Of Ash and Stone

 

Overlooking the charred remains of the once-mighty cathedral of Notre Dame from my tiny balcony I sat long and pondered its fate which I have always felt very tied to my own. I had come to bear witness, to see for myself with my own tear-filled eyes, the devastation in the wake of its darkest hours.

A year earlier, in the days before my father’s death, I had lit a candle for him during Sunday mass while the mighty organ intermingled its notes with the smoke from the flame of my candle and lifted them toward the heavens. I had always considered myself more spiritual than religious, but inside the walls of that cathedral, I felt whatever in my heart I believed God to be. It was a powerful place for me, a seemingly solid bastion impenetrable to the forces of the weary world around it. There was truly no place in my wildest imagination where its mighty presence was diminished. But the unthinkable and unimaginable often catch us off guard.

Watching the cathedral burn, even thousands of miles away on a small television screen, my heart was truly devastated. Seeing the pointed spire eventually succumb to the heat and flame and pierce the heart of the iconic cathedral with its dramatic fall, lifted me to my feet and stole the breath from my lungs. As it lay smoldering in the ashes for days afterward, the world watched and waited curious for its fate. For many long dark days, the cathedral sat in its silence, shrouded in wood walls and steel fences as the best minds worked to figure out how to save it.

Many months later I boarded a plane and with a heavy heart climbed the narrow winding stairway to my rented vacation home high above the narrow streets of Paris. I had originally hoped to hear the storied toll of the bells peal out their song of Paris. But when I opened the bedroom windows to the fresh air, the only music came from the gentle whisper of the city far below.

From my perfect quiet vantage point, I could see the stone parts of the church that still stood and from certain angles, you might not even know it had suffered such a devastating destruction at its core. The sidewalls and 2 commanding bell towers rose as they had always done but the buttresses, now held up with wooden beams like crutches under the once outstretched wings of the high altar and the roof, its fabled “Forest” named for the massive number of ancient trees used in its creation, now collapsed, burned to grey ash. The Great bell Emmanuel, its toll once the soul of the city, silent now in the bell tower, its weight a feared burden on what was left of the integrity of the tower that held it.

The cathedral was me.

From the outside you saw what you have always seen, a façade mostly intact and to the naked eye only small signs of the devastation that lies underneath. But when you looked closer you saw there was no light, save a few small flickers dull and almost indiscernible from hidden stairways inside, only visible on the darkest of nights. There was no song like there once was, only deafening silence. At its core it was empty, ravaged by a fire that burned hot and fast and broke even the strongest beams. It was gutted, left buried in ash, and underneath the piles of rubble and remains of what once was, it waits still to be reborn. Its renaissance slow to come with fears of further collapse and uncertainly of how to stabilize it.

No one knew exactly what was under the ash but with the cathedral we were all certain there was something there, in the stone, something unbreakable even amidst the worst of the destruction; a base from which to rebuild. This was the one thing I was not sure the cathedral and I had in common.

So much had happened in such a short span of a year. It seemed like only yesterday I had summited a mountain, 100 pounds lighter than when I stood at its base 10 years prior. But standing on the top of that mountain at the absolute pinnacle of my health, my career flourishing, my life on some apparent fast track to perceived happiness, I had no idea how quickly things were to change. It was as if at the summit of that mountain, I had stepped into a portal to another reality, one where I would be forced to watch helplessly as the life I had worked so hard to create, disintegrated to dust in front of my eyes. First, from all the things that were completely out of my control and then eventually at the sacrifice of everything I still did.

As I had been changing, so too had the world been changing. But like a cosmic scale, it began shifting its weight to the wrong side. I had apparently been going about my life happily oblivious to it. But now all that had been evolving in the shadows was now upon me all at once. Behind the curtain, corporate hands were working to downsize and gut thousands of jobs including my own. Fear and ignorance would begin to silently crush the moral compass of so many close to me creating isolation from long-held support and ends to relationships I once held dear. But first and most certainly worse, a microscopic cell of cancer worked unseen in the darkness to flourish, propagate and consume my father taking his life within weeks of his diagnosis.

