Toward Paradise

by Jeri Griffith

A striving upward with the whole body, perhaps even without a body, maybe even disembodied. The point here was to live with my heart striving upward. As a child, I often experienced moments of ecstasy. That’s the only way I can describe it. The ecstasy was always there in the light, in the way the sun shone—in winter blindingly bright and cut into by the dark, bare branches of trees—in summer dappled, fluid, and green.

I liked to hide beneath the catalpa tree on the terraces behind my house. Its huge, heart-shaped leaves hid me. I crouched. I knelt. I did not say words, but this felt something like prayer. I loved but the love was without any object. It was something pure, like an arrow aimed at the sky.

My father was big on identification, meaning, for example, it was important to know the names of birds—from cardinals and blue-jays to snow geese, coots, bitterns, and the more elusive purple gallinule that strutted atop lily pads. I depended upon my father for that kind of knowledge. We lived near a great marsh where there were lots of birds.

One day we were in an open boat headed to a place called Four-Mile Island to visit a rookery of great blue herons. I often saw these large wading birds flying downriver with their long legs stretched out behind them. They seemed prehistoric, more like pterodactyls rather than creatures that should exist in my world.

On the island—a cacophony exploded with squawking around nests filled with gangly, awkward babies not yet fledged. The youngsters peered over the edges of precarious platforms made of sticks. My father pointed out stands of dead trees on another part of the island. The herons fouled the nesting ground with their droppings and this killed the trees. When the trees died on one part of the island, the birds moved on.

Four-Mile Island was muddy and stinky, and there were mosquitoes, but I knew it was important to see things like this and to understand them. My father’s language was a naming of trees, rivers, birds, and fish—a language of the seasons, of falling leaves and freezing water. I saw myself there at the center of all that.

At a very early age, it was clear to me that I lived in a medium and that I was connected to everything through that medium. Something about me was like water, fluid, unnamed and un-nameable. There were moments when everything seemed to be moving, moving as one, moving together. An abundance of guidance came at me from all sides. Always, I knew I was headed for paradise, and it seemed I could get there in no time at all.

When I was five, my father brought home an old upright piano he’d scavenged from a tavern that was closing. He paid twenty-five dollars for that hunk of junk. Ivory was missing on about ten of the keys. But I played. I began to learn the piano inside my body. I took it into me, and it became part of me. It didn’t matter that the old hag of an instrument was never in tune. What came out was still a semblance of music.

When I was in the sixth grade, I met Charlotte, and a young girl and a young woman became friends. I hadn’t realized that other people could pull you upward, that other people could take you to paradise. I’d never felt this close to anyone. We walked the fields and woods with her two small children, multiple dogs, Shetland ponies, and a horse named Brandy with dark liquid eyes. We’d circle a pond that blinked open to reflect the sky’s light. A family of foxes lived out there. As we watched the kits playing, yipping, rolling, and nipping at one another, our own eyes flashed with pleasure, and I felt I was one step closer to heaven. I was laughing on the inside. I was that happy. The mother fox returned with food, and the little ones mobbed her.

At home, we had a wood-burning fireplace. My father taught me to split logs when I was ten years old. Setting the log up on the base, then whacking it hard, hearing that sound as it fell into pieces never felt like work. It was especially beautiful to split the dry wood that had few knots in it. I loved the smell, the feel of it, the clear white interior of the logs. I felt the center of the earth pulling me but I also felt the land stretching out all around me, dragging me, ripping me apart in all four directions. East. West. North. South. My body seemed to spread out in all those directions until I was everything and everything was me. I liked that feeling.

But was the feeling true? Was paradise real? Years later, as I reflect on that time, it’s easy to deny that reality, impose an adult’s order, and be done with it. But no. Paradise was and still is real. It just gets harder to attain. Knowledge intervenes. Judgment is a necessary asset and evil in any adult life.

Charlotte and I made contact over the years but finally had a falling out. We simply weren’t in the same place anymore, or maybe she was in that same place while I had moved on. The piano stayed with me, not that piano but other pianos I lived with and had the opportunity to play. I continued watching birds, and for a while, I lived a wood-burning lifestyle.

No, I didn’t forget paradise, get jaded, or become another person, but I did move on. I’m not one of those people who think that childhood was the best time of life or that it represents something always longed for that we can never return to. I don’t think of my mother’s sausage and potato casserole as the height of comfort food. I can appreciate that cream sauce loaded with Velveeta cheese, but I also know it’s loaded with calories, and might not even be very good for me if eaten on a regular basis.

My childhood was not idyllic, but it had its moments. My adulthood has not been without challenges, but then again I’ve essentially been happy. And I need to ask whether I can attribute that happiness to the heart striving upward. In a long lifetime, there are inevitably losses, but striving for paradise is not about reaching back in time for lost moments. Striving for paradise is a way of life.

The deck on our Vermont home overlooks deep forest with animals. Black bears cross our lawn. An immature porcupine climbed our linden tree and remained there for a while looking down at us with curiosity. We looked back, as curious about him as he was about us. A pileated woodpecker hammered the nearby hardwoods and pines. We have seen the holes these birds leave behind. The woods are dark, the tree trunks covered in lichen and fungi, the stones moss-strewn. They remind me that the past is not separate from the present. They’re all one and part of the same circle. Paradise is real. If we know what things might touch us, they will touch us again, and we can always come to know ourselves anew. At least that is true for me.

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Jeri Griffith is both writer and artist. She regularly publishes essays and short stories in literary quarterlies. Many of these can be accessed through her website and read online. Her artwork—paintings, drawings, and films—can also be viewed on her website: www.jerigriffith.com. Jeri lives and works in Brattleboro, Vermont with her longtime collaborator and husband Jonathan, her best friend Nancy, and their two beagles, Molly and Ruby.