Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [4]
This room, her altar room, resembled a cave. Dark and quiet, like being in the earth, and the candles had been like a hearth, a fire pit, beckoning one to come forward and sit.
This was no longer the case. All now was in disarray. Her surroundings mirrored a dissolution she felt growing inside herself. And though she had loved her home, her berry-colored house with starry blue trim, she thought frequently of selling it. She even thought of giving it away. It did not seem important, though for years she’d jumped for joy each time she managed to pay the mortgage or to add some small or large improvement. Now she dreaded thinking about its needs. She noticed a shabbiness creeping in, she who had been so fastidious and never left a single broken thing unrepaired. She found she cared little that the paint over the fireplace was beginning to peel, that the door to the kitchen didn’t quite close. That there was a leak beside the bathtub drain. She even thought about these things positively, in some new and quite weird way. She could feel her house dissolving around her, as her parents dissolved when she daydreamed them. And there was a feeling of relaxing, of letting go, that was welcome.
Every word she wrote now she thought of burning. Old journals she gathered in a pile. To save in already overstuffed cupboards? Or to burn? And one day, ceremonially, she burned not only some of her writing but several hundred-dollar bills, just to demonstrate to herself that these items were not the God/Goddess of her life. Her friends grew quite alarmed. She began to dream each and every night that there was a river. But it was dry. There she’d be in the middle of an ancient forest searching for her life, i.e., the river, and she would find it after a long journey, and it would be sand.
Her pens as well seemed to go empty on her. An unusual number of them, though practically brand new, refused to scratch more than a few pale lines. No matter that she banged them in frustration on the desktop. Her eyes dimmed. Nor could her new reading glasses often be found. Was it the end? she thought. Or what?
And so her friends—the ones in her psyche and the ones sitting around her dining table—said: You must find a real river somewhere in the world—forget the dry one in your dreams—to travel down. They suggested one of the deepest, swiftest, most challenging of all: the Colorado.
She went. Taking just her light duffel of hiking and sleeping gear, mosquito repellant, aspirin, and a walking stick a friend had carved from a twig, lovely in its lightness and the color of dried hemp, she started on this journey. They had told her the river was wide. They had told her it was cold and deep. They had told her it roared through the Grand Canyon like a locomotive. They had forgotten to mention there were rapids. And so, the night before the start of the river run, in a motel room not far from the Grand Canyon’s rim, reading at last the material that had been sent to her by the able women who would steer her boat and the boats of the nine other women journeying also, she sat bolt upright in bed, startling her companion, a friend of many kind and unkind years. Merde, she said (though she was not French or of that ancestry); there are rapids involved!
Not small, barely perceptible ripples on the river, but mighty upheavals of the river itself. The river, in fact, with its twenty- and thirty-foot waves, roiling beneath their tiny wooden dories, would attempt, daily, to dislodge them. She, having read about this, barely slept. And yet, it did not occur to her to turn back.
When she did sleep, for a few blissful minutes just before dawn, at which time they were to leave the motel, she dreamed she was in a high-rise building, living there, and that she was informed it was time for the water to rise. She thought this meant the water would rise perhaps to the level of the gutter