In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic

Copyright © 2024 by Alexandra A. Chan

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Flashpoint™ Books, Seattle

www.flashpointbooks.com

Produced by Girl Friday Productions

Cover design: David Fassett

Interior design: Paul Barrett

Development & editorial: Ingrid Emerick

Production editorial: Katherine Richards

Project management: Sara Addicott

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-959411-54-3

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-959411-55-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023923533

First edition

Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Counterpoint Press, counterpointpress.com.

The poem Laundryman by Gerald Chan Sieg, used by permission of Jerry Dillon and Daphne Murphy.

No, I’d Never Been to This Country by Mary Oliver.

Reprinted by the permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency as agent for the author.

Copyright © 2015 by Mary Oliver with permission of Bill Reichblum.

What’s madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance? from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke reprinted by the permission of Faber and Faber Ltd as the publisher.

Excerpt from Sometimes a Wild God (see here) used by permission of Tom Hirons.

To the ancestors⁠—

our own, and the ones we hope to become.

The Carp Leaps Through the Dragon’s Gate. The characters in the painting have the same meaning as the title.

About the Structure of this Book

We are a storytelling animal, for better or for worse, and the most important story we will ever tell is the story of our own lives. Are we telling the right story? Are we telling it well? That’s important because it is the best storytellers among us who have the future in our hands. A good story isn’t just entertainment. It has the power to heal us in the present and prepare a better future for all. It can awaken us to the truth of who we really are, what we want, what we came here to do⁠—things we have perhaps spent a lifetime not permitting ourselves to know. It involves learning from the ancestors, yes, but also becoming better ancestors ourselves in the process.

This book follows the arc of the Chinese zodiac from Year of the Ram (2015) to Year of the Tiger (2022). For those not familiar, Chinese astrology is an ancient classification system composed of the twelve animals (Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig) and five elements (metal, water, wood, fire, earth). Each animal has its own characteristics, and depending on the year, each element has its own features and associations with each animal (e.g., the Wood Ram or the Water Tiger). Thus the zodiac cycle is actually sixty years and not the twelve we often think of.

Each section of this book represents not only a year in my journey, but new developments in spiritual growth and understanding. The stories I tell in each explore different facets of that animal year’s gifts and challenges. Come with me on a journey of ever-increasing enchantment. Enjoy discovering the magic of the ancients’ wisdom and knowledge as you watch each year unfold, often as foretold. Take heart as you discover that there are no unprecedented times. The labyrinth of earthly life is known, for people and creatures of all times and places have walked it before you.

The Ouroboros, pictured on the dedication page, is an ancient emblem found in numerous cultures, depicting a snake, or sometimes a dragon, eating its own tail. The earliest depiction of the Ouroboros in China appears on pottery from the Neolithic Yang Shao culture, which flourished in the Yellow River basin from five thousand to three thousand years ago. It symbolizes wholeness, completion, and the eternal, cyclical renewal of life, death, and rebirth. It is this book in a single image.

A Note on Names and Pronunciations

T’ai Peng, my grandfather, the Great Phoenix: dah BUNG

Alexka, a diminutive for Alexandra: a-LESH-ka

Seu, my younger son: SEH-oo

Throughout this book, names shown with an asterisk are unknown and/or have been fictionalized.

T’ai Peng, young revolutionary with Western hair, ca. 1889

T’ai Peng, laundryman, 1930s

Prologue

1889

Guangdong Province, China

The Great Phoenix

Grandpa Chan was eighteen years old in 1889, the year he escaped beheading and flew off across the horizon, stepping into the mantle of his own name, T’ai Peng, the Great Phoenix.

It is said of the mythical T’ai Peng that its back covers thousands of li (which measures about a third of a mile) and its wings are like clouds that hang from the sky. When it flaps its wings, the air thunders and the waters churn for three thousand li in all directions. The T’ai Peng starts its life, however, as a giant Kun fish in the North Sea, where it circles through the black waters, unknowing, unseeing, and restless. In time, it is written, the Kun fish sheds the dark, cold ocean of its youth, metamorphosing into the mighty T’ai Peng. As it rises from the deep, it grows wings and beats them ninety thousand li into the sky, where it enters a state of complete transformation and heads on its destined journey to the Celestial Pond.

