by Sukey Forbes
I tried sitting meditations and I struggled with staying focused, but the flowing movement of yoga seemed to allow my mind to free itself. So I made it a daily practice, and I planned my days around my sessions on the mat. The children were in school during the week, but weekends were more challenging. On weekends I alternated between missing yoga and feeling resentful, and going to yoga and feeling as if I were neglecting my family. But I was noticeably more calm and at peace when I made it to class.
• • •
That fall I was out hiking in Arizona with a group of girlfriends. By this time I was no longer being preintroduced with the hushed “You know she lost a child . . .” I no longer felt I had to share the information in the first sentence of discussion with acquaintances. On this trip we were all on vacation and feeling good and being completely goofy, laughing and taking turns doing yoga poses on the tops of rocks along a trail. Another hiker was passing by and he stopped to watch us. After a moment, he pulled aside one of my friends and asked her about me. “Has she lost a child?” My friend was dumbfounded, but said yes. Then this stranger said that he was a medium and that he was hearing from my little girl. He said he simply wanted to pass along her greetings, and to say that she was doing well and was happy to see me so happy.
This sort of visitation or message happened to me with increasing frequency now. My experiences with Margaret and with Alexis had opened up the doors to perception, and once the senses were awakened, the reinforcement just kept coming. My whole concept of everything—the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, between the living and the dead—had been transformed.
None of this would make the least bit of sense to Michael. He and I were still trying to hold it together, but from the outside, as an act of the will. The inner core that makes a bond seem natural had begun to dissolve in our very different responses to grief. The fact was that through a shared experience we had followed very divergent paths. Michael, it seemed, had lost his old faith, while I had found a new one. In the immediate aftermath of Charlotte’s death, when it was all we could do to lick our wounds, the experience had bound us together. But now, as we came stumbling out of the haze, we were emerging as completely different people.
As my bond with Michael faded more and more, I felt myself drawn more and more to exploring my bonds with my family of origin.
• • •
For someone for whom the embrace of a Boston Brahmin family was so important, the alternative beliefs and practices I was drawn to could have been problematic. But as I began to shake the family tree a bit more, increasingly I found that I was in good company.
I moved beyond my great-great-great-grandfather Emerson’s ideas to how he conducted his life. I felt a glimmer of recognition when I discovered his relationship with Jones Very, the certifiable madman who got booted off the Harvard faculty, then locked away at McLean when he claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ. My great-great-great-grandfather edited Very’s poetry and became his champion. He didn’t mind that the man was a lunatic. Neither did my great-great-great-grandmother Lidian.
At the same time, I found myself growing less and less accepting of Emerson’s treatment of his wife. Ralph Waldo may have been the famous one, but Lidian was my ancestor as well, and it bothered me the way he marginalized her and how she lived in his shadow despite the fact that she wrote her own essays on Transcendentalism and the fact that he incorporated many of her ideas into his work. He had wooed her under the pretense that she was going to be an intellectual partner, and she had subjected him to a two-hour interrogation during which she made it very clear that housekeeping and domestic affairs were not her strong suit. She had wanted to be very clear about how he viewed her, about her future role as a wife, a mother, a life partner, and she would not accept his proposal until she was satisfied with his answers. She was a strident and bold woman of strong convictions, easily her husband’s intellectual peer. And yet very quickly their marriage took on the traditional asymmetry she had wanted to avoid.
After the death of Waldo, she spent her days and nights hiding upstairs in her bedroom while Emerson entertained hoards of guests. She even had to suffer the indignity of her husband’s near obsession with another woman, Margaret Fuller. In family albums, Lidian’s image appears to recede, becoming ghostly and ethereal, as if the sun damage and natural fading of the photographs had affected only her. And through it all Emerson seemed indifferent to her suffering, dismissing it as hypochondria. The height of absurdity was that, early in their marriage, he’d decided that he liked the alliterative sound of Lidian Emerson better than Lidia Emerson, and so he arbitrarily changed her name! She went along with that kind of belittling treatment. In my marriage, I would not.
Delving further into the family history, seeking companionship, comfort, guidance, I discovered that my uncle Eric was an expert on Islamic mysticism, and that my cousin Paula, a devotee of Krishnamurti, had held séances at a Vedanta temple. A cousin from the Emerson Society wrote a book called Be-ism (as opposed to atheism), which was essentially a reworking of the Emersonian idea of God as nature and nature as God. (Another family member adopted a hippopotamus when the zoo could no longer care for it and kept it in her grandfather’s stable.)
But my interest in the fringier side of the family coincided with a new and more specific interest in the Forbes women as women. I became especially intrigued by my aunt Ruth Forbes, who had always seemed so exotic when I was growing up because she did yoga and lived west of the Hudson River. To my eight-year-old self, she had appeared hopelessly glamorous when she came to our house on Naushon, her long silver hair braided and wound into a bun on top of her head. She obviously cared about her body, and I would get down on the floor beside her as she went through her yoga postures, fascinated by her lightness, by the way she seemed to float.
