Farmboy, soldier, freak, teacher.

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The eternity of a child's summer is not ambered, but rhythmed with daily adventure.

The rural Northeast, verdant and sultry. A country road eases through the trees, past the old house, over the bridge spanning a chuckling brook. An immense silence, scoped by distant lowing, shelters my reveries.

An approaching tock, tock startles me to presence. A walking stick, a queasy presage. He's coming.

But how? He's blind. His terrible aspect now a terrifying visage. Yet he courses that gentle road, steady and true, daily, unfailing, undeterred by maimed limbs, his gait like clockwork, tock, tock. Now I would add, a jaunty stride, but there long ago, in my horror of his deformity, his swagger was lost on me.

But not his perseverance, nor his clockwork appearance, marking the passage of time, surer than meals, surer than sleep. The end will come, and autumn chase us away. Who is that? my blunt, offended question. An aunt, kind eyes veiled, answers: a local. I name him Hardacre. Not a mayfly like us summer folk. Thus, a farmboy, gone off to war years past, and returned to his home broken, hideous, and to my eyes, worse than useless. A monster. A freak. Come to spoil the cloudless blue perfection, the new mown idyll of my timeless paradise.

Almost fifty years have passed. I was, in my way, wounded, too. Then, and now. Whole of limb and blessed, each sense keen, my wounds, though hidden, were plain to many. Now, as I heal myself, my cruel disdain returns and demands atonement. And Hardacre is there, tock, tock, steady, oblivious, and yet not unforgiving, his first gift to me. Though not his first lesson: my first hint of death's iron surety, my first glimpse of pain and mutilation born of war. Of life's unfairness, and the long road we may yet have to limp, though we soldier on, and frighten the children.

His wounds, plain to all, hid his essential wholeness from my child's eyes, his second gift to me, received only yesterday, as I, blinded by sight, now see with my heart, a world new, bright, and timeless.

Boughs & vines, entwined

As I free fall into a carnival of New Age stereotypes, choosing my words with care is a welcome, grounding, chore.

One new-to-me concept of great utility is the container, with which we hold space, for a notion, an intention, a relationship. In Hakomi: relationship, especially the therapeutic relationship between therapist, client, and whoever else is immanent. The therapist fosters the bubble, in which he witnesses and encourages the client to witness and encourage her own healing evolution. Beautiful work, this: right action, right speech, creating the container for precious cargo, the unfolding human soul.

So why does this word grate on my ears, and set my eyes to rolling?

Maybe it's the associations. Containers are what fast food comes in. Containers are piled high in every port, when they're not littering the beach. What needs containing in our world? Radioactive waste, plague vectors, social breakdown, errant desires...

Maybe it's the lineage. Somehow, container is all about the function, good, bad or indifferent. 

Latin continēre, to hold together, keep together, comprehend, contain —OED, as well as the following

Good as far as it goes, until you notice the controlling, reductionist scrutiny, and we're right back to quelling something that wants to escape. I'm drawn to words whose roots grabbed earth before Rome paved the way back to itself across the West. You know, the languages of barbarians, where all of our best four letter words come from. Container, well... marches straight back to Rōma. 

I long for something else, a word freighted with an agency and intention more appropriate to the project, and I've come up with: bower

Old English búr dwelling, etc., corresponding to Old Saxon bûr
A dwelling, habitation, abode... especially, a vague poetic word for an idealized abode

Yes, better, something built, with a lofty intention, to restore something lost, to house ourselves in sylvan splendor (I admit, L. silvānae, goddesses of the woods). But, it gets better:

An inner apartment... especially applied to a lady's private apartment; a boudoir

Thus we imagine a gentle realm of intimacies, of shared secrets away from the harsher, masculine realm of commerce and politics, although this might rightly be challenged and derogated (L. dērogāre to repeal in part, etc.) by feminisms undreamt of in the 14th Century, and only now roiling brows hidden by burqas and chadors...

And, best of all, because it evokes my preferred, long view, transpersonal, ecological memespace

A place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants; a shady recess

Photo: missy_gardenwhimsy

Now we have all the aspects that make bower so attractive to me: a constructed refuge, woven with care over time, from natural elements, to hold the things we love, in a place of mindful intimacy, a soul solacing retreat from all that wounds us, where we abide with all that would heal us. Yay!

I hold a vision of the post-historical future, of the fractal bower of our survival: the great bower of Gaia, tended by a billion loving spirits, sharing bowers of home and garden, each spirit weaving many relationships within and among, embowered by loving regard, and our better angels.