describes a time of not writing but enjoying the garden of a rented London apartment.  Her husband thinks she is avoiding her writing, but actually she is cultivating it. Sometimes writing is allowing the senses in without direction. In the garden, specific blossoms stir specific memories of her mother. Weimer sits and plants and remembers.

During this reflective time, a friend calls from the States ecstatic over the purchase of a farm and certain that a feminine power has helped her, Weimer reflects further on her own quest to understand and accept the power of the Black Madonna she has researched and experienced. She realizes that she has been judging rather than accepting the power of believing in a loving, ever-present mother. Then she writes:

Maybe that’s the way of the inner life-you dive into those dark waters where memory and magic live tangled together, and then you surface, gasping, amazed by snippets of blue sky between the branches of a willow tree.

Weimer continues:

You can’t stay too long in that realm of mystery and wonder. You’ve got to come up for air….

And when you do come up for air, the most amazing things happen.  For Weimer, it is seeing a way to come to peace concerning her mother’s offering and then withdrawing love.

 Weimer realizes, “Maybe this garden, not my desk, is the place for me to weed and water my memories of my mother.”  After you read this excerpt from Awestruck, brainstorm places you might go to foster memories of an unresolved relationship and find images that help you come to terms.

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We settle in. Come to terms with the alarm system, call friends, order tickets for concerts and plays, make a list of exhibits we want to see, locate the nearest public library. Then back to our writing. I unpack the files about labyrinths and pile them on a card table in the second bedroom where I’ve set up my laptop. I skim through some notes and reread some drafts to see if they’ve ripened since I looked at them in Samedan. Still hard and green. If I changed a few words here–no, the sen­tence was better the way it was. I move it to a different place, then move it back, write a new sentence and delete it.

I switch off the computer and wander down to the garden. Blue and white pansies have bolted in a rare June heat wave, and I pull out their spindly remains, thinking of the pan­sies my mother used to plant every spring just for me because I loved to pick them. She bought a special little vase to hold the pansies’ fragile stems, I remember, a narrow white crescent on four stubby legs. When I filled it with pansies I could press my nose against their velvety, fragrant faces and breathe in the spring.

July is too late for pansies, but I don’t think our landlady would mind if I plant some summer annuals in their place. At a nearby garden shop I wander the aisles, inhaling plants, touching leaves, perfectly happy for the first time since we arrived in England. I carry home a flat of white and purple petunias. Under my trowel, the soil feels more like chipped flints than dirt, but in a few weeks the petunias are branching and blooming. Every morning I bring my breakfast tea and muffin out to the garden, my sandwich at lunch time, the news­paper in the afternoon, dinner whenever we’re home. I water faithfully, pinch off dead flowers, tending the tiny garden as if it were Eden. David is amused by this new passion of mine.

“You don’t think you’re evading your writing, do you?” he asks.

“As soon as I figure out what I’m doing,” I tell him, “you’ll be the first to know.”

I cut some pink roses and paw through the kitchen closet looking for a vase. The roses don’t have much scent, not like the fragrant peach and yellow roses my mother grew in a back yard not much bigger than this little garden. I always brought her a blooming plant when I drove to Boston to visit her in her nursing home–cyclamen in blazing heliotrope or paper-white narcissus or yellow tulips edged in crimson. And I’d remind her of the plants she’d pampered in the bay window of the dining room on Winthrop Road–spider plants, begonias, African vio­lets.

“My green thumb’s turned black,” she’d say.

Maybe this garden, not my desk, is the place for me to weed and water my memories of my mother.

Late one evening my eyes are closing over a book when the phone rings. It’s my friend Sharon, calling from New Jersey.

“Joan, I bought the farm!” she says. Her excitement filters through the phone’s transatlantic crackle.

“What farm?” I ask sleepily. For years Sharon has wanted to move from the suburbs to a place with the open skies of the North Dakota farm where she grew up, but she can’t move far from the clients who come to her for psychotherapy.

“It’s perfect,” Sharon says. “Lovely house, acres of land and not too far away. But it costs more than I’d planned to spend, and my own house hasn’t sold yet. I could never have bought the farm without Mary’s help.”

“Mary who?”

