Oh No Highway
And The Oddly Beautiful, Often Tragic & Awfully True Life
When Oh No Highway has been accepted, generally after fleeing dozens of times to bathe in fields of meme hearts and daffodils, it may be discovered that this is an oddly beautiful, often tragic, and awfully true life.
A number of years ago, I came across a tree while hiking in the woods and grew increasingly unsettled over a heart carved in its trunk. Initially, it seemed delightful in an “I stumbled on a heart in the woods” kind of way. Between then and yesterday, when I scrolled past the image or returned to the tree, I felt differently, yet unable to define the nature of the shift. Looking through photos for this essay, the image finally reflected clearly to me.
The heart wasn’t tattooed into the tree.
The heart was carved out of the tree—out of life.
Living in alignment with what is true might be stark. It might be scary. It might be walking along Oh No Highway—a muddy and treacherous path in a bleak forest beneath a dread-filled sky. It might provoke a desperate yearning for daffodils to appear.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes, they don’t.
Sometimes, we flee Oh No Highway to seek daffodils. Shush the hurt, the hardship, the messiness, and the too-too realness of who we are and who we might be without the wounding of others and the truth of our wounds.
The stark and scary truth is, wounding and its aftermath cannot be shushed.
Scars echo forever.
I remember when I recovered something I had lost. It wasn’t a small something—a mislaid watch or the name of a childhood friend—it was an important collection of many important somethings.
A therapist diagnosing me with PTSD had suggested it would help if I worked with someone who specialized in reprocessing trauma. They thought it might be possible to regain chunks of my life I couldn’t recall. I laughed.
“If it was good for me to remember, I’d have already remembered.”
I imagined forgetting into vaguity was the best possible outcome and that if I remembered the most specific accounting of the past, it would destroy entire worlds. I believed specifically remembering would incite a series of catastrophic combustions, annihilating the universe I had made from the discard pile of my dreams, as well as the lives that had hitchhiked alongside mine.
I tried not to remember and echoes from the past grabbed the steering wheel and drove me straight into an oddly beautiful, often tragic, and awfully true life.
Remembering did destroy entire worlds and then turned toward birthing new ones.
Ava Du Vernay recently said “There is no future in forgetting.”
Hidden wounds exist with or without memories, witnesses, written testaments, or carved hearts obscuring scars they have left on trees.
We are our experiences—the remembered—as well as the lost, forgotten, shushed, and hidden.
The truth is ripples of history echoing through time.
The truth is a friend. Not a friend who tells us what is easy and we hope to hear, but one who says we need to remember pain and loss, and integrate our wounds.
“Remember” is generally defined as bringing up a memory. If the word is considered in two parts—RE and member—it becomes an act of gathering what has been “apart from” into collective wholeness.
Life is an accumulation of individual and collective experience. Discarding, avoiding, fantasizing, and fictionalizing history—even something seemingly benign as carving a heart into the flesh of a tree—does not serve the blessed gift of a single breath.
An important collection of many important somethings are the vitally important dog-eared pages of our ongoing collective story.
We are an oddly beautiful, often tragic & awfully true memoir.
The truth ignites healing and growth.
The truth aligns with nature.
The truth resides in intentional evolution.
Despite the intention, a heart carved into a tree is not a heart. It is a meme heart at the end of a sentence. A heart painted on a laundered shirt hanging on clothesline. An echo of a heart that ached as it was etched into a tree.
“We will not comply with forgetting. We will not make myths in place of memory. We will not trade the truth for contortions and comfort. Instead we will gather, we will remember, we will teach. We will share, we will tell it all…. And, even when the current swell is upon us, the bridge will hold because the truth deserves passage.” Ava DuVernay
*The Wonder Scroll returns in an upcoming post featuring the 2nd half of the shortish story: To Begin, Something Must End. The first half may be found in the previous post “Waiting For Endings,” by clicking HERE.