The Flagpole

'The Titcomb Farm' illustrated by Paul R. Sherburne

“Summers in the 50s, my sister and I went to North Newport, Maine for a week with our grandparents. I remember my happy relief at the first view of the barn and farmhouse after riding for eight hours. Then my father turned off the country road onto the gravel driveway at the mailbox with L.W. Titcomb on the post. Slowly the Plymouth drove by the flagpole and the bed with red and blue flowers in rows, and then stopped at the barn doors and, impatiently, we were out.”*

This is how A Flower for God begins. I am nine. With the sun barely rising, I carried the flag to the pole, snapped hooks through grommets, and carefully pulled on the rope, keeping the flag off the ground.

Through my forties my emotions swung from ones I enjoyed to ones I didn’t, without my knowing how to control those. The day I saw, in an inner view, a flagpole and a flag above my head, I had the insight I needed. I was a flag influenced by others’ views of me and needed instead to become the flagpole—a small, positive beginning rooted in a fond childhood memory.

One day the flagpole had a light on top, not at all realistic, but two weeks later, in astonishment I said, “It’s a lighthouse!” I immediately understood a lighthouse didn’t move out to ships in the night but simply blinked its helpful warning. Nor did it budge for hurricane waves. It weathered them.

In My Grandfather’s Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. writes, “Symbolism is the language of the unconscious mind, the deep wisdom that is part of how we are made. Sometimes the unconscious talks to itself and occasionally shares its wisdom aloud in the form of symbols.”

In future spiritual learning, I would read that the world is neutral and what I see is a projection of my thoughts and feelings reflected back. But in the beginning, a simple image worked best.

My realization is, “Awareness comes in a spiral pattern where we repeatedly pass through a situation until we are ready for the opportunity of change.

*A Flower for God to be published in 2015