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My middle brother, with whom I have a difficult past, shared an evening with me last night, the first time he'd visited me at my home in decades (because I usually see him in our home state). Warmed and emboldened by some bourbon, I began to ask about his memories of our old neighborhood, and the wild -- really, quite feral -- upbringing we had in the woods of Kentucky.

We approached the topic tentatively, as we do most discussions of the past, having shared so much beauty and horror both, yet interpreting them differently, sometimes in baffling and hurtful ways. We reminded each other of neighbors long forgotten, as well as injuries both physical and psychic, along with memories of the magical acres we explored -- free to wander at ages 5 and 6 and 7! -- in the caves and gulleys and woods and bottomlands.

I suppose the liquor "unarmed" me -- and my question unarmed him -- but this time we approached the topic with curiosity and kindness, maybe a benefit of having reached our fifth decade together? I was well pleased that old ammunition of "this is my truth" had faded and we simply existed in each other's wisdom, acknowledging that both warp and weth create the fabric of life.

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Oh I'm so happy for you that you have a brother. I have three. I can relate to this conversation so much. My brothers and I have had many around campfires. It is my belief that brothers and sisters can write rewrite the past (and their futures) with a fierce and fearless tenderness none can match.

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I have three (all a year apart).

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What beautiful joy you shared here.

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Ah yes the wisdom and suppleness of aging in and by grace.

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What a gift.

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So beautiful, heartwarming and hopeful

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that old ammunition of "this is my truth" - I love this!

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Yes, the past has things to say. I often feel ambushed by a memory of something my younger self did or said, and feel a tremendous wave of regret and shame and sorrow. I'm not talking about serious crimes, but of the everyday failures of presence and wisdom that are common in the young. In my case, because I was so young when my children were born, I feel that they were the ones who suffered from my selfishness and immaturity. Learning to forgive myself and have compassion for that young girl is an on going challenge. I am trying to be open to the snipper fire from the past, to have a more expansive view, to remember the good times, to learn what I need to learn from the past so that I can live more in the present.

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I hear you and feel you, Kathryn! thank you for putting it so: "the everyday failures of presence and wisdom"... ohhh, fellow traveler! (also, I was just talking with a friend and realizing that every single one of my friends who is a mother has at some point shared with me how they feel they have failed, fucked up...). and maybe that sniper fire is just a burst of brilliant starlight calling your wise compassion to expand even more, to hold all of you. (what I try, try, try again, to do for myself).

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Maya Angelou's words when you know better do better are my comfort in those predator memories. When we were young and inexperienced, we did not know better.

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Yes, this is one of my favourite quotes too, such an encouragement.

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As someone who was raised by parents that were only 21 and 19 when I was born, I can say that I am happy I got to see them when they were "immature" because that made it feel normal later when I was "immature" and needed to learn. I guess since it felt so natural to me I'm always perplexed instead at how any child raised by already "mature" parents would know how to "grow up". : )

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I love this comment, having been (almost) 19 years old when my first child was born.

I had an aunt who liked to say that my sons and I 'grew up together'. The benefit for me seemed to be that I was too young to know to be nervous about mothering, I kind of rolled with it, especially after divorcing at 23! The memories from those years aren't 'rusty ammunition,' thank goodness. They are reminders that I trusted my instincts. If I sometimes got it wrong. I did no lasting harm and my sons are resilient men.

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It seems to me, from my experience, that children raise parents as much as the other way around. They usher in a new sort of becoming.

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What a refreshing perspective! Thank you, Christina, for sharing. XO

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What a refreshing perspective! Thank you, Christina, for sharing. XO

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Wishing you continued grace in your future past ambushes

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I feel exactly this. ‘Sniper fire’ is just the absolute perfect term!

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yes!

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Kathryn, this is incredibly vulnerable. Thank you for sharing this. We ALL make mistakes, whether young or elder. We each have a unique journey that is just as valuable as anyone else's. Others may seem to live perfect and/or beautiful lives, but, in reality, are just as crazy as anyone's. The past is firmly in the past. Take the lessons and bloom, just bloom. XO

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love to you and every you - you've all done your best

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Ambushed, yes, that is exactly the word. And "a tremendous wave of regret and shame and sorrow." Thank you for articulating this.

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May you be showered with more self love and self compassion.

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Thank you.