Like a lead brick to the face, it took me down blow after blow. Weak and on the ground, life slid its cold hands around my neck but failed to end my suffering. It held me there, suspended in time and place. Unable to cope, I again turned to my food addiction, backsliding into the abyss from whence I came. Eating to dull the pain. In every way, I felt my life slipping away from me. I was angry, scared, and grief-stricken, immersed in the thought of an uncertain future.

I had returned to Paris that long year after my father’s death, to stare into the mirror of my soul that was the ravaged cathedral. But I was uncertain what a true and honest view of the destruction would accomplish. Maybe the connection of a kindred spirit. Possibly being amongst the rubble in more than just a figurative sense. But I believe what drew me there, above all else, was hope. I guess I had imagined that if I saw a faint shadow of hope for the cathedral, then there would also be hope for me as well. That in the reflection of myself, I would somehow see a path from which to rise from the ashes.

But the cathedral had rallied itself a world of support and a solid base to rebuild. This is where the reflection diverged. I was alone in my endeavor. If I was to rise it would be only of my own hands. But it felt as if this level of devastation was beyond repair. Was I even capable of that kind of rebirth? Or the bigger question, was there even stone somewhere far below the piles of ash and rubble for me to uncover?

I would ponder those thoughts as I made my way through the enlightenment of the rest of the journey ahead of me. Like puzzle pieces falling into their rightful place, they slowly revealed the canvas I failed to see amidst their small moments.

Stepping onto the platform from my Paris train to the streets of London a well-spoken, well-dressed older gentleman stopped abruptly in front of me. He spoke to me in French asking for directions. I explained in my muddled weak attempt at the language that I only spoke a small bit of French and asked if he spoke English. Right away he began easily speaking in English and said he was glad I was English, I believe assuming me to be British and not an American. He referred to “our” superior standing, mumbled a few words in what I believed to be German and then back to English where he changed the subject quickly. As we followed the long corridors to the exit, we spoke of Hollywood movie stars and well-groomed gardens, of education and what it was like to be a child. It seemed like forever before we entered the customs area.

The crowd poured from the train like water on stone down the ramp. The customs agents stood side by side like a wall at the bottom. As we descended in earshot the old man, still conversing with me, paused and loudly announced “We are white!! There is no need to search us!! We are not the problem! We are white!”

The noisy crowd fell suddenly silent. I was in shock and just stood there with my eyes wide and mouth hanging open at his bold and unapologetic supremacy. I held my breath as I waited for someone to speak up. No one did. I waited for some sort of collective condemnation from the crowd around me, disgusted whispers or mumbled obscenities, a furrowed brow. Some indication that everyone there did not agree with his racist sentiment. There was none. Only those around me pretending to have not heard, fiddling with their bags or nervously feigning distraction.

Finally, a customs agent holding the line in front of us who was not white replied quietly, almost under her breath, “Oh you ARE the problem”. Her fellow colleagues just shook their heads in absolute silence and let us pass as if this behavior was a regular occurrence. And like the other 100 people on that ramp, I bowed my head and said nothing.

I quickly distanced myself from this man as we exited the station, politely acknowledging our brief interaction with a nod of my head as I disappeared into the crowd. But that moment, like a bad melody, played over in my mind for days beyond. I pondered it in the silence as my anguished head pressed the pillow unable to sleep. I considered it like a grey cloud rising from the tube station grates enveloping me as I rushed along the rainy streets of London. I ruminated on it through the steam pouring off the brim of hot tea in the still morning hours when our minds stray to the unresolved.

Somewhere along the way, I had stopped defending what was right. In the long empty hours of sleepless nights, I considered where this started for me. At no time in my life had I ever witnessed the scope and breadth of hatred like I had in those years and since. It was truly unprecedented, the divide and the rage. I have always known that in the shadows there were those who held fast to beliefs passed down through generations, hating and not even knowing why. But I believed they were few and I certainly did not imagine them in my circle of friends. I did not consider such ignorance in the bodies of the supposedly educated.

There was a time when I was outspoken, openly calling for justice, standing boldly in defense of honor and decency. I believed, mistakenly, that the torch wielders were on the periphery. That the people around me were generally good people. But all at once society peeled back the skin and burned my eyes with what I saw. It shocked me, traumatized me so much that it silenced me, by voice and by pen.

