mountainsides, crisscrossed Middle Hardscrabble Creek, tromped through parts of San Isabel National Forest as she showed me many of the approximately twenty little huts Stillpointers had built over the seven years they had been there. Each hut seemed to hold memories, of the builder, the times, and now their absences, already so evident in the huts’ various states of neglect. I could sense imagination and resourcefulness at work in those small structures, and I thought I could conjure each builder’s search for possibility, for hope, and peace. Those huts and the land called to me, too. I heard their calls in the silence, smelled them in the scent of pine and spruce. I felt my ribcage expand, my breathing slow. Time melted away.
Over the next few years, Susan and I had occasion to scramble, crisscross and tromp on that land many times. We also had forays beyond Stillpoint, especially to Singing Acres Ranch, ten miles up and over Hardscrabble Pass, to talk and laugh with Clara.
Clara was the local person everyone turned to when in distress, as Susan had done when a horse she’d acquired became ill. Neighboring ranchers had referred her to Clara, whose equine knowledge and deep wisdom were legendary. Following up on their referral, Susan never guessed that the meeting would produce a close and abiding friendship. Before long, Clara, knowing that Susan was temporarily living in a cabin at Stillpoint that had no electricity, designated a bedroom in her hundred-year-old log ranch home for Susan’s use during extremely cold nights and any other time she wished. I can still picture the two of them warming themselves by the fire in the big rock fireplace and deepening their friendship as they talked horses, books and legal matters far into the night. Clara’s was a friendship I would also come to share in time, a legacy I cherish.
At Stillpoint, Susan and I continued our adventures. One moonless night we went for a stroll, and I pulled a flashlight from my pocket to better see the way. But as soon as I clicked it on, Susan said, “Turn that light off! You’re ruining our night vision!” I obeyed, learning from her yet again, and allowed my eyes to adjust to the dark as we ambled along.
With Susan, I learned to dance with the land, for the dance was there. In the spring mud season, we laughed at how much taller we became after our outings through the mud that caked our boots. Summer’s heat would find us soaking in the small pools of Middle Hardscrabble Creek, and winter making snow angels in the bountiful fluffy drifts. Sometimes on our rambles, we startled and were startled by turkey hidden by the gamble oak, or deer grazing in the lower meadows. And we would often puzzle over scat left by elk, coyote, or bear. So quiet was it that we often heard the flutter of wings as swallows, hawks or Steller’s jays flapped and soared far above us. On that land, we laughed, cried, philosophized and ranted about the state of the world and life’s vicissitudes. And we hypothesized about the future, oblivious to what it would bring, and how suddenly it would bring it.
The future came a brief six years after our first experience of Stillpoint together. Susan died of complications from stomach cancer, a mere ten days after it had been diagnosed. Out of the blue, incomprehensible, and devastating. I was incredulous that the person I loved most in the world was no longer in it, that the world could go on as usual, when now nothing about it was usual.
I moved through the days by instinct, feeling as though I were trying to swim through a vat of molasses. Everything took enormous effort. At that time, I had experienced many losses, our father, my first husband, and treasured friends, all whom I grieved. But Susan’s loss completely flattened me and made despair my constant companion. These decades later, I realize that, against the force of accumulated loss, I could no longer hold soul-shattering grief at bay. Her towering loss evoked all the others and, for a long, long time, grief seemed to permeate every aspect of my being.
In our shared sorrow, my mother, brother and I held a memorial service for Susan. We intended that, as she had requested in her will, her ashes would be spread on a sunny hillside, and we knew that sunny hillside had to be at Stillpoint.
Under a brilliant blue May sky, family, friends, tribal representatives and neighboring ranchers gathered in that terraced upper meadow. Looking back, I think of the people present as a living obituary, reflecting many of the facets of Susan’s life. Some had known her through her legal work in tribal courts with the Zuni and Navajo Nations and Lakota People; in federal court on water rights or civil rights; or in her early days as a U.S. Army captain in the adjutant general’s office litigating rape and domestic abuse cases. Susan’s reach had been long and deep, and many who knew her became devoted friends, a devotion she returned.
The birdsong filling that blue sky seemed out of tune with the heaviness of the day as I trudged up the path I had walked with my sister so many times, this time carrying the small wooden box that held her ashes. My body felt wooden, too, and my mouth dry as dust. I didn’t know how I could let the remnants of my sister go. But dear Clara put her arm around me and said, “Let me do this. It isn’t easy. You may not know there probably are bits of bone left in the ashes.”
There in that meadow, I handed the precious box to Clara and stood back, dazed and aching, to watch as she crossed the green expanse with purpose and reverence, dipping her hand again and again into the box, releasing its contents, my sister, to the light breeze. The others stood watching with me, all of us remembering Susan, such a wise and lovely being, whom I had so loved. As her ashes drifted across the grasses and early flowers, I simply could not take in how such a vital part of me could not be standing beside me in that meadow, a place I’d never been without her.
