what I've learned from life, by Mary Elyn Bahlert
The sky, deep, in autumn
rests deeper in the heavens,
deeper as if it has reached a peak,
the peak of color, of light,
deeper as if creator’s brush
has found the darkest color
and presented it to us for our delight.
If we are watching,
if our eyes are open, waiting with great patience,
if we are watching, waiting –
we disappear into the deepness,
we are set free from the troubles of earth,
we fly into the freedom.
Mary Elyn Bahlert, 09/15/2025
Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/11/2020
I’m always delighted to walk under the Gingko trees in Mountain View Cemetery near our house in Oakland. The branches are full and leaf out over the sidewalk as we pass under them, the shade protecting us from the afternoon sun here in Oakland. And gingko trees hold special memories for me.
When I was a student at Washington High School in Milwaukee, an English teacher gave us the assignment of finding the gingko trees in Sherman Park, a few blocks to the north of the high school, along Burleigh Street. And so I took a walk through the park, looking upward into the trees and finding the ginkgo trees, collecting a few leaves to take with me to complete the assignment.
The upper flat we lived in during my high school years was on North 49 Street, in the block south of Burleigh, and so those trees stood only a few blocks to the east of where my family lived. Many times, I walked through the streets from Center to Burleigh, stamping through the leaves on autumn days, or quickening my pace during the winter as I skirted around icy places on the cement.
The streets were beautiful then, the branches of elm trees and a few maples meeting overhead and over the road, lush green in the summer and bright orange and red in the autumn.
Sometimes, I like to walk along those streets in my memory. They formed an audience to the person I was becoming. And those streets marked the edges of what I knew, even in the years after I stood in a doorway of our flat, looked out into the street, and said aloud: “I don’t belong here.”
I didn’t know it then, but my path would take me far away from those narrow streets, those crowded flats. I didn’t know it then, but I would live for many years in northern California, for many more years than I walked home from school under the trees whose branches covered me, followed me home.
Gingko leaf, from a tree in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland photo by meb, 9/2025
Our house on Ring Street stood right next to the alley, and from the porch of our upper flat I could see my Grandma Markowski in her long black coat, her head covered in a cotton scarf, as she made her way from her house on Burleigh Street to our house – walking in the alley. Grandma was a babushka, a peasant woman from Ukraine who came to the United States with my Grandpa; he had left his home to find a better life for himself and his children.
The alley was lined on either side with garages. My dad rented a garage down the alley to keep our car out of the weather. When I was a child, we children played outside for hours, close to home when we were little, and farther away as we grew. From the front porch or the small back porch outside our kitchen door at the back, my mother could keep an eye on me as I played.
I have a memory from those times, when I was very young. I am in the bath tub, and Mom is helping me with my bath. As she runs a washcloth over me, and without looking at me, Mom says: “I saw you hit a little girl when you were playing today.”
“That wasn’t me – that was another little girl who looked just like me.”
I see Mom turn her head away, a smile coming to her face. She liked to call me, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”.
One of the favorite games of kids in my neighborhood those days was playing Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, our television heroes, whose show we watched faithfully every Saturday morning, one in a line-up of shows for children that aired – a new episode every week. Randy Larson, a neighbor boy my age who lived in a flat around the corner on 12th street, played Roy Rogers to my Dale Evans. And one day, as we played our parts, riding our bikes in place of horses – skinny, blond-haired Randy Larson leaned over from the seat of his bike and planted a kiss on my cheek! We laughed!
*
My mother always kept up to date on happenings in Milwaukee. And she read the obituaries, faithfully, in The Milwaukee Journal. If something or someone of note to me had had their name mentioned, she made sure to tell me. And so, one day, I had the news from my mother that Randy Larson had been killed in Vietnam.
In 2015, Jeff and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet up with our good friends and traveling buddies from the U.K. – Pat and Tone. While there, we visited the Vietnam Memorial. I had long wanted to see the Memorial, the Vietnam War having made a mark on me as it had on all members of my generation. I looked for Randy’s name on the register, and found his name engraved on the Memorial.
Just another working class kid, a kid who died serving in a War that was not declared a War, his name a memory on a wall.
We trek to a place of solitude,
this lonely place, to sit,
to listen to the water, to the wind, to the silence:
the silence speaks to us as we walk, as we sit.
And in this lonely place the loneliness drains from us –
from our arms, our legs, our beating hearts –
richness fills us:
the voices of the pines, the balsam, and the birch
which call out to us in the wind.
Gentle, the breeze ruffles the needles, the leaves.
We have searched – endlessly –
for this place:
for the solitude that is in loneliness,
for the depth that is boundless,
without form.
Here, the emptiness fills us,
completes us.
—Mary Elyn Bahlert, “At Solitude Swale,” Door County, Wisconsin, 5/2025
“So he said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” 7 Then the man got up and went home.” Matthew 9:6b-7
This really happened to me. I swear (if I need to).
In the early 2000’s, I was happily working as a Pastor in downtown Oakland, a perfect place and a perfect, diverse community for me to serve. And then it hit. One day, a pain developed in my lower left jaw. Of course, I went to the dentist to have him take a look, to get the toothache taken care of. I arrived in the doctor’s office early one Saturday morning, and methodically, he numbed one tooth after another in my mouth, and methodically, we both waited for me to announce that the pain was gone. He was looking for the culprit, the one tooth that was causing me pain.
After several hours in the dentist’s chair (and have I mentioned that I cringe even now at the thought of needles?), we both ascertained that the pain in my jaw was not caused by a tooth. There.
And so I was left to go about my life for almost a year and a half, living with the pain that had mysteriously arrived and mysteriously stayed.
I tried massage – neck massage, back massage. The pain persisted. One day, I made an appointment with a Rosen Method therapist, a woman in Berkeley whose work I admired and trusted. Miriam was working on me that day – she had her hands on me -and as she worked, I began silently to pray: “please Jesus, help me!”
Miriam stopped moving her hands and stepped back from the table. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before,” she said. “but have you tried Feldenkreis work?”
Like most of you – I suspect – I had not heard of Feldenkreis work. But I left Miriam’s office that day with the name and phone number of an acquaintance of hers who lived in another city in the Bay Area. And that afternoon, I called and made an appointment with Iren.
I arrived in Iren’s office for my appointment, not knowing what to expect. First she had me walk through the short hall from her reception area to the room where she did her work as she watched. Then she had me – fully clothed – lay on the low massage table in a small room where she worked. She set to work on me as I lay quiet, not hoping, not expecting any particular result.
As she worked, Iren was silent. At one point, though, she stood up straight from her work position, bending over me to methodically move one part of my body, then another. As she stood: “I can help you,” she said.
I made another appointment. I was looking forward to traveling to Paris with Jeff in a couple of weeks, and I made one appointment a week with Iren in the weeks coming up to the day of the trip.
At the last session before my trip, as she worked on me, we were both silent. And when the time for the session was ended, Iren said to me: “Now, go and enjoy Paris!”
I did. Jeff and I did enjoy Paris together. And I was pain free for the first time in many months. And the pain, the mysterious pain, has not returned. Ever.
photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallin, Estonia, 2024.
