The Honey From Which We Are Made

The Waters Of My Oak Creek

Do you ever think about time passing? We all do, for sure, maybe more as we get older. I remember how I would stand on a certain bridge over that little creek where we spent our summers, thinking how that strikingly beautiful water under my feet would never return to this place and to this moment. Though I couldn’t put anything like this in words, I understood, quite deeply, I could not control time. I could not gather in this beauty, this sparkle, this murmuring, and bring it back again. There it went, gone forever.

Well, what should we do with time that has passed on? Just let it go? Live in the moment? Move on, get to work?

The cloud sends me often unsolicited “Memories Of This Day,” photos I’ve taken over the years. These pictures always trigger my imagination into lively motion, perhaps a vacation with Sharon or the family, a special dinner with lots of friends, or perhaps a picture from my work—there I am standing in front of some microphone holding forth as if I absolutely knew what I was talking about.

These pictures send me into reverie, send me out thinking about them through the day, remembering those sweet times. As I ponder these moments years ago, I make them even sweeter in the remembering.  Maybe I’m trying to reclaim respectability for nostalgia, or maybe I’m just trying to understand time passing, but I’ve come to dwell more carefully on memories.

The great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas says about traveling, where so many photos are taken, that we travel for

something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God’s

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of traveling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

We want to airbrush out certain memories, those times of stress, or perhaps something to this day we regret, or maybe it’s something ugly we got ourselves tangled up with, or maybe a mess we caused ourselves. We didn’t take photos of those times, but they too are squarely lodged into our memory as much as the lovely moments we love to dwell on.  

I know my psychologist friends tell me we’ve got to remember the tough stuff too, that just maybe in remembering these times we can deal with the painful things that fester deep in our souls. I hate doing that work, and am sure I don’t do it very well, but I take their advice, and work not to skirt the hard things buried deep within.

But I am struck by that pollen we get covered with as we walk around in the good times. Thomas is right, that’s the stuff we later “work up / into the honey the mind feeds on.” For some strange reason we are often warned not to be too caught up in nostalgia, but things like standing on the bridge over that luring creek is the honey I work up. My mind has fed on it for a lifetime.

Somehow these days, I am wanting to claim the value of remembering, to remember vividly, to live in those memories, to work them up into honey, the only way to make memory sweet. What’s wrong with that?

Thomas continues:

What are our lives but harbours

we are continually setting out

from, airports at which we touch

down and remain in too briefly

to recognize what it is they remind

us of? And always in one

another we seek the proof

of experiences it would be worth dying for.

This is why we share our memories. This is why we sit around with family and friends just talking about things that happened to us. It’s as if we need proof that they happened. We do this precisely because we’re always moving on without getting to know where we’ve been. We need to make sure our memories are something we care about so much we would die for them.

I have memories like that, don’t you? I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Well, why not dwell on them, think about them often, tell stories about them, why not dip deeply into those precious memories? I know, I know, we can repeat the stories too often, as my kids remind me, but so what? This is the honey of which we are made. We better work it up, stir it often, savor it slowly. It helps to make us who we are.