What were my great-grandparents thinking, in a country village outside the capital city of Guangzhou, naming their youngest son and last-born child after the most powerful character in Chinese mythology? It was as if they knew he was never theirs to keep, and blessed him with a powerful spell of protection, spoken daily for eighteen years. T’ai Peng. Great Phoenix. Each time their child’s name crossed their lips, it summoned the otherworldly power and extraordinary destiny of the magical beast. Attached to each utterance of his name was a silent addendum: You are enormous of spirit and powerful beyond measure. You will journey ten thousand li beyond the realm of what is recognizable. You will embrace transformation and soar to meet your destiny.

And, too, You cannot stay.

As a boy, T’ai Peng received a classical education and was intent on going to university to become a Confucian bureaucrat and work in the imperial civil service, which was what all the best and brightest young men of his generation aspired to. The year of his exile, he had won a poetry competition in the capital, taking the prize not only for subject matter but also for the elegance of his brushwork. Recalling the moment decades later for his six American children, he described how, with notice in hand, he had been carried, swaying and triumphant, on the villagers’ shoulders to see his father.

He stumbled to the ground and grinned at his friends, then straightened and composed his face to approach his father, who was schoolmaster for all the surrounding villages. Thus it was as the schoolmaster that his father took the notice and scanned it, gave a terse nod of approval, and handed it back. Only T’ai Peng, who stood close, could see the glint in his eye that bespoke a father’s pride. It was one of the last times T’ai Peng would see his father, so his children heard the tale often. And so, eventually, did I.

T’ai Peng’s academic work was in world studies at the university at Guangzhou, where he began to conceive of many modern ideas⁠—from technology to day-to-day practices and observances to governance⁠—that he wanted to see brought home to China, a backward and exploited country whose people suffered at the hands of the Empress Dowager Cixi and the Manchus. Within months of his arrival in the capital, he had taken up with a group of similarly minded young intellectuals in the Revolutionary Party. They held secret midnight meetings in the back room of an herb shop, fantasized about a free and modern China, and plotted the overthrow of Empress Cixi and the Manchu government.

In early 1889, the plot was discovered. T’ai Peng, born in the Year of the Horse, might almost have expected it. Soothsayers and old women gathered at the village well had reminded him that General Fu Youde⁠—one of sixty heavenly generals, or Tai Sui, of Chinese mythology⁠—had it out for the Horse. The happiness, health, and good fortune of all mortals were the Tai Sui’s alone to rule for the year. It was bound to be an unlucky one for the Horse.

The young revolutionaries had time for one last meeting to alert their members that the empress had dispatched soldiers to destroy their plans and that the soldiers were now moving through the city with orders to round up and execute those named in the conspiracy. They should all assume their names were on that list. The group leader’s final instructions were Go now. And try to stay alive. China needs you.

As T’ai Peng fled the herb shop, he heard the quick-trot tread of soldiers’ boots two streets over. His eyes strained in the dark, unable to see an escape route. But as the drumbeat of doom moved ever closer, the clouds suddenly parted and the moonlight illuminated a garden wall belonging to the neighboring monastery. In a flash, T’ai Peng was up and over it, crouching beneath large bushes at its base. The clouds then slid back over the moon and plunged the streets into darkness. From where he hid, T’ai Peng heard one of his comrades being dragged into the street, his wild screams cut short by the crisp, wet smack of sword cutting flesh and cracking bone and the sickening thud of something hitting the ground. An image came to T’ai Peng, unbidden, of his older brother chopping melons in the courtyard for a feast, smiling broadly, sleeves of his best shirt rolled to the elbows, cleaver in hand. Chunk. Juice spurted and glinted through the sunshine. T’ai Peng’s small niece and nephew toddled after the geese. Home. He had to get there.

Bag the head, said the captain. Leave the body for the people to see.

A monk from the monastery discovered T’ai Peng in the bushes and gave him cover for the night, disclosing that he, too, belonged to the revolution. The monk arranged for food, clothing, money, and secret passage on a ship departing for America the following morning. He also promised to get word to T’ai Peng’s parents. Home? No, he could never go home, the monk told the frightened young man. Soldiers would be sweeping towns and villages throughout the province, looking for the conspirators. He must leave.

