Pulling the Chains of the Heart

It all began with nostalgia, which led to determination.  When I traveled to Europe with a college class over 30 years ago I carried with me a fondness for the cuckoo clock that had always been a fixture in my parents' home.  That one, I think, had been a gift from my maternal grandparents, but the gift had pre-dated my memory.  It had simply always been there in the den, along with its concomitant ritual of pulling the chains each day to wind its various mechanisms -- the clock, the protruding bird, and the circling musical dancers.  Suddenly, beyond my wildest college imagination, I was headed, among other places, to Germany's Black Forest where such things originated.  I had few souvenir ambitions for that trip, but a cuckoo clock of my own was at the top.

They weren't hard to find.  As any traveler quickly learns, cuckoo clocks for sale in Germany are as ubiquitous as maple syrup for sale in Vermont.  They are everywhere.  The difficulty was narrowing down the selection -- sifting through the proliferation of types and styles for the one that most resembled that one of my childhood.

Eventually I found it, of course, and carried it on my lap for the rest of the trip, and on the plane ride home.  It has managed to survive my various moves, and find a respectful place on one wall or another in all of those subsequent homes.  It ticks and cuckoos, but the musical dancers have been on strike for a few years.  "A few years" indeed, because they were already silent when, a few years back, we stopped the clock in deference to the sleep needs of a guest who was inhabiting the bedroom nearby.  And I never got around to restarting it.  It has hung there on the wall ever since, a dormant, silent, decorative relic.

Until last week.  When we reorganized the space downstairs with an eye for inspiration and soulful creativity -- when we gave birth to the area I have dubbed "Buona Mente" -- we sat in the area in those first  few moments just to see what it felt like.  Lori was the one who noticed the still and silent clock nearby, hanging at the gateway to the area.

"Do you want to restart the clock?" she asked.  And, of course, it was right.

I am still retraining myself in the discipline of the chains -- morning and evening; like milking a cow.  More than once I have found the weights tilted against the floor and the pendulum still.  But I am getting into the rhythm of it.

Which may be the real lure of the piece -- the discipline, the rhythm, the patterning of the day; like shaving; or praying the hours; connecting oneself in an almost primal, heartbeating way to that which is larger and more encompassing.

Time certainly goes on even when I forget to wind it.  But there is something nourishing, centering, and grounding -- something almost elemental -- about becoming part of the chains, the moving weights, the back and forth of the pendulum, the protruding bird and its song, and, when I get around to getting them fixed, the circling dancers.

But the repairs will have to wait.  I'm not ready to still it all just yet.