The Winds of Memory

Making Memories

-Rush

There’s a time for feeling as good as we can
The time is now, and there’s no stopping us
There’s a time for living as high as we can
Behind us you will only see our dust
So we’ll just keep smiling, move onward ev’ry day
Try to keep our thoughts away from home
We’re travelling all around, no time to settle down
Satisfy our wanderlust to roam.
You know we’re having good days
And we hope they’re going to last
Our future still looks brighter
Than our past
We feel no need to worry
No reason to be sad
Our memories remind us
Maybe road life’s not so bad
From sea to shining sea and a hundred points between
Still we go on digging every show
The cities in the land all extend a welcome hand
Till morning when it’s time for us to go.

As we age, we begin to lose some memories, but, it seems to me, older memories surface more often.  Nostalgia is a beautiful thing.  It reminds us of how brave and beautiful some of our lives truly were and we ARE because of those very things, not just the negative memories.  Choices we make today are, in part, because of body memory, mind memory, emotional memory, and spiritual memory.  The weights of most memories are residing in our emotional quadrant.  And, of course, memory retrieval is, in part, sensory.

A scent, a sound, a glint/sight, a taste, can trigger a memory that was embedded deep in our brain.  Every memory has an emotion.  And, although I am not entertaining the negative thoughts, for those are hard enough to deal with without acknowledging them, the stronger the emotion attached to the moment of that incident or any incident, positive or negative, makes the memory cling more deeply.  In most cases we should learn the lesson of the incident so memory can facilitate our healing and keep us safe from that incident again.  We crave those good memories because they bring with them the joy, the love, the comfort they initially brought.  Peonies will always remind me of my mother.  Baking homemade bread recalls my grandmother over her big kitchen wood stove.   But we cannot spend great blocks of times to merely memories.  It stops us from making new ones.

 Who we are today is guided by our body, mind, heart and soul incidents and memories.  Sometimes, though, our memories are not accurate – in that they get warped by recall every time we recall.  Our memory bank has many similar memories to file through and sometimes one or two other memories can become included in that one memory.  Most memories, though, are bits and pieces of our truth.    Use clear and direct ways of looking at a memory to see the core truth.

In Maine, I made many of these.  I called them singing Hoops and there was a story that went with them.  Some were God’s Eye kinds and some Dream Catcher.  I will do a blog on them one day and explain the story of dreamcatcher and how it was gotten all wrong.

©Carol Desjarlais 5.27.20