Maybe you’ll come back one day, he said to the boy, in reassurance. And then you must come pay me a visit and tell me about the world.

And so T’ai Peng set out from the monastery and met a sampan driver on the banks of the Pearl River in the dark before morning. In silence, the sampan slipped toward the ship, where T’ai Peng climbed a rope ladder to its decks and stowed himself away, sleepless, terrified, and heavy with sorrow. The ship had been underway for less than a day when it mysteriously came to a halt. An imperial ship was checking departing vessels for stowaways and had sent a small band of sailors over to search the decks and cabins.

They found T’ai Peng and took him into custody, forcing him onto a dinghy with two of the sailors, who started rowing him back to the mainland to his execution. T’ai Peng, gripped by terror, thought of his mother and father, his sisters who doted on him, the terrible grief they would experience at news of his demise, and his terror settled into despair.

But unbeknownst to him, circling far below, the giant Kun fish had heard the call. The great beast began to rumble in the deep. Glimpsing for the first time another world above, it began its journey upward, flexing its powerful body side to side, churning the waters in all directions. Bursting through the surface of the sea in total metamorphosis, the T’ai Peng began to rise to the firmament. The clouds grew thick, the sky grew dark, and the air became dense with pressure. A peal of thunder rumbled across the sky as the great beast beat its wings, their awful power whipping up mighty winds and turning choppy waters into raging seas. Gigantic waves tossed the dinghy from peak to trough, throwing the three men about like rag dolls. The T’ai Peng ruffled its feathers, shedding the ocean waters of its youth as torrential rain. Futile attempts to row the little boat soon gave way to frantic bailing of the water that threatened to swamp it with every swell. The T’ai Peng beat its wings harder and the rain fell in sheets.

For many hours and all through the night, the men fought heroically to stay afloat. And when the great T’ai Peng eventually set off for the Celestial Pond and the storm passed, young T’ai Peng and the two sailors found they had drifted irrevocably off course and could no longer see land. The water was dead calm, and a blazing midday sun shone punishingly upon the scene below. The men were exhausted and weakened by their ordeal. Worse, the dinghy had not been equipped with provisions, as it had been meant to be only a couple of hours’ row back to shore. Soon all three men lay inert and at odd angles on the bottom of the boat, using their shirts to protect themselves from the glare of the sun. They drifted for days. Their lips turned white and cracked. And as they continued to weaken, T’ai Peng took sips of seawater under cover of night, remembering from his school days that salt caused water retention. Enough to slow his dehydration? His own initiation had begun, and as he watched his captors grow ever weaker, he continued to sip and spit seawater at night. The wheels of destiny ground into motion.

On the third morning, young T’ai Peng struggled to his feet, wobbling the boat violently. He froze, afraid to rouse his captors, but incapacitated as they were, they barely seemed to notice. He carefully bent down, never taking his eyes from their faces, and wrapped his long fingers around the shaft of one of the oars at his feet. The T’ai Peng must meet its destiny. He raised the oar high into the air, like the Kun fish breaching the surface of the sea, and brought it crashing down onto the heads of his captors. Once, twice, three times. He dropped the oar, breathless in his weakened state, gagged, and let out a single, strangled sob. The dinghy rocked back to equilibrium while blood trickled and pooled in the boat’s bottom. T’ai Peng wiped his mouth and brow and felt a blank calm overtake him. He rolled the two bodies overboard, checked the position of the sun, and began to row in the direction he thought land to be.

Of course the Great Phoenix found land; how could it be otherwise? He sheltered again with the monks until he had physically recovered from his ordeal. And then he caught another ship to America, this time without incident. When he set foot on the shore of San Francisco Bay, the first thing he did was grab the hated queue over his shoulder, a symbol of the tyranny that had robbed him of his family and his future (one hairstyle to rule them all) and cut the hair off at the nape of his neck. He threw the braid in a nearby dustbin and touched the brush of new growth above his forehead, for he had not shaved his head in forty-five days. The T’ai Peng travels ten thousand li beyond the realm of what is recognizable. It embraces transformation and soars to meet its destiny.

