The Beauty of Memory

The Old Spring House, watercolor ©A. Rutherford

"Pioneers looked for a spring and built their homes near it. It kept their thirst (and that of their animals) satisfied and their food from spoiling. It was the only refrigeration known for years. Usually a house or building was built over the spring out of rock and a tree was planted near the door. A stone trough was built in the spring house. Through it ran cold, slow flowing spring water. Earthenware crocks of milk were placed, neck deep, in the water. It was always cool in the spring house, even in the warmest of days. A gourd dipper hung in the spring house so men coming in from the hot field could stop for a draft of cold water. The dog quenched his thirst from the overflow at the back of the spring house and a flock of ducks noisily investigated the trickling stream for tidbits. Watercress grew in the shallows.   (Taken from The Good Old Days, The Spring House, R.J. McGinnis, F. & W. Publishing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio, page 76 

In painting this scene with an old spring house this weekend, I was set to reflecting on the old spring house on my grandparents’ farm.  What a comforting place it was for me, but also just a bit mysterious with its cool, shadowy corners and the spring that seemed to flow up out of nowhere.  As a very young child that spring seemed magical to me.

In our fast-paced society, what are the memories that will last?  Which of their experiences are shaping our children into men and women of character, sensitivity, and strength?  

Perhaps one way to ensure that our children will indeed have those life-shaping memories is to take the time to remember what kind of our own past experiences contributed to who we are today.   Or look back at your own parents and grandparents.   What were their lives like?    What were the events that contributed to all the characteristics you value in the people they were and the contributions they made to your own life or the communal life?    What kind of music did they listen to?    What books did they read?    What chores were they responsible for that gave them the work ethic that successful adults need?    How did they spend their leisure time?    What was the balance between leisure or productive activity for them?    What adversities did they face or mountains they had to climb that carved those lines of character that you see in their faces?    What did they love, and how did they love?  

What were the simple joys that nurtured them?    I know in my own family, there was not the incessant need to be entertained or amused.    My memories are of warm family times of story-telling or playing games, gathering around a dinner table filled with home-cooked food, helping out with whatever needed done in the house or outside.    There was time to play, but not to be idle.   Time to explore our environs, but not to waste before the TV.   Time to read or be read to, and the books were ones that inspired our imaginations or connected us to the past or nurtured our character.   And music that delighted and entertained us but that didn’t fill us with angst or wrong-thinking or over-sexualize us.

What are our children experiencing that will feed their souls and will not fade away, but remain a comfort and an inspiration throughout their lives?   What are the memories we are making with them that will stand them in good stead when the rough places in their own lives occur?    What will act for them as reminders that they must take their place in the flow of the river of time and serve with honor and courage?

How will the memories of fast food and ready-made meals linger lovingly in their minds?   What will endless hours spent on the internet or lounging in the malls contribute to their strength of character or their resourcefulness?   Or will all the structured sports activities or “enrichment” activities only contribute to their being driven adults with the incessant need to be “on the go”?

Below is a poem by Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who received among many, many honors the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Although he was born on a farm to working class people, he became a professor at both Oxford and Harvard.

The material of his poetry was the material of his own life.  Speaking of his early life and education, he commented, "I learned that my local County Derry experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to 'the modern world' was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it." 

When Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee described his poetry as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

From his lecture upon receiving the Prize: 

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.  At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception.  In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world.  It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other.  We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation.  Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.

Click HERE to listen to his poem about exploring the wells of his childhood,  "Personal Helicon," Helicon being a river from Greek mythology.

No, how could he have dreamed as a child of the man he would become, but his early experiences molded his character and gave him the stuff of his later life’s work.

Continuity . . . staying connected to the past, carrying those valuable things of the past into the future . . . remembering what made us wise and strong and and loving and then passing it on.  That’s important!

Train up a child in the way he should go,
      And when he is old he will not depart from it.

                                          -Proverbs 22:6 (NKJV)

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