Everything I thought I had always known was false. And then when I was fallen and broken, when I needed the hand of my father’s guidance the most, he too was taken from me, stolen in the night by a cancer as deadly and destructive as the cancer our society was facing. And through all of it, I was silent. I had been so, long before my feet touched that customs ramp. And every time, in the safety of my own mind, I allowed myself to believe that it was okay as long as I was a good person, as long as I didn’t believe and act with the same malice as they did. Unable to acknowledge that my silence was complicity.

The years leading up to these moments had been so much more than your basic disagreements, so much deeper sown than party lines and policies. But I ignored it, expecting it to go away, for the pendulum to swing back to rational thought and kindness all on its own. I had closed my eyes and plugged my ears and worst of all, I had closed my mouth and backed up slowly into the shadows.

Who had I become in that silence? Had I lost my foundation? Why was I not the voice against the hatred he was spouting? Why did I not speak up in that moment or in the many moments before? Was I afraid to be the only voice? I will not say that in the back of my mind I did not consider that in this new strange world I had come to know, the very real possibility existed that indeed mine may have been the only voice against him. I feared it. I somehow feared being the only voice for justice more than I feared losing myself to the silence.

I believed the old man on the Paris train was the problem, but possibly it was the other 100 that stood silent to him that were the real problem. Maybe, I was the problem.

In this moment of reflection, I realized that my father’s death was not the ember starting the fire on my soul as I had once thought. That flame was lit possibly much earlier and burned steady and slowly and unchecked. My father’s death was merely the mighty wind upon it. It was the oxygen leaving my lungs at once and fanning the flame, stirring it to rage and burn with the fuel of a forest inside me. I had not only lost my hope for humanity, but I had lost the one person who most had the capacity to guide me back. And I slipped deeper into the darkness, the fire consuming and burning everything in its path. The raging inferno collapsing an already weakened structure and gutting the heart of me.

But although the busy streets of London had revealed to me the path I had walked to weakness, it also held an unexpected gift to me that I was unaware would present itself in the strangest of ways.

My husband was book shopping near Leicester Square and I was outside taking in the hustle and bustle of the street corner. Like a slow-motion movie, it plays over in my mind. There were pastries in the shop window, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the sounds of car horns, and a far-off ambulance siren. Voices and colors danced across the detailed architecture of old buildings. I enjoy breathing in a city with its sights and sounds and everyday motion. The moment was like a painting in my mind allowing me to inhale the random chaos and exhale a sense of contentment.

As I turned my gaze from the corner shop window, I saw 2 young Asian girls, clearly tourists enamored with the sights around them, unaware of their immediate surroundings, immersed in the excitement of London. One of the girls had a large, zippered purse on her back and behind them both, an older woman and man close on their heels. The streets of a big city move quickly and often people invade our personal space, but something seemed wrong. For reasons unknown, it held my gaze.

The old woman reached up and carefully unzipped the young girl’s purse and then removed a large red wallet. Although happening in slow motion replayed in my mind, it took only mere seconds to occur in real time. At first, I thought maybe they knew each other, and she had been asked to retrieve it, but when she slipped it into her coat and the man and woman quickly turned into the crowd brushing past me in their haste, I knew exactly what I was witnessing.

It is amazing how quickly our minds can process what is happening and translate it instantaneously to our bodies for reaction. I hesitated for a split second. Like a frozen breath in a moment where a thousand lifetimes flash before your eyes. And then one thought alone above all else. I will not allow this injustice again before my eyes. I will not be silent.

I pushed through the tightly packed mob and quickly grabbed the arm of the young girl pointing frantically toward the woman who was making her way up the street. “Follow me! That woman stole your wallet!” The girl, panicked, confused and in shock, her zippered bag still hanging open, stayed on my heels as I darted through the crowd. We finally confronted the older woman in the doorway of a shop she and her accomplice were slipping into. They acted like they didn’t speak English and didn’t understand me but after I recounted quite loudly the story of her removing it from the girl’s purse, she produced it from her coat and then acted like she had found it on the ground, handed it begrudgingly back to the young girl and the team disappeared quickly making their hasty exit back into the protective curtain of the surrounding crowd.