In time, he found his way across the country to an old student of his father’s, Li Chin, who owned a laundry on Broughton Street in the port city of Savannah, Georgia. Chung T’ai Peng (who would live and die in the United States as Robert Chan) would eventually take over the Willie Chin & Co. Laundry, and there he lived out his days starching collars, raising children, writing poetry, and dreaming of China and a better world.

Years later, my aunt G.G. captured her father’s longing in a poem.

Laundryman

If I could hear once more

The call of dark winged birds across the fields

Of rice and slim young bamboo,

If I could see once more

A crane with yellow legs so straight

Among cool water grasses,

If I could touch again

Her hands whose fingers in their sleeve of scarlet

Are softly curled and gentle,

My soul would be content,

O gods,

To iron away eternity.

—⁠Gerald Chan Sieg, The Far Journey

Book One

2015

Year of the Ram

Dawn breaks on Year of the Yin Wood Ram. The new Tai Sui, General Yáng Xiān, steps onto the dais. The Ram is a soft, gentle, and lucky animal, thought to bring health, wealth, and happiness. But not to the Ox. The General first scans the horizon for the animal, which is offensive to him. So determined and reliable, the Ox, so earnest. But the Ox is binary, stuck in its ways. The Tai Sui sucks his teeth and grins. This should be fun.

Such a hard worker can always be found in the fields or cooling off in the river after a day’s honest labor. The General cuts his gaze to the unsuspecting animal and drops into a wrestling stance. He cracks his knuckles and sways on his feet, eyes snapping. For sixty years he has planned it. At long last, the Ox is his. What should he start with? Injury? Bankruptcy? Relationship breakdown? Death? The Ox will rue the day.

So say the Chinese.

Is it misfortune or destiny that I am an Ox⁠—same as Dad? I never meant to offend a celestial being, but unbeknownst to either of us, Dad and I are on a collision course with 2015’s Tai Sui.

The Chinese say the Ox should expect once-in-a-lifetime misfortune in 2015. The conjunction of the Ox with General Yáng Xiān comes around only once every sixty years. A wise Ox will lean into its inborn traits of honesty, diligence, strength, and determination. It must flex these preemptively and often, or it will wither under the unrelenting trials of the Tai Sui. Learn patience and hope. Look for personal areas in need of improvement. If the Ox cannot effect these changes willingly, change will be forced upon it.

I know nothing yet of the Tai Sui in 2015, but I shiver at the light whisper of a mustache as it brushes past my ear, and a voice purrs from the corners of my mind. Burn to ash or forge yourself anew. The choice is yours.

The Ox will be brought to its knees in 2015, Year of the Yin Wood Ram. It is written.

Mountain Wind Listening to Buddhist Prayer. The characters in the painting have the same meaning as the title.

Chapter 1

Alien Lands

No, I’d never been to this country

before. No, I didn’t know where the roads

would lead me. No, I didn’t intend to turn back.

—⁠Mary Oliver

Three and a half years after Mom died, in 2015, I went outside to the deck, fell to my knees, and let out a bloodcurdling, primal, and completely silent scream. Don’t leave me, Dad. I called it a soul scream, for it took place wholly within my head, exploding mental shrapnel into the void, shattering my energy field to pieces. For a period of several seconds, it also had physical control over my body. I buckled under the weight of it, paralyzed, until it had passed. An observer might have seen my cramped figure on my knees, motionless in the sunshine, and feared I was having a stroke. It was the first of many such episodes over the next few years⁠—in the shower, at stoplights, checking the ripeness of melons.

I had no answer or remedy for these screams. I didn’t even know how to describe what was happening to me. Not that I told anyone about them; I feared their worried looks. I had made an identity for myself around the pursuit of knowledge and the ethos that you can solve any problem if you know enough about it. After all, I am the great-granddaughter of a village schoolmaster in China, the granddaughter of a dean of continuing education at NYU, the niece of two award-winning poets, the daughter of an erstwhile librarian turned one of the first women programmers, and the daughter of a man who defied Jim Crow to go to high school and college and then rise to the upper echelons of the US military, work in top-secret missions that helped end the Cold War, and die with thirteen patents to his name. Because of his own meteoric rise above his station, Dad put so much faith in the idea of going to school that I thought education must, indeed, be an elixir of the gods.

