Epilogue

I tried hard to finish this project before going on vacation, but here I am writing the final post back in Vermont, where I started this story two years ago. I'm sitting at the community table in Vergennes Laundry, the French bakery located in the former laundromat where we came whenever the washer broke or the pipes froze thirty years ago. As I type, surrounded by laptops, croissants, and caneles, ghosts wearing parkas struggle with laundry baskets over snow banks while angels with espresso dance overhead. To imagine is to move an image. My thirteen year old self who ached to run away from everything broken could never have known that right in this very place, Paris would come to me.

Full circle, back where I started. Not full circle exactly, but a spiraling upward, like a conch shell, the cochlea of the inner ear, or a maple creemee. The spiraling inward is also spiraling outward, the sacred is right there in the mundane, the far away is right in front of you.

My blog and I will be taking a summer break, and when we return I will be returning to drawing because, as Brenda Euland wrote, "If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it." I've become a little afraid of it and I want to move through that. Which leads me full circle to Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles, the first drawing, the first post, when I started this blog for that very purpose four years ago.

I recently learned that Ganesha is also the God of Writers. He wrote the ancient Indian epic the Mahabarata, the most voluminous book the world has ever known. It contains the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of God, the story of the spiritual practice of yoga. Dictated by the sage Vyasa, Ganesha made a promise to write the Mahabarata until it was done. When his pen broke, he broke off his own tusk and dipped it into ink in order to hold to his promise to keep writing. For that his broken tusk represents self-sacrifice. But it also represents openness, just as when a window breaks it becomes open to the whole world.