Aunt Ruth, I discovered, was a pacifist who used her fortune to establish the International Peace Academy and who, in her spare moments, did watercolor portraits of alien beings. Her first husband, Lyman Paine, was a Trotskyite. Her second, Gilbert Thomas, I don’t know much about because he died shortly after their marriage. Her third was Arthur Young, who is a story unto himself.
Uncle Arthur was a brilliant physicist and engineer who developed the Bell helicopter. After Uncle Arthur retired from Bell, he devoted himself to investigating phenomena that mainstream science ignored. “I am interested now in the Psychopter,” he wrote, “because it won’t work. What is the Psychopter? It is the winged self. It is that which the helicopter usurped—and that the helicopter was finally revealed not to be.”
I found this passage reassuring—if only because nothing I could ever come up with would ever sound as nutty as this.
About five years into my grieving process, I decided to look up Arthur and Ruth’s son Michael, as well as their grandson Chris. I remembered Chris from my teen years on Naushon, a slightly awkward teen with long hair, always walking alone, emerging unaccountably from the bushes at the strangest times.
With a little bit of digging I found that Chris had started a commune in Sebastopol, California. Later, his father joined in and helped him acquire more land. I remembered my cousin Michael as being slightly older than my parents and having the austere tight-lipped Forbes look that is sort of a genetic maker’s mark. When he’d stood up to speak at our annual meetings in August, I’d always been intimidated by him. He was smart, articulate, determined, and even a bit autocratic. But obviously, there was more to that Brahmin facade than I’d realized.
Sebastopol is near Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco, and on the drive from the airport once again, overwhelmed by Charlotte memories triggered by the madrone and oak and the smell of sage, the tears started. I also began to worry that I was going to have my long-awaited gothic meltdown surrounded by naked hippies and two relatives I hardly knew.
The commune, Green Valley Village, has a long access road. There are cattle pol
es over the river, and eventually you come to a dilapidated farmhouse surrounded at varying distances by old school buses converted into mobile homes, mud huts, yurts, and platforms in the woods that looked like bird nests, with a gypsy caravan twist. Many had solar panels, and the jury-rigged electrical wires running here and there looked like something Rube Goldberg would have appreciated.
Much to my surprise, cousin Michael pulled me into a very warm embrace the minute I saw him. I hardly knew him, and yet he gave me a wonderful welcome that didn’t seem forced in the least, but utterly gracious and heartfelt.
Like my Saltonstall grandfather, Michael is six foot four, and even well into his eighties and despite his recourse to a cane, he has a regal carriage and moves with a purposeful stride.
As soon as we sat down to talk, I described my reason for being there as wanting to learn more about his mother. Within minutes he was telling me that he felt she’d never hugged him enough as a child. It was such a guileless and sweet statement. I could actually feel his pain over that lack of warmth in his early life.
His childhood had been very eccentric, bouncing around with his mother between her first divorce and her eventual marriage to Arthur. He’d lived all over, including once in a miner’s hut in Nevada, where he said he had been mesmerized by the sound of the rain on the tin roof. (Hello, Charlotte.) But he’d always taken the train all the way back across the United States each year to spend his summer on Naushon.
Eventually Chris joined us, and we spent a long time sitting in the living room discussing Aunt Ruth, and Michael’s not only challenging Arthur on his design for the Bell helicopter, but being right!
In the late forties, about the same time that he married Aunt Ruth, Arthur discovered Theosophy and the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, Zen Buddhism, and Hindu philosophy, as well as the study of precognitive dreams. He and Aunt Ruth took up with Mary Benzenberg Mayer, who had studied under both Freud and Jung. In 1952, they started the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness.
Michael was very animated when speaking about the engineering of the helicopter, even more so when he got around to the application of higher mathematics to astrology. Arthur had spent his later years developing what he called his Theory of Process, a way of unifying consciousness, physics, and biology through calculus and quantum theory. “The universe, far from being a desert of inert particles,” he wrote, “is a theater of increasingly complex organization, a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution. The real function of science is to explore the human spirit.”
I was picking up about every fifth word my cousin was using, and after our conversation I had no more precise understanding of Arthur and Ruth’s spiritual and metaphysical beliefs than when I had arrived. But the whole point was that I didn’t have to understand it precisely—I could feel it. Intellectually, I was a fish out of water; emotionally, I was completely at home.
I nodded my head and gazed out the window. As Michael and Chris continued their discussion, a man with a ZZ Top beard drove up in a beat-up Mercedes. Two bare-breasted women stopped outside the house and had a twenty-minute chat. One of them had just returned from a three-day clothing-optional retreat in the woods, and she was so energized from the experience she practically hovered over the ground. Is this what Arthur had meant by the “Psychopter”?