So, by this time I had accumulated my own bona fides as though they were the Golden Ticket to Everything, because as far as I knew, they were. At the pinnacle of my archaeology career, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the inauguration of a research center in Germany⁠—a center that was inspired, in part, by my own work. It was validation that I was doing everything right.

Dad glowed when I told him about the murmur that rippled through the crowd when I began my presentation in perfect German. He asked how I had overcome my fears to accept the invitation.

I said, Oh, you know, I just asked myself what Bob Chan would have done.

"And? What would I have done?" His eyes twinkled.

You would have said yes and then found a way.

Dad’s laugh sounded like a shot. You’re damn right I would. He warmed himself for a moment at the fires of over a century of saying yes and finding a way. My dad, Robert Earl Chan, turned 102 that year. Oh, yeah, he said. "You’re my girl."

At the time, I had two interesting jobs⁠—as a professional archaeologist and a photographer. I also had two boys at home who brought me a whole other kind of self-expression and fulfillment. So if I hadn’t yet done it all, I had done a fair bit and done it well. Though I had seen my share of heartache too. This wasn’t my first rodeo. I was a capable person, even in confusion, disappointment, and loss, and as long as I remained ensconced in my fortress of knowledge, surrounded by beautiful facts and certainties, I was Bob Chan’s girl. I would find a way.

But then came the prospect of losing him, my last parent, a man of such vitality it had seemed he would just always be there, like air. Or gravity. His presence in my life was planetary; I was but one of his moons. Or was he a star, the light of his life making my own feel twinkly and charmed? That light had been a homing beacon for me on every kind of sea. The thought of it now being extinguished made my fortress crumble. And the soul screams began.

What lesson could there be in this relentless landing of blows⁠—broken bones, hematomas, infections, family fractures, long-distance parental care. There is no purpose here, only pain.

I recalled Mary Oliver’s words in her book Winter Hours: Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. I understood for the first time, and with a searing sense of disillusionment, that knowledge had somehow failed me as well. Something in me still starves.

Fire and Ice⁠—Spring 2016

I rarely took the wheel on a family road trip, especially when we were traveling in unfamiliar territory, but Brent had jet lag. And in the last few days I had been heartened to see that Iceland had only one road to speak of. All I needed to do was get in the driver’s seat and . . . go.

The sun was lowering in the sky, but the candy-pink hue of an Icelandic dusk can be enjoyed for hours. The silence around me was textured by the sound of sleeping people⁠—Brent in the passenger seat and our boys, Jin and Seu, in the back⁠—and the hum of the highway beneath my tires. I zoned out until a stray thought of Dad caught me unawares and threw me into the jagged rhythm of the refrain that had haunted me for the last six weeks. Hurt for life, I’m hurt for life.

My throat closed over a soul-rending sob just as I saw, in my headlights, a sign that said Vík í Mýrdal, and an arrow. For reasons I could not explain, I jerked the steering wheel left. Vik, whatever that was, was not on our itinerary. We were supposed to be making up lost time. And while I am an adventurous person, I also like to know where I am going, driving at dusk in a foreign country.

Beckoned to the North

Over the past year I had learned by trial and error to follow the small voice in my head that always seemed to be saying, Go there, Let’s try this, and Why not? It was often an invitation to something off the beaten path, and it had never led me astray. It was this voice that beckoned me to Iceland in the first place. After Dad’s death the month before, a deep yearning came over me to gather my family and flee to the cool austerity of the North.

Why north? I asked myself. To distill and to shed, said the voice. You come here to rest.

I knew Iceland to be a strange and beautiful place but hadn’t thought of visiting. The voice let me know, however, there was no time to lose.

Vík í Mýrdal, we discovered, is a sleepy seaside town on the southeast coast of Iceland, nestled at the bottom of the mountain Reynisfjall, an igneous rock formation that rears up 340 meters into the air. The town is perhaps most famous for its black-sand beach, Reynisfjara, and the hexagonal basalt columns that rise sheer from the shore, then ripple down the base of Reynisfjall like the scales of a dragon that has just settled in for a nap and turned to stone. This image came naturally, for in Iceland, the line blurs between reality and magic. It is no accident that many Icelanders are said to believe in elves. The land vibrates with mystery, and I am inclined to believe in them there myself.

