Jewels of the Forest: A Memoir (eBook)

Bonnie Raber Wickes (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798350976717 (ISBN)

Infos

Bonnie Raber Wickes, a retired psychologist, wrote this memoir for friends and family. Other readers may be drawn as well to common themes of the third phase of life, her focus in this book. She uses the framework of the forest, a place for growth and reflection, as she shares the death of her parents, the birth of grandchildren, meaningful work and travel, ruptures in near-perfect health, the deepening of relationships, evolving spirituality, retirement, and finally, the shock of the pandemic. She sprinkles jewels throughout her story, some of them real and others more ethereal. Visions of hope and enduring peace inspire her journey through this third phase of life, called Vanaprastha in ancient yoga tradition. As this phase nears the end, she contemplates entering the fourth and final phase of life.

Bonnie Raber Wickes is a retired psychologist who spent the bulk of her career providing psychotherapy services in Alaska. She completed her M.S. in Counseling Psychology at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and her Psy.D. at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California. Toward the end of her career, she closed her private counseling practice in Anchorage to work on US military bases in the United States, Europe, and Japan. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

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The forest is a metaphor for the third phase of life in ancient yoga tradition. As one who has practiced yoga for decades, Bonnie Raber Wickes chose this metaphor for her personal memoir, generally capturing her years from the age of fifty to seventy-five. At the beginning of her time as a forest dweller, she travelled to India to see the Dalai Lama at a millennium celebration in the Himalayas. In the years that followed, each of her parents passed away, a marker for many in this third phase of life. She experienced her first crack in near perfect health when she was diagnosed and treated for cancer in her mid-fifties. Her only child married. Grandchildren were born, influencing her decisions about work and retirement. She changed the focus of her work from a private practice in psychotherapy to the provision of counseling on military bases both near and far from her home in Alaska. Raber Wickes takes you on this journey with her, threading her experiences with reflections on her childhood, the beauty of nature, her marriage and relationships with friends and family, her meaningful work and travels to places like Hiroshima, her political leanings, her evolving spirituality, and her eventual decision to retire. Finally, the disease of Covid-19 presented challenges in finding ways to cope with the shock and loss of a world-wide pandemic. The jewels of the forest represent not only her modest personal collection of beads and gems and textiles, but also the meaning and context stored in each. This is a a memoir about inheritance that may jog readers' own thoughts about what it is they have received from family, friends and experiences, and what it is they want to leave behind.

Textauszug

Chapter 3

Journey to India, 2000

Lee and I had planned to meet in Singapore, then fly together to New Delhi the next day to meet up with our tour group, eighteen people from around the country. They were strangers to us, also going to the millennium celebration, the Kalachakra, a Buddhist ceremony literally meaning “the wheel of time.”

I arrived in Singapore, exhausted, after a fourteen-hour flight from Anchorage. I went straight to the hotel and slept so soundly that I missed three phone calls from Lee over the next ten hours. She left two frantic messages: “Bonnie, you won’t believe this, but I thought my San Francisco departure was at 1 p.m. but it was 1 a.m. I missed my flight!” The second voice mail: “I may have to cancel the trip altogether!” Her third message: “Go on to New Delhi and I’ll meet you there!”

My flight from Singapore to New Delhi was interrupted by an unexpected overnight in Chennai, a city that used to be called Madras. I understood very little about the delay or why we couldn’t just stay at the airport until our connecting flight in the morning. I found myself in a taxi with other passengers, none of whom spoke English, heading for a hotel a half an hour away. It was humid and dark, kind of drizzly. I saw skinny stray cattle roaming along the side of the narrow road. The scent of incense blended with the ash of smoldering fires. Men were burning trash and rubbish in the ditches by the side of the road.

I stood at the end of the check-in queue at the hotel. It was well past midnight. By the time I reached the front of the line, I was told, “Sorry, no rooms left.”

A kind Indian woman in front of me offered to share her room. She carried the key as we walked in silence down a long hallway. She opened the door and motioned for me to use the bed, pointing to the phone, indicating she had calls to make as she sat on a sofa across from the bed. Clouds of sweet cigarette smoke with a scent of clove and her soft Hindi voice lulled me to sleep.

I woke up three hours later to someone banging on our door, the kind woman asleep in the bed by my side. I shook her gently. “Wake up,” I said, and we ran down the dark hall and scrambled into the last cab available, arriving at the airport just in time for our flight. We picked up our passports from the agent who had collected them the night before. His shift had not ended. Tired from our strange detour, my new roommate and I boarded our flight to New Delhi as we waved and said our goodbyes. We never saw each other again.

***

I met our tour guides by late morning as others in our group trickled into the breezy lobby of the New Delhi hotel. After lunch, I went for a walk, knowing that Lee would arrive from San Francisco in a couple of hours. I turned the corner from the hotel, and immediately saw a man riding down the street on the back of an elephant, among rickshaws, cabs, bicycles, cars, trucks—all creating a cacophony of different beeps and honks.

The aroma of incense filled the air. Hindustani music flowed from storefronts and upstairs windows, melding with the sounds of conversation and traffic. I was drawn into a fabric haven where I watched beautiful women draping and wrapping colorful silk saris with gold and silver borders around and around their bodies. It was very hot by now, over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I suddenly remembered the freezing weather just months before at the New Year’s Eve celebration in Anchorage. What a contrast, I thought as I circled back to the air-conditioned hotel to wait for Lee.

