Tag Archives: holidays

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The Power of Memoir

A faraway relative wrote me at Christmas to say she had read Letters from the Pacific and liked it, and that she had keyed particularly to things relating to family. “We have more in common than I thought,” she wrote, and it struck me forcefully that she and I – who haven’t seen each other in 30 years and who write only at Christmas – were able to connect across time and space through the telling of a very small part of my personal journey.

It also struck me that she and I, while experiencing such similar feelings, have arrived at such different places. I had written:

Day Three, at Sea: I am remembering, as I look out at an almost full tropical moon and smell the sweet night as the sky begins to pale over the Pacific, that my father was in these waters at the end of the war. It was from a ship somewhere out here that he wrote that horrified letter to his Admiral after the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the letter, he sounds like an outraged, disillusioned youth – almost as if he hadn’t yet seen Omaha Beach, with the bodies rolling in the surf and the shells screaming overhead. Maybe with Hiroshima, he finally had enough of killing and death. When I was growing up, he never talked about the war. Being here reminds me of this Pacific connection to him – pacific connection, after all the rage at his abuses – and it occurs to me that I would like to go through his papers once more. After he died, I could only skim them, didn’t even want to touch them. Now, here, another notch in my ability to forgive him seems to have clicked into place. I go up to watch the sunrise from the observation deck. All alone out here, with nothing but the balm of a peaceful sea.

Writing this was the first moment on that amazing journey when I was able to look back with calm, past the anger, and realize that forgiveness was what I was really searching for. It’s taken me a long time to find it, but feeling the faint tectonic shift on that peaceful dawn established me on the path. Out there on that wide ocean, I was beginning to discover the healing power of memoir.

And now I see that the power of memoir to touch the hearts of others is a testament to the commonality of human experience; that each of us, however, has a special “take” on that experience that, in the expression, can draw us closer; and, finally, that none of us is as unique as we think we are.

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

 

© Sandra Shaw Homer

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Pensamientos Navideños: Holiday Thoughts on Rewriting a Life

This essay first appeared in The Tico Times 20 years ago as Pensamientos Navideños.

 

The coffee pickers are in the fields full-time now. I can see them on my morning walk, both in our neighbor’s field and in the giant cafetal that climbs the steep hill on the other side of the river: small human forms balancing their baskets in front of them, reaching deep into the dark foliage, stripping one branch after another, moving steadily along the rows, sure-footed on the steep slopes. As hard as this work is, it is a cheerful time. At dawn, I hear their voices calling to each other, and this bantering goes on all day, sometimes punctuated by a line of song.

Coffee season means we are approaching Christmas. For the pickers it means a few sheets of galvanized metal for the roof of the new house, school uniforms for the coming year, a new ceramic or wooden figurine for the crèche (portal), a pair of shoes.

As the coffee baskets are rapidly filled, they are dumped into sacks, and the pickers drag or shoulder their sacks to the collection point where the coffee is weighed and the colones are paid. Men, women and children – whole families – pick coffee, and these few weeks out of the year are enough to ensure relatively good economic times . . . at least for a while.

When I first came to Costa Rica I was amazed at how labor-intensive these crops are, but on such precipitous terrain no machines could do this work. Now I have grown accustomed to seeing people in the fields, and it is their cheerful calling to each other that first puts me in mind of the coming holidays – a better reminder than the sudden appearance of Salvation Army Santa Clauses on slushy city street corners, I’m thinking.

Year’s end always makes me pause and reflect on the changes in my life since moving to Costa Rica. Over the years I have learned some important lessons – far beyond losing my fear of driving on mountain roads with no guard rails, discovering the joys of communicating in a new language or adapting to the courteous ways of the people around me.

I suppose you don’t have to move to a foreign country to rewrite a life, but you do have to get away from everything familiar that binds you to your old self. Another culture is so different that it forces this rebirth much more dramatically. It is often painful, but if you choose to be open to it, let go your defenses, take joy in what’s around you, you’ll find it reflecting back at you something new, something you never knew was there, a self you never had time for before.

Here in Costa Rica I have learned that I believe profoundly in the power of family; that I can be a generous person; that a single orchid or a new-hatched hummingbird can fill me up; that being a good neighbor is better than guarding my privacy; that I have more patience than I ever thought I did; that to welcome a stranger is not a waste of time; that charity is personal; that connection with others is the most important thing in life; that personal growth is a choice and, once it starts, it will not be stopped; and that, even though what remains to me of life is less than it was when I first arrived here, I have all the time in the world.

Photo by Dan Spreen

Photo by Dan Spreen