Icelanders say that the columns and sea stacks at Reynisfjara are the remains of trolls who dragged their ship masts ashore and got caught out in the rising sun. I knew something about being caught out and turned to stone. The image of myself on the deck some months before, cramped and on my knees in the brilliant sunshine, came to mind. I hadn’t imagined finding such a beautiful reflection of it in nature. My memory of the traumatic event softened. That’s curious, I thought.

Considered one of the most beautiful nontropical beaches in the world, and long an attraction to geology geeks, it was a serendipitous discovery for us. The sand is truly black and displays appealing contrast against the white surf. More, each surging crush of wave receded gently, dragging behind it a delicate train of sea-foam, the push and pull of which was hypnotic.

Seabirds nestled in the grass-tufted nooks of the basalt mountain behind us, and we shouted with glee when puffins, so much smaller and cuter than we had expected, started to bumble in for their crash landings. Success! We had tried all week to see puffins. Jin had decided to hang the success of the trip on whether we found any. So we built several puffin stops into our itinerary but had been thwarted at every turn. Locations touted in guidebooks as puffin havens were devoid of them⁠—at least at this time of year. One required driving through a mountain pass that took us from cerulean skies and balmy breezes at the base, up a harrowing switchback ledge of a road without guardrails, and right into the heart of a menacing storm.

Puffins were supposed to be just ahead if we could only get there. Jin’s mounting disappointment was a palpable miasma emanating from the back seat that pressed us forward, even as my inner voice countered with ever-greater urgency, Don’t go any farther. Turn around. Stop. Stop! By the time I listened to it, there was no turning around. We were forced to drive backward down the ledge with almost zero visibility until we found a slight widening at a bend that allowed for a tight three-point turn. The sunny valley . . . and dashed dreams . . . waited below.

In the wake of that near disaster, Brent and I laughed nervously about the article we had read in a local newspaper a few days prior. Called How Not to Die in Iceland, it was an irreverent guide for tourists, outlining the country’s greatest dangers. The changeable weather and lack of barriers at sheer drop-offs were two of them. The article’s final admonishment? Don’t be stupid.

And so, we had largely given up on finding puffins (we weren’t stupid), but here they were. Jin had a beatific look that made me chuckle. Surely this was a boy who had achieved enlightenment, not merely seen a bunch of gangly little goofballs wobble and pitch into the cliff above his head. Meanwhile, Seu, who at the first mention of a trip to Iceland had been most taken by the idea of black sand, had found his own Valhalla.

On our first day in the country, we did find a patch of the storied sand at a harbor, and he had grabbed a small fistful and stuffed it in his pocket, where he fingered the grains for the duration of our trip. Here, though, were fistfuls as far as the eye could see. He ran pell-mell at the waves, sounding his barbaric yawp before the waves chased him back up the beach, nipping at his heels as his legs bicycled him to safety.

After several such rounds of chase, in his exhausted and ebullient haste he fell face-first into the sand, with crashing waves roaring up behind him. Well, I thought, here comes our magical detour to an early end.

But lo, he went into a commando roll once, twice, three times up the beach, never more than a splash out of the sea’s reach. He rolled with such force that it propelled his body back upright as he landed on his feet and bounced and jogged the rest of the way clear with a grin that cracked my heart open wide. We all saw it. I hadn’t felt thrilled or joyful about anything in months, but even I gave an involuntary whoop at the sight⁠—a spontaneous, almost painful, eruption of simple joy.

Beautifying the Gaze

How often we hear that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How quick we are to wave a dull assent, as if to say yes, yes, there is no accounting for one’s personal sense of beauty, blah, blah, blah. But what about a subtler meaning, proposed by Irish poet, philosopher, and priest John O’Donohue, that when our style of looking becomes beautiful, we discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger?¹ By this definition, beauty isn’t subjective, or even rare or fleeting. It is an autonomous force that abides inherently and secretly in everything⁠—even pain. At stake, then, is only this: If beauty is in everything, can we beautify our gaze enough to find it?

Turning back up the beach toward the car, I felt a quickening within me, a leavening of my spirit and my grief. A nascent healing was undeniable. How rare that I should have been driving, and rarer still that I followed a whim to this precious place full of dragon scales and troll masts, puffins, and black sand. I looked down, shaking my head with a grateful smile, and saw at my feet that someone before us had scoured the black beach and found a collection of white stones. They were arranged into large letters that stopped me in my tracks. I love u, it said, with the word love represented by a heart shape. A message made for someone else, yes⁠—but surely, I felt, surely, left for me.

