Where Memory Begins

Sharon and I took a trip this summer from our home in Scottsdale to our family cabin in Oak Creek Canyon. It’s about two hours, through Sedona, then deep into the Canyon to reach our little place. There it rests, year after year, in a cradle of splendor, holding in its clutches so many memories from childhood, for me, for my brothers and sister, now for the next generation.

This cabin has been in our family since I was three years old, planned and built by my father and mother, as a retreat, in part an escape from the heat of Phoenix summers. As we open the door of that cabin with each new visit, sometimes years in-between, memory surges into high gear. It’s almost as if this is the place where all memory began for me. It’s the place where I came to know things deep and mysterious, things sometimes haunting and a little scary. It’s the place where I learned to touch things, see things, listen to new sounds. It’s the place where I found my imagination, where I was transported by beauty, where I knew joy before I could name it.  

We all long for rootedness, at any stage in life, perhaps especially as we grow older. We long for roots precisely because we are a society, a world, a civilization, that persists in cutting ourselves from the roots we need to thrive. We need our personal roots too.

What are those roots planted so deeply for me each summer at our little cabin? In those long summer days, I felt swamped in curiosity, curious about the big green world that surrounded me, curious about how this very place came to be, curious about silence and solitude, down by the creek, resting under those trees, going to sleep at night with the creek murmuring its way through the canyon, as it has for millennia.

I was learning also about awe. There was no need to debate the existence of God in those days. That might come later. God was everywhere in the canyon, in sky and clouds, in the rain, the sunshine glinting across the water, those hours standing by that holy place that was my fishing hole. It was as if God took my hand as I hiked the many trails. I remember waking up with early light breaking across the porch where we slept, bacon sizzling on the woodstove, pancakes with blueberries, fresh peaches and cream, blackberries picked by the road. I was learning joy. I was learning gratitude for a mom who was always there to share her gift.

In my reading several mornings ago, just about to finish my second time through Abagail Favale’s extraordinary conversion memoir, Into The Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion, I ran into these touching lines about revisiting the place of her childhood: “This is the place where my memory begins, and I’m circling back now, all grown up, but still like a child in many ways, curious and prone to awe, only vaguely aware of how little I actually know.”

Exactly my feeling on our visit to Oak Creek Canyon this summer, circling back, to be sure, all grown up now, having taken paths far and wide from this deep place. Perhaps indeed this is where my memory begins, the place where I was free to follow curiosity to the limits, the place where I found the holy, early on, where I came to know the awe that follows me to this day.   

We need to go back to the places where memory begins. This is where our roots are formed and nourished. This is where we may have met God, stood on holy ground for the first time, where prayer came forth without words, without effort.

 I encourage you to find your own places where memory began for you. It will strengthen your roots, perhaps give you back curiosity and awe, perhaps set you once again on holy ground. At least that’s what happened to me visiting our little cabin this summer.