Standing in the doorway the young girl thanked me in her own broken English, obviously still reeling from what had happened, her eyes wide, clutching her wallet closely to her chest. I warned her to keep her bag in front of her and be watchful. With that advice I bid her a pleasant day, turned, and exited back onto the street.

I was breathless for quite a bit, dizzy, my head swimming in the chaos of what had just happened, my senses heightened and my adrenaline pumping through my body blurring my vision. The people around me stared at me and then went on their way or pushed past pretending to not know what they had witnessed. I was literally shaking to my core as I ducked inside the bookstore to process what had just happened.

As I slowly recounted the story to my husband, I pondered what made me act when I was with 100 other people on that street who did nothing and the futility of the situation in that she was just one of many targets for that team that day, targets who would not likely be as lucky to have a random stranger step in and interrupt the intended course. He said, “You may have only been one person in one moment but because of you that girl’s vacation wasn’t ruined. To that one girl, your actions meant everything.”

My husband has always been as much of a romantic as I was. But as I recounted the story to friends and family, I was met with more pragmatic responses wondering if I considered that I might have been killed by confronting thieves or why I didn’t just call the police instead of handling it myself. My only reply was that sudden minutes often lack the luxury of time. One does not stand in an inferno and weigh their options. For better or worse, we decide those actions outside the boundaries of everything rational.

I still remember watching the news footage after the Boston bombing and in the replay against the crowd of people racing away from the smoke you would see a few people, for unexplainable reasons rushing back, removing their own clothing to make tourniquets for the injured, caring for total strangers, staying by the side of those unable to move simply so they would not be alone, risking their own lives in those fast moments. They had no time to consider their response. They did what was in their nature. They were the ones acting against instinct and instead calling upon what lay deep in their personal stone.

In the moments where you have only seconds to decide to act, it is not our calculated choices or the weighing of options that initiate our response. It is pure and untouched character. It is what exists within the stone in all of us. It is who we are at our core, raw and unfiltered. It is devoid of logic or reason or the wisdom of our age. It is free of prejudice and contemplation. The actions of our hands in the split-second moments when we cannot conceive the outcome are just as valuable, if not more so, than the ones we long calculate and plan for. Because they are an exceedingly rare glimpse into what exists deep inside of us, unseen to our own eyes and unknown to our waking mind. They are what exists in the ether. They are the true heart and essence of our souls. In the brief and unexpected seconds when we gain a rare glimpse into this hidden part of us, when the light of the universe like collected shards of glass pierce through the darkness and reveal themselves, we find ultimate clarity.

In that moment for me, my actions were completely in line with who I have always believed myself to be, the person my father raised me to be. They revealed clearly what lay untouched within the solid stone. I needed only to seek to release it, expand it and allow that new fire to rebuild instead of destroy. Knowing I had a solid place to start from meant everything to me. In that moment that I acted to stop that theft, I unexpectedly rediscovered a part of me under the rubble I long feared was lost. It was an awakening, a chance to choose my humanity over my human fears. It was the first time in a long time I had heard and acted unquestionably in alignment with the voice inside of me.

In the days that followed I had found a strange peace. I was reminded that no matter how broken, we are all capable of extending our hands in moments of trial and need, lifting up our voices to empower change and inspire solidarity, to seek daily in uncertain times the gifts that lay hidden and protected in the solid rock.

It is not about knowing what is at the core of everyone else, or worse, fearing it. It is about knowing 100% what is at yours and allowing that to be enough to change the world.

Rebuilding starts from the bottom up and that evening I found a perfect physical representation of that in a pair of fabulous sequined Phoenix boots in a little shop in Soho. Arise you fabulous, winged creature. Breathe in the ashes of the past and let them recreate you. You cannot change the other 100 people on the street corner with you. You can’t alter their core or change who they are. But you can rebuild yourself from the jewels of what has always been.

Paris reminded me that I am broken and lost in the flames of these years; that I am ash. London reminded me that I am also stone.