An invitation to see differently

Thank you for leading us here, Dad, I said aloud. I love you too.

Mine was a declaration not just of love, but of intent. I intended to accept this message openly as something meant for me. It was a conscious break from my rationalist past, which had brought me success in society, perhaps, but scorched my earth privately and run my well dry. I pondered the possibility (necessity?) of recognizing the natural world around me as perhaps the benevolent face of something altogether deeper⁠—the visible shoreline of a mysterious, barely seen but bright other world, the uppermost layer of many more subtle layers of being. As an archaeologist, the idea of peeling back the layers and finding meaning beneath made sense to me. In effect, I was making a promise to myself to live more magically. Anything less didn’t feel much like living at all.

Stykkishólmur, Iceland, at dusk

Logos and Mythos

The ancient Greeks knew there are two ways of accounting for and thinking about what happens to us. There is logos⁠—the realm of reason, logic, and rational thought. It involves a linear timeline and is preoccupied with the organization of facts into what we call knowledge. I had plenty of experience with logos. It is the dominant paradigm in the West today. But facts, says mythologist Michael Meade, never tell the whole story.²

Then there is mythos, which is the opposite of logos. Its organizing principle is story, not facts. In mythos, the archetypal myth that is trying to come into the world through you is more important and has more explanatory power than anything that has happened to you (illness, bereavement, betrayal), any details of you (birth date, education, income, or marital status). It is the difference between knowing something and making sense of it. Myths don’t need facts per se, because their purpose is to reveal an underlying truth. Mythos is where we explore deep, subjective feelings about the facts, which in turn reveals elemental truths about ourselves. With mythos we use imagination to organize the world into a story of how we, as individual souls, are threaded into the tapestry of The Great Story of all that is.

If logos means thinking in powerful ways, mythos means transcending that earthly logic in equally powerful ways. The point is not to replace logos with mythos, but to recognize that today there is plenty of the former and not enough of the latter. True wisdom, according to the ancient Greeks, lies in seeing both logically and mythologically, enabling deeper perceptions of reality and new and better stories for how to proceed. Our world has lost that balance, and therefore also much of its wisdom and its life-sustaining capacity to transform itself in the face of radical change or collapse.

Snaefellsnes Peninsula, Iceland

Reconnected to myth and story

What’s Your Story?

Beside me on the black beach, a question hovered on the mountain wind. Are you ready to come home? My eyes welled. Nothing felt more necessary. I just didn’t know where home was anymore, or how to get there. My parents were dead, my family through them dissolved or dispersed. I had no hometown. But I looked at the black sand at my feet and thought I might have just stumbled onto a trailhead, and that, perhaps, in the words of Marcel Proust, My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

As alien a land as you can find on this earth, Iceland’s landscape reflected my own⁠—wild and unknown. A world without Bob and Karen Chan was not a place I had ever been, not a place I cared to be, and the broken shards of it snagged painfully in my ordinary reality. I bumped into its edges and stumbled on its broken floor. The view from where I stood in my own landscape yawned ahead, colorless and tasting of ash. I breathed in the serrated edge of loss and felt myself at the base of a Mount Everest looking up. Worse, I was Sisyphus, condemned to push the boulder before me up the mountain forever. This was not a load that could be put down or tucked away. No one else could carry it for me. I was, simply put, hurt for life.

But then here in Iceland, the land and sky were so vast, wide, deep, and magic that they contained the whole of my broken heart and made it no more frightening or alien than the landscape itself. My grief became part and parcel of the ragged beauty before me, no longer a disruptor nor a cruel and indifferent master, but a partner and cocreator in a seemingly endless array of beautiful moments.

Every loss feels manageable when you go somewhere that makes you feel like you are on a quest. Your loss becomes, momentarily, part of your personal legend and the compelling seed to a story that is only now beginning to unfold. And for that moment, you cannot help but be in breathless anticipation of . . . whatever comes next. Thus, Iceland reconnected me to mythos⁠—a sense of myth and story, the timelessness of human experience, and where my personal pain fit in the order of things.