Michael then took us out for a tour of the property, and despite the hitch in his walk, he led us at a fast clip through the dry yellow pampas grass, the eucalyptus trees, the madrone. It was all so much like our place in Santa Cruz that I could hardly breathe. Even more striking, while it was completely different from Naushon, I still felt the same religious awe. Walking through the virgin-growth redwoods, I could feel my past and present coming together, the part of me that had been drawn to California and the part of me that remained wedded to Naushon. I thought of Emerson: “We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”
Michael had to get back to the house, but Chris and I went down to the pond and sat on a small dock where a canoe was secured with a frayed rope. We took our shoes off and dangled our feet in the water, and I was struck by the contrast between the cold water and the dusty dry air of the valley. We sat there for a long time, and I told Chris about the connection I felt with Arthur and Ruth. Eventually we got around to all the searching and the metaphysical speculation I’d been engaged in, and I mentioned the idea of “soul groups.” Chris was right there with me. “Absolutely,” he said. “Moving through life in clusters of individuals. Like a secret brotherhood traveling on the same ship.”
I smiled. It occurred to me that maybe now I was officially one of the “crazy cousins,” and the thought was liberating. I felt both “out there” and at the same time embraced by the protective warmth of a clan.
I’m too attached to my creature comforts to live on a commune the way these cousins did, but we were all on the same kind of quest. “Build, therefore, your own world,” Grandpa Emerson said. “As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.”
• • •
Michael and Chris invited me to attend church with them the next day, which both surprised me and filled me with dread. They hardly seemed like the churchgoing types, and I didn’t want to spoil the high I was on by confronting an institutionalized interpretation of God, the soul, and the hereafter.
When we pulled up to the Unitarian Universalist church in Santa Rosa, the utterly nondescript building did nothing to overcome my resistance. We entered through glass doors set in a cinder block building that could have housed the town water department.
The service was already in session, so we sat in the back. The minister was a woman, and I looked around at the sunbaked Californians in their khakis and blue jeans, so different from the Unitarian congregations of my childhood—not a blue blazer in sight. But then, when the responsive readings began, I thought, “You gotta be kidding me.” The first was from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere—on water and land.
This was followed by another passage from Whitman that could just as easily have come from Emerson: “I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.”
They were speaking my language.
The minister announced that it was time for a guided meditation. “Right here?” I thought. “In church?”
She led us through a series of breathing exercises, then told us to imagine that we were walking through a meadow. “Feel your feet on the ground, smell the smells, pay attention to all that surrounds you.”
I loved this, and I really got into it, feeling deeply moved and yet also on the verge of giggling. This was so not what I had expected. I floated around in this meditation smelling all the California smells.
I could hear the minister’s voice intrude ever so slightly. “Ask yourself where you should be putting your attention right now,” she said.
I asked myself that question.
Immediately, I heard a voice inside of me say, “Be divine.”
“Be divine?” I asked myself. “You mean like Bette Midler?”
But then my smart-aleck mind quieted down and I let the message sink in. “Be divine.” What does that mean? Live divine. Find divinity in your life.
“Okay,” I thought. “I can do that. At least I’ll try.”
The minister gently brought us out of our meditation and back to the literal world of the unadorned chapel in Santa Rosa.
The
n, most astoundingly, what should she begin to talk about but being divine—about finding the divinity in everyday relationships, objects, and experiences. My jaw dropped and I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp. It felt in that moment as if God, whoever or wherever or whatever he or she was, had created that service just for me. Certainly that service on that day spoke right to my soul. In that moment I knew I’d made it home.
After a few more thoughts on everyday divinity, the minister closed the service by putting her hands in prayer position. Bowing slightly forward, she said, “Namaste,” the Hindu greeting that means “The spirit within me greets the spirit that is within you.”
“Namaste,” the congregation repeated.
I had come full circle, and it brought to mind another of my great-great-great-grandfather’s observations: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn: that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”
There I was, in all the divine glory I could muster. I realized that the divinity in life I was seeking would come not only from my new spiritual Brahman path, but from whatever inner wisdom had accrued to me in forty-seven years as a Boston Brahmin. I will be divine. I will trust this. “Trust thyself.” Thank you, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I get it.
• • •
A week or so after I returned east, Michael, Cabot, Beatrice, and I went over to Nantucket to visit friends and family. Beatrice and I took the ferry from Hyannis, and Michael and Cabot drove our small boat over from Naushon. They planned to drive it back as well, but when the last day of vacation came, high seas and rough weather put a kink in everybody’s plans. Michael was due back in Boston for a couple of meetings, and the kids were eager to get home, so they all got a ride back together, leaving me with a seventeen-foot outboard that needed to be returned to Naushon across thirty miles of open ocean. I stayed one more night, hoping the weather might improve. If it didn’t, I’d take the ferry back to the mainland myself and figure out what to do with the boat later. A seventeen-foot inflatable, it was moored at my cousin John’s place at Brant Point. He told me they could tow it over later if need be, but I did not want to impose on their generosity.