Learning to explore more gently

My father named me Leif and challenged me to Life. I was going to be a boy, named for his favorite voyager of the moment: Leif Ericsson. Drawings of the Norseman and his great winged serpent of a boat, littered the floor in the months leading up to my birth. Leif the Lucky, son of Eric the Red, captured my artist father's imagination, and so I was named. My arrival in feminine form did nothing to change his decree.... My father's naming challenged me to continuous journeys of exploration.... A name can become an ideal to attain, a reason to go on striving, a longing to be the soul my father recognized and named. It can even instill the courage to move beyond my origin, discover the woman who lives beyond the man, and complete the journey (p. 103).
--Leif Anderson, Dancing with My Father, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

My favorite walking trail in Portland is named for the same explorer my dear friend Leif is named for. Her artist-father, Walter Anderson, chose that name for his third child before she was born, and today she walked with me on Leif Erikson Drive, among the mosses and the ferns, under the Douglas Firs and Cottonwoods, hoping to recover some strength for her onward journey. Leif is a dancer, a painter, a sculptor, a writer, a teacher, a mother and grandmother, and a precious friend, but she has worn herself out. She came to Portland to replenish and restore, to rest, and I think she has made a beginning. We are alike in many ways and most alike in our greed for life. Our delight in beauty, in action, in making and doing, wears us down to our last threads. As performers we disciplined ourselves to long hours and little sleep. As single mothers we taught classes to pay the bills, and as teachers we exhausted ourselves. We have long called each other "my reminder-er," because we remind each other to ease up, to rest, to allow for the beauty of imperfection and to say no to some things in order to say yes to a little solitude.

Leif writes in the book I quote above, "I think that my father's favorite motif was the spiral: the point become line that circles, opens, and evolves to infinity. You can hold a spiraled shell in the palm of your hand, but you cannot stop the spiral from unfolding. By its very nature, it tells of more to come; it is unending (p. 167)." I also love the spiral, and one of the peak experiences of my life was visiting some of the great monoliths in Ireland many years ago, touching the spirals inscribed in them. Leif brought me, as a birthday gift, a little ceramic cat inscribed with spirals.

Spirals are unending, but the human body has limits. Our fathers were dead before they were the age Leif and I are now, and we are trying to learn something they never did: how to let up, how to make ease a part of the journey. We are late coming to that lesson; we have not practiced; we aren't good at it. But maybe we can still get it.