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The past is often a shy visitor,

hiding when you try to call.

But put on the music from those good ol’ days

and watch her dance like no one’s watching!

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‘Unarmed if any meet her’ - what can we arm ourselves with? I find the militarism of the second stanza fascinating - there’s a practice of history which focuses on wars and generals and Great Men which bores me to tears, but this ammunition seems more dangerous for being faded- the disgrace perhaps which has lain buried in the lower recesses of our consciousness which once uncovered greets us with the sharp and formidable truth of our shortcomings.

What can we arm ourselves with? When we can, surely we must choose love.

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yes!!!

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Yes Christie! I had the same impression…the same curiosity about what we might arm ourselves with for an exploration of the past. It seems that often we are armed with shame, guilt, denial, censorship, fear of self, fear of “other”, fear of want, fear of excess…what a revolution it would be if our deployment into the past were equipped with LOVE as you propose!

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Her angry Ammunition

Might be laid to rest.

And may the dominant figures of this present world have the courage to lay down their arms, see themselves in the eyes of their neighbors across the road, across borders.

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I think Emily's alternate ending speaks to my relationship to the past. Rusty ammuniton still has the power to bring me to my knees. For me the past is whitewater, and I am in my small kayak trying to navigate and avoid the rocks. I fear that I may collide with a memory or be drowned in one. Much therapy has helped me to pilot my little boat with greater confidence. I have a life vest now, for which I am grateful. And yet the past also has less perilous things to say to me. Moments of great joy: walking in the high desert of New Mexico after a thunderstorm, the scent of rain-washed sagebrush enveloping me. Exquisite petrichor that evokes transcendence. I am slowly finding that each rock in my whitewater - and some of them are mountainous - is balanced by these moments of joy (usually related to wilderness). I am finding calm stretches in my river now, and I am deeply thankful for them.

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Thank you Erin, for your beautifully described experience of a life in which 'rusty ammunition [which] can bring me to my knees' and you have 'a life vest', both coexisting in the present moment. The joy (as a word nerd) of being reintroduced to 'petrichor' - an old friend I had forgotten. Inspired to look at its origin I find it was first coined in 1964 by to Australian scientists. I was born and live in Australia and there needed to be a word that describes the smell that arises after rain falls through the eucalyptus trees and onto the sun-baked red soil at the end of an Australian summer! This is today's small happiness (chiisa na shiawase). 🙏

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“For me the past is white water” - this and the metaphor of a kayak amidst it is close to how I experience confronting the past. Not as a battle (‘ammunition”) but skill and grit.

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I am struck by the word "unarmed". With what do I "arm" myself when facing the past? Then the question morphed in my mind to something more akin to items I might take along to the deserted island of my past. Here is my "short list":

1. Trepidation. Watching through my fingers, as it were.

2. A companion to steady, cheer, hold, ____ me, as needed.

3. Fortitude. A bit of practice or training is extraordinarily useful.

4. A sound track, mood dependent.

5. A pen and paper. My literary camera.

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The eons of my past hang around me as ever ready as my dogs

- and as unpredictable

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Her faded Ammunition

Might yet reply. Could Emily be implying that with time the ammunition of certitude fades, evaporates and the endless possibilities then continue to open within us and around us?

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I found Dickinson’s wording, “I charge him fly”, odd. Not a warning to ‘avoid’ but perhaps a warning against naivety when turning to face the past. And the personification of the past as “her” and the audience as “him” … what to make of that? (I’m sure there is a biographical or historical significance to it.) It brings to mind the notion that facts are neutral, objective, simply the way things are/were. When we turn back to the past and face her — truly face at her, not a refraction or a shadow or a mirage — she has the capacity to wound and enthrall. On the one hand, this capacity isn’t good or bad: the past is the past, and it isn’t necessarily an indictment of us. And yet, it can be, or at least it can be a reminder that our present was both born of the past and a pre-manifestation of future. We would be wise to remember she carries “faded ammunition” still capable of wounding.

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I come to Emily’s poem just after having spent an evening with friends connected lightly and occasionally over 4 to 5 decades to celebrate reaching an age. I looked at and through the past in the eyes of my friends. We talked of shared experiences; I learned that one shared experience was much more painful for my friend than it had been for me. We mostly focused, though, on experiences together or since, with others, that brought us laughter.