For months, I felt like a breathing container for loss. And yet I felt another loss looming—Stillpoint itself. I couldn’t see how I could possibly keep it, how I could afford it, afford to take care of it. At that time, along with my usual expenses, I was supporting my mother and paying the mortgage Susan and I held on Stillpoint. The only way to proceed, I thought, was to sell it to the friend of Susan’s who wanted to create her own center there, reasoning at least it would be in good hands. I agreed to sell, but deep down something niggled at that practical solution. I often talked with Clara about it, and she listened with a friend’s ear, with her whole being, asking an occasional question, knowing I had to find my own way.
It was some weeks after the memorial service, while back in that terraced meadow, I realized that, regardless of financial problems, I could not sell. To do so felt as though I would be selling a part of Susan, and a part of myself. With that realization, my normal breath returned, my muscles relaxed and my heart opened fully to the place that had become embedded in me, that I did not have to say goodbye to. To make keeping Stillpoint possible, in addition to my work directing a nonprofit, I began consulting through the national school-university network of which the nonprofit was a part, as well as taking on visiting professor stints at the local university. In time, the financial issues lessened.
Through those difficult years and beyond, my friendship with Clara continued to deepen. She and I occasionally rode her Appaloosas through the mountains and valleys of Singing Acres Ranch, where we also had more than one adventure on her four-wheeler. And, of course, we roamed at Stillpoint. Once on our rambles, Clara told me about the single time she’d encountered Gia-fu, and how she hadn’t liked him—until much later when she learned more about his life from my investigations. She called Stillpoint’s smaller structures “shitty little huts,” and I enjoyed threatening to deed one to her.
From her, I learned about horses and people and often consulted her on problems at Stillpoint—the well when it went dry, mistletoe weakening the trees, the skunk living under the mudroom. Though I can’t put my finger on a particular moment or event, I know how much I learned from the steadiness of her friendship, suffused by her deep well of wisdom. That wisdom was hard-fought, gained through forging ahead through great obstacles. As one of the first women ranchers in the Wet Mountain Valley, she was told over and over that she would never make it. Cultural norms were not on her side, but Clara did make it, and she helped many people along the way, including Susan. And me, as well.
When, a few years ago, she got the COPD diagnosis, I was alarmed, but Clara, in her inimitable way, took it in stride. After all, she told me, she’d suffered through fractures, concussions, and any number of torn muscles when breaking horses, baling hay, building fences or doing other work on the ranch. I tried to take it in stride, too, but over the next few years, on each visit I could see further decline in her. And then, only months ago, the call I’d dreaded came. Clara was gone, slipping away in her sleep, in her gentle decisive way.
Death has a way of diminishing one’s self-confidence. I know it did mine. Death reminds us that, ultimately, we are not in control, not even when we can’t imagine going on without someone we love. And we don’t, at least not as the same person. Looking back, I think Stillpoint and Clara were instrumental in helping me reconstitute myself, not as the same person, but a stronger one, one who, in order to survive had to go beyond who I was then, and at the same time allow grief to have its say. Stillpoint required attention, and it gave solace. Clara believed in me and her friendship buoyed me. And now she, too, as one of my ghosts, walks beside me at Stillpoint.
I think of them all and of how they continue to help shape me through memories that hold the past and also encourage me to keep my heart open to the present and for the future. Their essences speak to me through Stillpoint’s enduring and often enigmatic beauty, as when storm clouds roll in across the ancient Wet Mountains, or the stars sparkle and beckon on a clear night, so close and profuse that I can almost touch them. Hummingbirds circling wildflowers, wind sighing through the forest, deer running through the meadows, these are the eternal messages of the land that speak to me of love, and of loss.
As does a singular experience late one evening not so very long ago. To the northwest, thunderheads and stinging rain filled a black sky, while opposite, in the southeast, the full moon, low on the horizon, shone brilliantly. The moon’s bright light refracted in the raindrops to create a faint bluish, greenish, and pinkish bow, and then a more brilliant bow that shone directly beneath it, as if it were a rainbow reflected in a silver bowl. A double moonbow.
The brighter bow formed a perfect arc, with one end resting in a neighboring field and the other near Gia-fu’s grave, close to where Clara had spread Susan’s ashes some three decades earlier. For almost forty-five minutes the double moonbow glowed and then very slowly began to fade, gradually giving way to the moon’s steadily growing dominance in the changing night sky.
Throughout the entire spectacle and then its fading, I felt my ghosts near me, there, at the still point of the turning world, where past and future gather.
*COPD - Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Carol Ann Wilson’s work with public schools and higher education institutions focused on issues of democracy and social justice, as did her writing. When she turned to creative nonfiction, her first book, Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng, won Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Award. Another biography, Because We Wanted To! was a finalist for the same award. Carol’s essays have appeared in Under the Gum Tree, The Write Launch, bookscover2cover, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Unlimited Literature, and the Awakenings Review. Her essay “House of Mirrors” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Carol lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado. For more information, please see https://carolannwilson.info
