I sludged my way through "Lost in Interpretation" tonight, and I think the movie was worth the sloooow progress through. I have certainly felt that feeling of walking through days where no one was speaking my language and I am lost in my own backyard--feelings this movie evokes. But the final scene that gives importance to the "could have beens--makes the movie. Have you ever met someone at the wrong time and place? You know without question that had your life different you would have had a profound relationship. Or perhaps the profound relationship was in another life and you are simply feeling the echoes of it? I've had moments like that a few times and it can feel like your body hit a solid surface but your heart just kept moving out of your chest when it was time to walk away. I'm not talking simply about love either, but friendships also that are just belonging on a path that you can't walk. There is an erie juxtaposition of sadness with a sense of coming home--if only for a brief moment.

"There never seemed to be to her much difference between joy and pain, or between sad and pleasant things. They were all equally welcome to her, as if in her heart she knew them to be the same." ("The Dreamers" by Isak Dinesen)

While some might argue that the character Pellegrina is tragic, or even crazy...there is a profoundness to her character such that she lingers along with you long after you have closed the last page on her story. People like to categorize experiences as good or bad, positive or negative--every one neatly in its box in line with how we think it has affected our lives. I, however, must agree with Pellegrina on this one--there really isn't any difference between joy and pain. Each experience adds something to our lives, makes us think, makes us reevaluate, change paths, reinforce a path, teaches something..."If you could go back and change one thing, what would it be?" Such a classic question. It receives a resounding "nothing" from me! There is no way to untangle valuable lessons learned from past experience, no way to know what seemingly negative experience was truly a positive in the long run, no possible way of knowing what was worse around the corner not taken. Polarized thinking seems so strongly entrenched in the Western mind set, everything is either/or, black/white, bad/good, positive/negative...there is no room left for the notion that things aren't just either/or, but sometimes both, or something smack in the middle of the two, or sometimes simply unclassifiable. One day at a time, one experience at a time...arms wide open, like Pellegrina who faced life and death with arms wide.

"In the mild air of spring they were singing cheerfully, sweetly, as though to keep her company on the first morning of her life that she, Omakayas, knew the truth of her past. She was the girl from Spirit Island. She lived in a birchbark house. This was the first day of the journey on which she would find out the truth of her future, who she was." from The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich

This book is a story of many many things, but what struck me particularily is the vision of our life not being straight lines from birth to death, or birth to any point in between--but that life is circular. It rolls back on itself in a way that is facinating. It also touches what has long interested me, and that is personal myth. We all have personal stories, experiences that happened to us that are at the core of who we are. Omakayas had a story that she didn't know and yet much of her life moved from that story forward, that circled back again and again until she finally learned the truth of her story. From that day she moved forward to find out what the rest of the story of her would be. These moments that are woven into our being are very important and I like to think of them as touchstone moments. When Old Tallow told Omakayas the story of how she came to be a two year old alone on an island of dead people--her entire life wiped out by small pox and her left to lay by her dead mother--her soul remembered even though her mind didn't. Later in her life, she met with smallpox yet again when a man entered the village of her new family. Erdrich writes, "What happened changed the way Omakayas and her family lived from them on. A visitor entered." We have all had those moments that changed our lives in far reaching ways. I can think of any number of them...my trip to Africa and subsequent bout with Malaria, the birth of my son and the long road of his illness, the birth of my daughter and the lessons of relearning joy she taught me, the crossroads that determined the course of my marriage and my family, walking into the emergancy room and seeing my husband after falling and breaking his back...these moments were moments that either at the time, or later, I could look back and know that my life took a different path than it was running on.

I know this has been an incoherent babble, but the gist of the matter that I have been mulling is that time is circular and that moments in our life are life changing and make up our personal stories, and that it is important to come to terms with life changing moments because you will retouch on them over and over in your life in ways and times you least expect.