Remembering and Forgetting
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My small suburban town in central Ohio was recently blanketed by a heavy snowstorm. There was already snow on the ground, and we were in the band of mixed weather that resulted in a thick crust of ice sandwiched between the snow that had already fallen and the snow that came after. It was impossible to shovel, a nightmare to plow, and so we were stuck in a world of white for quite a while. It was beautiful but exhausting. I got to the point where I was so tired of the blanket hung up in the doorway of our drafty door, of having to struggle to put on boots and coats and gloves and mask to go anywhere. And I’ve finally reached the point in winter where I feel a deep-down ache in my soul for the warmth of green. I miss green. Verdant, glowing green. The green of unfurling tiny leaves, of curled up baby fiddlehead ferns, of grass that grows so fast you have to mow it twice a week. The thing is, I knew I would reach this point in winter, because I always do. Last summer, I made a video of my garden in early June, ostensibly to share its foliage and growth with my blog readers and YouTube followers. But in the back of my mind, I was mostly recording it for myself. Right now. At the point in winter when I knew I would need a reminder that the green would return.
But this isn’t a blog about snow, or about gardens. It’s about forgetting. The reason why I feel so sapped around this time every year is because I’ve forgotten what it’s like to experience the green, to be immersed in and surrounded by it every day. To take it for granted to such an extent that my first thought looking out the window every morning isn’t “wow, look at all the green vivid growing life around me!” but “I wonder what the weather will be” or “do we need to put the bin out today?”
It’s remarkable, this human capacity to forget so easily. I’ve never had a very good memory, and it has more than once frightened or embarrassed me when I couldn’t remember someone who insisted they knew me from years ago, or even the name of a high school teacher. I also am sometimes reminded by Facebook memories that my life runs in an annual pattern. I’ll start thinking “you know, it seems like time to take down the winter decorations and put up spring” and that same day I’ll see in my memories that I was doing the same thing last year, three years ago. We live in a constant state of now, of this moment, largely forgetting all previous ones.
Even when I have a wonderful day, or experience a remarkable moment, the details slip away. I will be standing on a beach with the wind in my hair, the surf pounding, the nearby stream babbling happily, and I will tell myself “remember this moment, every detail of it. Remember how you felt, remember the smells, sights, sounds, everything.” And it helps, it does, to focus on intending to remember. But the details still slip away. It’s just part of being human it seems.
Magic is even more slippery. Folklore tells us that humans often forget magical encounters shockingly quickly after they happen. In one of my favorite stories of his, “Ghosts of Wind and Shadow,” author Charles de Lint talks about this forgetting. “We [faeries] do have a certain…aura, which accelerates the process. It’s not even something we consciously work at. It just seems to happen when we are around those who would rather not remember what they see.” Another quote in the same story says “She’s like most people; if it doesn’t make sense, she’d rather convince herself that it simply never happened.” Children sometimes remember, but as they grow older they allow adults who have forgotten their own magic to convince them that their experiences were just their “wonderful childish imagination.”
Unless I’ve forgotten completely, I’ve never seen a faerie before. At least not with utter clarity and at the center of my vision. But I have seen flashes and flutters at the corners of my sight. I’ve seen shimmers in the forest. And I could have immediately followed these sightings with the thought “oh, it must be a mote of dust, or a seed on the wind.” This is not quite the same as losing a memory, but it is a different sort of forgetting: the rationalization of adulthood, instead of the childlike openness to possibility. I choose to try to foster the latter, and I will often respond to my instinct to say “it’s probably a speck of dust or a seed” with “ah, but it also could have been a faerie, and isn’t that wonderful?”
There is no miraculous solution to this human condition of forgetting. It’s how life is, how our minds work. We will always forget little and big things about the past, even important details. Today Facebook memories showed me an old video of my dearest beloved cat, Corvin, who passed away three and a half years ago and was (and is) my life’s most precious and very important fur-being. As I watched the video, I realized that I had forgotten how his tail would wag slowly and lazily when he was happy, instead of indicating annoyance as is the case with most felines. Our minds are such strange things that file some details away in locked vaults that will occasionally be opened at the strangest moment or trigger: a smell, a sound, some little reminder.
So what do we do? How can we try to open ourselves more to Faerie, to magic, to remembering? I’m honestly not sure what the answer is, but here is what I do, and I’ve basically already told you. I try my best to practice mindfulness whenever I can, so that I hone that ability. It definitely takes practice and I’m still a novice at it and often forget (eh, see?) to keep myself mindful. But then, when I have moments of splendid magic or wonder, I try to take a moment to be mindful: I make myself aware of all that I’m experiencing sensually in that moment. What do I feel, hear, smell, see?
Even if the moment itself has passed, like a deer bolting away in the forest, or a feathered faerie wing moving on in the wind, I may still pull out my phone and take a photograph of where I am. I keep those photos in a place I’ll see often and be reminded that magic is real. Those little reminders help me take the next step: to keep myself open to the possibilities. Charles de Lint says, in the same story, “That’s the thing with magic. You’ve got to know it’s still here, all around us, or it still stays invisible to you.”
Open yourself to this possibility, and more experiences will happen to you. And the more magical experiences you have, the more likely you will be to remember at least some of them. We can never keep ourselves from forgetting things sometimes. The mind is a mystery and magic is slippery. But we can fill our lives with more magic, and hope that some of it sticks with us. And who doesn’t want more of that?
