Riches

They're Complicated.

Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash

I signed with a literary agent last week, the biggest win of my fledgling writerly career.

And I lost my father.

So naturally, as I made my way through the week - walking, reflecting, processing, traveling, grieving - all I could think about was treasure.

Riches.

- in opportunity, lost or found;

- in a life well spent;

- in loving family;

- in the yield of hard work, and time, and effort.

And I realized that as I’ve been seeking treasure - sure, call it magic while we’re here - I had all these kinds of riches all along.

When I’m channeling my 9-year-old self, magical thinking drives my approach to life, an aggressive optimism where just around any corner I’m sure I’ll find the key - a treasure map, chest, or cave, a windfall, a message, the xyz of my dreams. As a kid, I read and re-re-re-read Edward Eager’s tales of wishing wells, and half-magic charms, and sundials that opened time travel portals and threw ordinary kids into engagements with royalty, mystery, history, and other riches of one sort or another.

But now I am grown, and deeper perspective can’t help intruding on hopeful positivity. I recently read an opinion framing Hope as just another of the evils released in the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, not the redemptive idea commonly imagined (analysis here).

crop from Pandora’s Box by Charles Edward Perugini, 19th c.

It’s complicated.

My adult self still wants and needs treasure. But I have felt both deliciousness and complicatedness in yearning for it. It has never failed to hurt a little.

In this moment where things anticipated, both eagerly, and with trepidation, have come to pass, I am trying to move beyond the want to recognize “the opposite of yearning…savoring the exquisite now,” ( Mary Pipher in Letters to a Young Therapist: Stories of Hope and Healing)

Like a warm bath, a place of peace, the experience of savoring helps me embrace the complex riches of magic and wonder in my present. And there is room to appreciate shadowy things as well as shiny ones - love and loss, smooth sailing and challenge, beginnings and endings.

I’m still up for a treasure hunt! And I won’t let go of hopeful optimism for what else and what next any time soon. But I’m grateful.

I can recognize a motherlode of riches now, and much of what I’ve always wanted is already here.