“The Mary!” Sharon says. “Your Black Madonna. You know how anxious I get about money,” she goes on, “but Mary taught me to trust in the abundance of the universe. It’s been an enormous leap of faith. And Mary did it!”

No, I think. Nonsense. Not for one minute do I believe that “Mary did it,” not even when Sharon assures me that “her” Mary is no different from “my” Black Madonna, both of them part of one “Great Motherenergy.” I don’t care for the New Age ring of that phrase, but it’s not Sharon’s language that bothers me, I realize as we hang up. It’s her faith. I can’t feel a single volt of the spiritual electricity that lights up Sharon’s life. What­ever it was that surged through me at Loreto is gone.

That whiff of the miraculous has faded, I realize now, like the sachets of dried lavender my mother used to keep in her dresser drawers. As a child, I’d bury my face in the spicy per­fume of her satin slips and lacy nightgowns. Decades later, when I moved her things to a nursing home, I found a sachet in her drawer, so old and dry that no scent remained, not even after I crushed it in my hand and raised it to my face. The fra­grance lingered only in my memory. Powerful perfume, to sting my eyes now.

The smell of my mother’s sachet lives deep in my cells. Her glamour, and her meanness too, stays fresh no matter how many times I pluck it out of the drawer of memory. But my most vivid spiritual encounters-on the Ravenna labyrinth or in the Santa Casa, in Connie’s rooms or the Palazzo Grassi or the ancient church at Marsat–even these moments are starting to fade. Already they’re turning pale and dim like old photos, cracked and crumbled from too much handling. I pick one up and can’t be sure if I’m looking at a blaze of glory or just the glare of my own flashbulb reflecting off a mirror. Now Sharon hands me a sharp fresh image of faith, aglow with trust and wonder. And I feel–left behind. Left out.

That’s just how I felt when I watched people praying at the feet of the little black statue in Einsiedeln. It must be how David felt in Venice when I was reeling from one marvel to the next–out in the cold, excluded from a club he had no desire to join. I shiver as if a cold breeze were blowing across my neck and grab the afghan that’s draped over the back of the sofa. But it’s not every testimonial of faith that chills me. When Maria told me her story, she moved me to tears.

Maria was cutting my hair one day when she told me how she’d nearly left the Catholic church. She’d had three children in four years, was exhausted and ill, but the priest insisted that contraception was a sin.

And I knew it too. Her faith in a mother who would never die and abandon her must have kept alive her hope and with it, her child’s fragile body. It makes no difference if her faith was in something real or imagined. She believed she was held in the hands of an invisible power, and that trust pene­trated to her very cells.

Of course. I know how that feels. I wrap the afghan tighter around my shoulders. In the presence of black god­desses, my hands, my heart, even my bones have vouched for the presence of a vast power. So how is my experience different from what Sharon calls Great Motherenergy? I sit up straight and the afghan falls from my shoulders. What arrogance, to think that my body registers the presence of some sacred power but Sharon’s farm does not.

For the next week I find myself dozing over newspapers and falling asleep on buses. Writing is impossible. I’ll be going home with nothing to show for my sabbatical unless I find something to pierce this fog. If I were home I’d walk to the stream near our house. Flowing water always gives me some of its energy.

I look for a wavy blue line on our battered London map and follow it to a winding stream shaded by willows. I watch leaves floating in the water like capsized canoes, barely moving in the sluggish current, and see a perfect mirror of my torpid inner world. Five speckled brown ducks swim by, proceeding in a tidy line, beak to tail, as if they’d had a meeting and decided where to go and why. “You winged purposes,” Whit­man would call them. My own purposes have flown away, or lost their wings.

A solitary duck sails down the stream, sporting a feath­ery white muffler around her neck. Abruptly she turns upside down, red legs scrabbling in the air, tail feathers twitching. Maybe that’s the way of the inner life–you dive into those dark waters where memory and magic live tangled together, and then you surface, gasping, amazed by snippets of blue sky between the branches of a willow tree. You can’t stay too long in that realm of mystery and wonder. You’ve got to come up for air, even if you come up empty, like that duck who hasn’t found anything to eat in the muddy bottom of the stream.