“I can’t believe I missed my flight to Singapore,” she said as she stepped out of the cab. She looked flushed from the heat.

“But here you are!” I said as I gave her a big hug and started to tell her about my strange night and the detour I had encountered on my flight from Singapore. We were happy to hear from our local guide that cooler temperatures awaited us in the Himalayas. We were both suffering from jet lag and after a brief orientation and hotel dinner, we fell into our beds after scheduling an early wake-up call.

We slept well. After breakfast, we took a shuttle to the New Delhi Railway Station. It spans what seemed like a mile and was packed with people of all ages, carrying bags and boxes, some spilling over with clothing and food. Someone was carrying a box of papers on their head and tripped, releasing hundreds of brochures and flyers into the air before they settled at our feet. Trying not to get lost in the shuffle, we managed to follow our tour guide as we looked for the train that would take us north, to the city of Chandigarh.

Lee and I boarded, heaving our identical small suitcases (a coincidence) up to the racks above. We settled into our seats, eyes wide open in anticipation of making our way to and through the Himalayas over the next four days. As the packed train slowly rolled out of New Delhi, we passed thousands of shacks, connected by broken boardwalks on muddy ground. We got a glimpse of the poorest people in the city as we watched quietly from the train window, feeling speechless, caring, numb, blessed, and very naïve. The train picked up speed. Four hours later we arrived in Chandigarh.

After lunch at an open market, our tour group transitioned to six jeeps. We travelled east to Shimla, a lovely, misty mountain town. Lee and I each bought a pashmina shawl for cooler weather in the mountains and mingled with others in the tour group. After dinner in the hotel, we fell into our beds, completely exhausted from the jet lag of prior days.

The following morning our caravan of jeeps headed north to Manali, deep in the foothills of the Himalayas. This quiet town, we were told, was known for its beauty, a place to escape from the oppressive heat and hordes of people during Delhi’s hot summers. We visited more shops, and we each purchased another pashmina. Little did we realize that a week later, on our return to New Delhi, I would discover my credit card was missing. We would comb the shops with little hope of finding the place where I’d purchased my shawl. The shops all looked alike, with the same pashminas draped along row after row. In one shop, however, as I started to introduce myself, a young clerk behind the desk would literally jump with joy and call out to another clerk, “Bonnie Wickes. It’s Bonnie Wickes,” as he ran to the shop next door, repeating my name, a huge smile on his face. I looked at Lee with a sense of possibility. He returned with my credit card in hand.

Our hotel in Manali was small, charming, surrounded by a grove of fir trees and deodar cedars. We enjoyed the breeze and the coolness of the forest outside our window. We slept well, minimizing our jet lag. From our base of seven hundred feet above sea level in Delhi, we had journeyed six thousand feet in altitude. The jeep drivers would take us up steep winding roads and valleys another six thousand feet over the next two days to reach our journey’s destination, the Key (Ki, Kee, Kye, Kyi) Monastery in the Spiti Valley.

The next morning, Lee and I climbed into the back seat of one of the white jeeps. It was a colorful drive on a gravel road with vast patches of green and fog, along a sometimes steep and winding dirt road that would be closed temporarily for winter in another month or two.

At one point, we passed a huge rectangular orange metal sign with big black letters: ACCIDENTS ARE PROHIBITED ON THIS ROAD. Lee and I looked at each other with unease. Further along, our driver backed up to the edge of a cliff to let an oncoming truck pass. I looked out the back window. We were very close to the precipice, and I suddenly felt foolish for putting my life in peril.

In that moment, I realized I, not my ailing mother, might be the one who would die during my trip. I also understood it was totally unrealistic to think that I would be able to simply go home, as I had told her I would if she died while I was in India. I was on day six of my trip, and we had not even reached our destination! There was no cell phone service in these mountains, no possible way to get back in time for a funeral. As our driver changed gears and pulled forward, back on the road, I looked out the window to the sky above. My friend Lee had closed her eyes and held her breath, letting out a huge sigh of relief.

With the mountains expanding in front of us, the bliss and pleasant dizziness approaching high altitude, I knew I was blessed to be in this place. Out of danger, I felt appreciation for the beauty of the Himalayas and my home in Alaska, where majestic mountains also reign, although not as towering as these, nor as wide in range. This vast beauty triggered an awakening of appreciation for beauty everywhere, and in everyone. I seemed to forget my earlier fears. My thoughts and feelings flowed from the sheer beauty of my surroundings, my mind and heart filled with wonder to the brim.

The yoga mountain pose had been a part of my daily practice for many years, and these mountains were the supreme models of Tadasana, standing tall and still, in perfect balance with everything surrounding them. My yoga instructor once told us about a first-grade teacher who watched her class as the school year began, each little student more disorderly and disruptive than students from prior years. She clapped her hands, counted to ten, called out, “Children, quiet voices, please!” When all else failed to bring them to their seats, she stood tall and steady in Tadasana, waiting, silently observing as...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Familie / Erziehung
• ISBN-13: 9798350976717 / 9798350976717