We were transported backwards and forwards without intrusions of disgrace.

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Having just watched a video of the brilliant, creative soul that is ALOK (poet, comic, actor, fashion icon, writer) talk about living in beauty, what strikes me about Emily’s poem is the fluidity of gender. A surface reading is that “the past” is female and “anyone” is male, and I do wonder if Emily conveys a more expansive sense of them. Her minimalism seems an invitation into the mystery of categories.

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Emily was a hermit but she still had lots of suitors because society would not accept her as she was. She has other poems where she describes young men trying to visit her. She was grateful for a father who seemed to "get" her.

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Coincidentally, i was thinking of the past last night when i showed my 16 year-old the time span of my life so far (65 years) applied backwards into the past which, born in 1959, takes us back to 1894. I thought of this exercise a few weeks ago and hadn't gotten around to doing the simple arithmetic. And i was startled by several feelings as I considered that past from before i was born. Those years from 1894 to 1959 seemed almost a volcanic eruption of abundance - so much happened - it felt almost unimaginable. Dickinson's "Transport" and "Disgrace" perfectly capture some of these feelings. My grandparents (in both Ireland and Acadia) were born in the 1890s and they became immigrants as young people, my Irish grandparents to Scotland and my Acadian grandparents to Waltham outside of Boston where the fish factories offered jobs. I spent decades trying to get my parents to tell me of their pasts. But their reticence in death is only slightly stronger than it was in life. Their refusal to share anything of their pasts was bewildering and, as i grew older, filled me more and more with feeling bereft. I applied good ole Holmes-ian deductive and inductive reasoning. I found many "dogs" that did not "bark" and figured out a few things. But when I did the "past" time-arithmetic last night, i experienced that "Transport" that Dickinson writes of. I felt a connection with those years that all my investigation and study (and i've studied a lot of history) had never made me feel. And while i felt no "Disgrace," it did occur to me (as it has before) that my parents were harbouring some shame or sorrow or loss (or disgrace, of course) that they simply could not bear to think about. All I have are clues and shadows and that will have to do even though it leaves me profoundly sad. Thank-you, Pádraig, for this prompt and for all your curiosity shared in these posts, all and each of which always feels like a gift.

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Wow Chris, I appreciate this long view of our person-ness. It offers a somewhat more forgiving and rich mountaintop view of our experiences where there is perspective and room to breathe. And I’m fascinated by the questions we ask about our family stories. I’ve been working on a biography of a little known woman who lived close to where I live but about 200 years ago. There are some big questions about her without answers (so far). What I’m interested in is why I choose the questions I do. I wonder if I’m trying to answer something for me as well in the process.

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In my own such investigations i am certainly, in part, seeking answers about "something for me." I don't how it could be otherwise. When we follow our curiosity is it not always tethered to something in ourself for which we are seeking connection? "Answers," i've learned are pretty elusive though. And what we learn when we pose questions doesn't always feel like an answer to the question we posed nor any question that we imagined. Which reminds me of one of my favourite stories of all time and which my 16 year old knows well enough that as we walked to school this week, he quipped the story back to me apropos of something in his life about which we were speaking:

One day a devoted Talmudic student ran out of the synagogue shouting, “What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life?” He ran through the streets shouting all the while. He found himself before the house of his Rabbi. He went inside and, almost in tears, pleaded, “What is the meaning of life, master?” The rabbi slapped the student across the face. “Why did you hit me,” asked the startled student. The rabbi answered: “Such a good question. And you want to exchange it for an answer? It is the answers that keep us apart. It is the questions that unite us!”

It occurs to me that the questions that you refer to "choosing" are the very tools we use in seeking connection with others. I really appreciate you mentioning your work on the biography of someone who lived close to where you live now. I have tended to focus on family members (perhaps on account of having been denied so much information) and I have not thought about the people that lived around them and you've made me realize that i can expand my focus and perhaps "see" stuff that has been invisible to me thus far. So thank-you for that.

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Thank you Chris. I love what you express about how questions foster connections.

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Thank you for pointing to that Conan Doyle observation of dogs that did not bark as a focus of curiosity and finding understanding.

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various associations come to mind…

1) a sentence I read once, I’ve forgotten by who, but i have repeated it many times, esp in the context of my therapeutic work: “you can’t change the past, but you can change how you think about the past, how you feel about the past, and that can change everything.”

