I wrote these thoughts down in France, 2004, just after I’d spent a week as a guide and translator for a group of veterans who had returned to France for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. The time with them was moving and powerful as they revisited the scenes of their wartime experiences.
I’m currently working on a memoir that begins when my father was in France in World War II, before I was born. The book has been percolating in my brain and heart for about ten years now. I had a few days after my time with the veterans to write and think about my life and the memoir. Here are some of those thoughts…
My life and writing are intertwined.
The memoir that I’m writing is about fate, destiny and soul. The mysterious map we follow through life that has been laid out for us ahead of time. Why we go right instead of left in the twists and turns of our own personal labyrinth and how we learn to know which way to turn.
No one ever taught me this in school. These are answers I’ve had to search out on my own. I’m talking about life as a vision quest, not a career path. Some of my teachers have been pure and good, others evil and dark. I’ve made mistakes, some big mistakes.
But I’ve also had the unmistakable fortune of being in exactly the right place at the exact right moment and the satisfaction of knowing that certain risks and lots of trust have gotten me there.
‘Croyez-en-soi’. In French, that means: ‘Believe in yourself’. It means listening to the inner voice that takes something to hear and that is only available from making choices that don’t always turn out clean, pretty and safe. But choices that take you to where you know you have something.
I’ve sometimes imagined that I have two guardian angels. Those two plump cherubs you see on cards and posters, happy, smiling, agreeable little cherubs. But sometimes, as my angels, in my life, from my choices, they’re covering their eyes, gasping in horror. ‘Oh No! She’s going the wrong way’. Other times, they’re shrieking in delight. ‘She did it, bravo, hooray!’ A kind of ‘Mr. Toad’s wild ride’ through life that has as many near misses and crashes as straight-ahead easy roads.
But this book, ultimately, is about how to discern a life out of the chaos and confusion of choices presented to us each day. How to have the strength to trust a choice when there is no ‘logical’ reason to trust it except your own inner knowing that you should.
“Go this way. Yes, that’s right. Good. Now you’re on track…”
I imagine what it would have been like to grow up with adults encouraging me to listen to myself, trust myself. In my fantasy of a perfect childhood, doting parents and teachers would always be there asking: “What do you think? What feels right to you? Trust yourself, listen to yourself, follow your dreams, hunches and ideas.” The way Joseph Campbell told us all to follow our bliss.
But I didn’t have a childhood like that and most others, I suppose, didn’t either. I had a fairly typical, I imagine, childhood in the 1950’s in a small rural town. The plusses were lots of freedom, fresh air and running around outside. Time in nature, riding my bike.
Our family didn’t own a TV till I was seven or eight years old. We spent two months in the summer in a trailer at the beach where my sister Sharon and I spent all day in the ocean. I learned to feel how the swell of a wave could pick you up and carry you to the shore as a ride.
In the center of my childhood, I had a loving presence—my father.
Looking back, he was like a beacon for me, kind, open hearted and good. I had a mother who was suspicious and jealous of me and of my relationship with Dad. I had an older sister who not only tolerated me, she liked me and played with me. We loved each other unashamedly. In photos, we’re entangled with each other, arms around each other’s necks, smiling and squinting into the camera, a momentary still shot of the endless play we shared all our waking hours.
One of the advantages of growing older in our youth crazed American society is some well-earned wisdom that comes from perspective. Looking back, the way seems straighter, the twists and turns less jagged.
I’ve heard that if you look down on a sailboat from above, the back and forth tacking looks like a straight line, even though it really takes many turns.
Stephen King, in his book “On Writing” says: “Be brave. Tell us all you know.” This book is my attempt to do that. It is the result of a lifetime of distillation of the everyday events and moments that add up to a meaningful life. Or at least to some sense of a meaningful life, some sense of meaning.
This book is about: How to have the courage to follow the inner voice that only you can hear.
How to have the courage to turn off the TV and to listen to your own life, not someone else’s made up life spiced with tricks to make you want to buy things.
How to turn right when everyone else is turning left and to know that you have to turn right, no matter what, you just do. And even if it is lonely at times, that right hand path is the one you’re meant to be on.
How to have the courage to watch for the clues, the hints and signs that tell you ‘yes, that’s good, you’re on track’.
Because it is all written in a secret code and you have to really pay attention or you’ll miss it, you won’t be able to decipher it.
And in the end, or maybe not the end, in the middle somewhere as I hope I am with my life, there is a satisfaction that comes from living your own unique life. And that is worth it all.
This book is about how to have the courage to stick to your own path even when it looks to others as though you’re walking captain Hook’s plank straight into oblivion.
My dad lived from the center of his power and the goodness of his heart. He showed me that. He was an extraordinary man living an ordinary life.
My memoir begins, on the Normandy Coast of France, above Omaha Beach, in World War II. Somehow I got caught up in the war, through my father’s stories and his life there, before I was born. I’ve learned a lot about the war since I first wrote about D-Day in Dad’s honor, in 1994. I now can hold my own with any World War II buff, mostly men; I know what a Rhino Ferry is, the names of all the invasion beaches and the number of ships and airplanes that were part of the invasion. (Over 5,000 ships and 11,000 planes.)
But what’s amazing about my father’s stories about France is that they weren’t about war, but about relationships. How the French people were kind to him when he practiced his high school French. Their gratitude when he shared the left over food from the Navy camp. And most of all, about his relationship with a 7-year-old French orphan named Gilbert who Dad tried to adopt and bring home to America.
Those stories shaped my life and influenced me in ways I’m still discovering. But most of all, when I was able to find Gilbert 50 years after the war, I experienced a deeper sense of the role of destiny.
I believe that our lives are affected by the interplay of our environments, relationships, what seem like chance events, and our own inner drives and longings.
This is one woman’s story of that rich weaving that became a life and I hope, is still becoming a life.
© Diane Covington 2009