Father’s Day: Writing for Self-Discovery: The Art of Healing

I didn’t know where I was headed in this piece. I listened, followed, watched, accepted.
The question I was tending to in writing, was “What does my father wish for me to say about him?”

Father

The quest I accepted was to not let ego make straight the way, but instead invite in Psyche, the unconscious, to take me into new territory of the soul.

Perhaps you have time to do the same?

It’s Father’s Day.

My father died in 1993, after a swift demise, a physical collapse of unmitigated, life-force migration, he tracked to a new north star.

One day he emotionally headed one way, the next month he was physically gone.
I believe people die the way they live.  
I knew he was finished living with a broken heart.
There was nothing more for him to do.
So, He immigrated away.

Forty years earlier, he had immigrated once before,
leaving Vancouver Island, his parents, siblings, life-long friends, garden plots, private coves with diurnal tides where leach-lines of dried herring roe salted a thin-lipped line of high tide.
Did they miss him then the way I miss him now?
His pet orphaned deer had been shot;
his mother-in-law gave her last breath away in the guest room;
his first born son lived three months, then quietly departed as a crib death.
It was time to leave, as well.

He was young, with young man dreams.
Fears were packed next to a shaving kit, whittling knives, a paint brush, a book of poems,
a wife, a four year old daughter, a black cat.
He knew how to build boats; now, he will build lives.
He traveled Highway One, Camino Real, the king’s highway, singular, narrow, sinew of coastal breath,
wet, roar, bone chill fog to guide this long shore drift.
The ley line of north south jurisdiction kept the course,
the ledge of road, like the vagus nerve, continued to inform just how far to go,
how long the reach of connection, countenance, and conjure could this Irish magi seep south
before finding the right port of call.  

Santa Barbara, San Pedro, Terminal Island, South Bay. Home.
He would launch vessels to ply the seven seas.
John Wayne, Charles Bukowski, Humphrey Bogart, Loren Green kept his conversations on the water,
on their boats he built, or in their liquor he drank, or with their stories of excess heartache and loss they shared
in Biff’s, the pool hall on T.I. one could never find until you needed it at the end of the day, or maybe eleven am was late enough.

He carried a ballast of depth, and sometimes inner mercenaries sucked the air out of him, when he lingered too long offshore.
Like Odysseus who finally returned Home, and who after ten years of living without his Circe,
left once again, immigrated into history.
The borders are thin these days, this new moon veil and aleph of time, missing, yearning, remembering a
father’s day in life.

Bren Littleton
June 18th, 2023
Sent from my iPhone