2) as I read this poem and think of the “unarmed if any meet her” and then “I charge him fly” and feel confused about the “him” and then the faded or rusty ammunition - two words that have very different connotations, to me, and ammunition faded or rusty that can reply or destroy, I think of the way the current dominant discourse around criticism of the state of Israel and its actions gets labeled as anti-Semitic, and even “genocidal” - ie; those who are protesting the massacring of tens of thousands of people, the targeting of hospitals, schools, journalists, aid workers… a number that the British medical journal The Lancet put at an estimated 186,000 back in July of this year, with most of the verified deaths in just the first 10 months of this aggression documented in children between the ages of 5 and 9, the second highest number of deaths occurring in those btwn 10-14 years of age, and the third most number of deaths in those between 0-4 years of age - according to the UN Human Rights Office.

And yet somehow, wearing a Palestinian scarf, using words calling for liberation of a people living for decades under occupation, under siege and now bombardment, forced starvation, domicide, genocide, chants calling for an end to these atrocities, gets labeled as “genocidal speech”? So to Emily Dickinson’s poem - it seems that the past here - memory of the past - of unbelievably horrific and traumatic events of the past, is being used to justify a present that would and should be intolerable to any feeling thinking decent caring human being. This weaponizing of past atrocities and traumas, to justify committing atrocities now, generating more trauma for generations to come … and the language used to describe those protesting this as “genocidal” and banning and punishing those who speak up against this.. this comes to mind as I read Emily Dickinson’s poem and your reflections and inquiry, Pádraig.

Is it, how is it possible to use our wounded past to grow our empathy and compassion?

3. another association: at the moment my mom passed from the realm of the living to the realm of, the ancestors as some say, at the moment she died, though I am not liking the sound of that word lately, so heavy, too much “duh”.. at the moment she crossed the veil, I felt as if a veil was ripped away from my eyes and suddenly I could see my mom only through the eyes of love. I’ve loved my mom, she knows this, she knew this, I’ve felt it, I expressed it, all of that, yes. But in the moment when my mom as a creature, a curious and extraordinary creature, in this realm of living “passed” as it’s often referred to, or became “past” - the lens through which I view her - consistently - were cleared of obscurations, leaving love as the only lens. Whereas, I who am still in this realm of the living, look to the past, to my actions and inactions of the past, not through these same lenses, but through a hazy gaze that senses it could have been different, ie, I could have been different, said it more or less, understood it more, reacted less, … a lens that senses there is and was control… therefore regret… therefore condemnation…. of course love too is a lens, but it gets fogged up… I suspect there are some liberating stories that can emerge from this... to be generated/revealed! also, when I try to view someone else particularly one who I am challenged by, still in the realm of the living, through the eyes I can see my mom through - that can see and sustain that seeing through to what is most essential - I find it nearly impossible. The past… a curious creature indeed.

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Thank you, Mona, for articulating all this. I'm struggling with much of the same!

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Thank you Pádraig- transport—is what grabs me from the poem, and what the past does to me— I gather more past, thinking of my own, studying the collective past. I recently stared at photos from 1915, people/ acrobatic aviators posing next to their fragile planes- a certain daring look, bravado- I was ultimately grateful to be transported from the present of my moment, to what I projected in that past. As always, thank you (and the community lovely ponderings) for the prompt.

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What strikes me here is not being ambushed by what I remember but by what I don’t. After many absent years I am now talking with my middle brother. We are four years apart so I hardly know him really. I find though that when we talk he has such vivid family memories. I am always saying, “really?” Early alcohol use didn’t help at all I know. Ah well

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I get ‘ambushed’ when I remember and siblings do not. The keeper of memories, I draw them out of others but always acknowledge my memories are my experience; it’s okay they may have forgotten.

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My youngest sibling, who is 12 years my junior, is the one most likely to ambush me. My memories of growing up include close experiences with our mother even if there were also confusing and painful moments. But our mother died tragically when K was only 11, and the years before that were wracked by depression and alcohol abuse, so, rarely easy. I was out of the house & married by then, so, didn't experience what the last 4 sibs did. For the older siblings, telling a story about our childhood memories related to our parents brings out the rusty ammunition in HER memory which gets aimed at anyone of us. She resents hearing those stories and considers us insensitive for sharing them in her presence. So, I 'fly'....

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