Recall,Recollection, Reflection

  RECALL, RECOLLECTION, REFLECTION

                                                  Guest Writer: Ken Fellows

                                                                     LIFE CYCLE

day lilly. fellows

          It’s intriguing how memories get stored in our brains, available there on-call, or to arise spontaneously. A recent NYT obituary for psychologist Endel Tulving, 93, described how he elucidated our modern understanding of memories. In his 1972 book The Organization of Memory, he proposed that humans have two forms of memory: one is a “semantic form of knowing,” …storage of facts like “George Washington was our first President,” and skills such as “how to brush your teeth.” The second form he termed “episodic memory”…recall of places, events, and experiences–the “taste of a delicious croissant eaten on the Champs-Elysees.”

     Tulving’s work also showed that the human brain records and retrieves the two types of information via separate brain tracts or pathways. This insight is substantiated by modern psychological studies and, recently, by PET imaging. He also thought of episodic memory as a human device for “moving forward”…a mechanism for transporting ourselves to a different time. Author Tim Obrien, in his book The Things They Carried, calls this “joining of the past to the future”:

     “Forty-three years old, and the (Vietnam) War occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet my remembering makes it now.

     “I should forget. But the remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is your life, at the intersection of the past and the present. The memory traffic feeds into a rotary loop up in your head, where it circles for a while, then imagination flows in pretty soon, and the traffic merges and shoots off a thousand different streets.”

     Obrien’s thoughts illustrate why long-term recall can be fallible. Similarly, writer Geoff Dyer has observed: “Everything in my book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.” These observations on remembering…that “imagination flows in and the traffic merges”… elucidate why our recollections may feel ‘true’ but are not necessarily ‘the truth.’

      Aging can be a fierce impediment to accurate recall, something most come to endure, making us sympathetic to the older man’s complaint in Ward Just’s novel Forgetfulness:

      “My memory isn’t what it was. The years wash into one another, a watercolor

memory. One fact bleeds into another. Emotions bleed. Forgetfulness is a dream state, and it’s an old man’s friend.”

Ken Fellows

Joanna         joannseibert.com

December 7

Charleston: I honor you
“I honor you. I honor you for who you are and for what you have done. You did not become the person you are without effort. You have weathered many storms and seen many changes. You have kept going when others might have given up. You have lived your life like an art, creating what you did not have, dreaming what you could not see. And in so doing, you have touched many other lives. You have brought your share of goodness into the world. You have helped more than one person when they needed you. I honor you for walking with integrity, for making hope real, for being who you have become, I honor you.”—Bishop Steven Charleston Daily Facebook Page.

 December 7th

 This week, we remembered December 7th, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was also the anniversary of the day I stopped smoking 44 years ago. That was the day of my grandfather Whaley’s funeral in 1979. He taught me the most about unconditional love. I wanted to honor him and knew he disliked my smoking. His mother died when he was seven years old of lung disease (Tuberculosis). My grandfather taught me about love when he was alive, and saved my life when he died. My younger brother died of complications from smoking, and I could so easily have done the same.

Several years ago, I honored my grandfather and his mother when my husband and daughter helped me trek to my great-grandmother’s grave in an isolated graveyard in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was not an easy adventure. First, we entered the Park near Gatlinburg, went over one small bridge on a dirt road, then an even smaller bridge, parked on another unpaved road with a chain across it, and walked a half-mile on an uneven path with roots crisscrossing it until we came to the secret, well-kept cemetery, a cathedral-like open space framed by a canopy of trees. We later learned this was the Whaley-Plemmons Cemetery in Greenbrier, where there once was a busy mountain community of schools, churches, and homes.

My experience with the grief recovery group, Walking the Mourner’s Path, teaches me that honoring those you love who have died is one of the most significant ways of healing. So, today, I do what others have taught me and celebrate a significant person in my life that I loved, and also honor someone he loved.

You can learn more about my grandfather in my recent book on Amazon, Letters from my Grandfather: A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love. Proceeds from the sale of the $20 book go to Camp Mitchell.

Grandfather’s mother’s grave in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Joanna           https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Feast Day of Saint Nicholas

Feast of St. Nicholas December 6th

“Almighty God, in your love, you gave your servant Nicholas of Myra a perpetual name for deeds of kindness both on land and sea: Grant, we pray that your Church may never cease to work for the happiness of children, the safety of sailors, the relief of the poor, and the help of those tossed by tempests of doubt or grief; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.”— Lesser Feasts and Fasts (Church Publishing, 2006), p. 97. 

If you have been reading this blog for several years, you have heard about St. Nikolas on his feast day on the sixth of December. I apologize right now, because you will hear about him again. I am powerless when it comes to St. Nikolas.  He has simply been a significant figure in our lives. You might say we developed an addiction to St. Nikolas in December! 

We know very little of the life of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, who lived in Asia Minor around 342. He is the patron of seafarers, sailors, and, more significantly, children. As a bearer of gifts to children, Dutch colonists in New York brought him to America, where he soon became known as Santa Claus.

When our grandchildren were young, we celebrated the feast day of St. Nicholas as a major holiday. First, we had a big family meal together. My husband dressed up as Bishop Nicholas with a beard, a miter, a crozier, and a long red stole, and came to visit our grandchildren after dinner. He spoke Greek to the children and the adults. Speaking Greek is my husband’s favorite pastime, and of course, you know Nikolas was Greek. Then our grandchildren went into the bedrooms and left their shoes outside the doors, and Bishop Nicholas left chocolate coins and presents in their shoes. I won’t bore you with our pictures of this family event, but they are stunning.

Why am I sharing with you our family story? I remember so many years on this feast day, as I would sit and watch this pageant. I am still filled with tremendous gratitude, as my recovery date is close to the feast day of St. Nicholas. Each year, I know that if someone had not led me to a recovery program, I would never have been alive for these special events.  I would not have witnessed this wonderful blessing of watching our children and grandchildren gleefully giggle as they try to respond to a beautiful older man with a fake beard speaking Greek and secretly giving them candy in their shoes. So, it is a yearly reminder to continue working a recovery program, so that I can remember another feast day of St. Nicholas.

This is a suggestion. Look at the calendar of saints. Find one close to the date a significant change occurred in your life. Learn about that saint. Observe that saint’s day in your home, in your life. You may even consider that saint your patron saint. This is one more way to remember how the God of love has transformed our lives. Spend that saint’s day giving thanks for those who loved you before you were born, with a passion that only comes from the love of the God of our understanding.

My hope is that we will all pay this love forward, giving back God’s love to a world so desperately needing it.

A secret. St. Nikolas will make an appearance Sunday night at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, at the Christingle Service at 5 pm on December 17.
Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/