Heart in a Mason jar
Preserving memory in a time of epidemic forgetting
The once ubiquitous and still popular Mason jar was originally patented in 1858 by John Landis Mason. During the economic downturn of the Covid pandemic, the global market for Mason jars held nearly steady at $25.63 billion, and sales are projected to grow to $33.76 billion over the next five years.
Part of the enduring popularity of these jars is their strength, resistance to heat and permanency in a world of throwaway consumer goods, while their commercial viability was unexpectedly boosted during Covid lockdowns by an upsurge in home canning.
Ironically, I encountered a very different use for Mason jars as a symbolic means of preserving life and memory several years before the WHO’s March 2020 declaration of a global pandemic due to Covid.
This unusual vision of the venerable jars came from an equally unconventional source in 2018, when I met a woman named Rosey in the Mexican fishing village of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, where I was holed up writing. Rosey was her Mexican nickname, including the odd spelling.
I saw Rosey walking at dusk, stumbling and nearly falling from the high curbs at each corner that are designed to stay above water during the often raging runoff of rainy season in La Cruz. I crossed the street and quietly rushed to catch up with her, then asked if I could help. She said yes, I could take her arm and walk with her.
Rosey was headed to a public presentation by a British couple who had sailed the world more than two decades earlier in a self-built catamaran made from wood, paper and tar. They came to La Cruz to study indigenous Huichol culture and stayed. This night, they were sharing a documentary about their experiences with a sizable audience and showing how their boat was constructed. I accompanied Rosey to the presentation and we became friends.
A few weeks after our initial encounter, she shared her personal story with our mutual friend Alef and me over coffee at Organic Love, a wonderful restaurant in La Cruz started by Alef.
THE ACCIDENT
At age 17, Rosey was in a solo car accident in rural Vermont that left her in a coma. The doctors told her mother she would not live, but after two agonizing months, she regained consciousness. Her mother’s joy was tempered by the realization that Rosey’s body was almost completely paralyzed.
She could not talk or move anything other than her index finger to indicate bathroom needs to her mother. She did not remember the accident. No one knew exactly what had happened.
The only thing Rosey remembered upon regaining consciousness was a dream she had while still in a coma. In this dream, Rosey saw her heart beating inside a Mason jar.
Even in coma, she knew this was a message telling her that she would live, but she could not talk to share the remarkable story with anyone.
Rehab was slow and lengthy. For the first few years, even rudimentary body movements had to be relearned. Speech was an enormous challenge.
Today, Rosey can walk and talk reasonably well, but she limps, has trouble with balance and talks slowly, sometimes with unusual but endearing facial expressions that have become part of her visual vocabulary.
Several years into rehab, a family friend suggested over dinner that Rosey and her mother, a kind of new age therapist before it became mainstream, should visit a Huichol shaman in Mexico to speed her recovery.
KAUYUMARI
The Huichol shaman in the Sierra Madre mountains outside La Cruz did not speak English and did not know Rosey’s name nor her story. He felt her energy and moved his hands around her head and body.
He told her that her strong energy vibration was the spirit of Kauyumari, a blue deer that is descended from the sun and is one of the four main Huichol deities. (The other three deities are Corn, Peyote and Eagle.)
When the shaman told Rosey about Kauyumari, she immediately remembered that she had rolled her car that night long ago on a remote country road in Vermont while swerving to avoid hitting a deer. She has been in México with her mother since this encounter with the shaman more than 20 years ago.
MEMORY RETURNS
Rosey was born in California and grew up in New York and Vermont. Her memory has come rushing back the past couple years, and she became very animated during our conversation sharing stories from her fascinating family history. She is using these stories to reconstruct the narrative of her life.
Rosey told me, for example, that her grandfather, who was born in Manhattan, was once a leading figure in the anarchist political movement in the US. He went to Southern California and founded one of the state’s first anarchist communes, which is the reason she was born on the West Coast instead of her mother’s native Vermont.
During my time in La Cruz, she shared several wonderful anecdotes such as this, and I suggested that she should write a book, something she had already been thinking about. It takes a lot of energy and concentration, but Rosey was starting to feel up to the task.
COVID IN A MASON JAR
PRESERVING MEMORY IN A TIME OF FORGETTING
As the Covid pandemic has entered its third year, the folksy resurgence of old style home canning with Mason jars cannot offset the ugly facts of the culture produced by official fear mongering and authoritarianism.
Over the past year, CNN, BBC and many other media outlets have published reports citing neurological and psychiatric experts on the extensive harm that has been done to human memory by pandemic restrictions. CNN has warned of potential long term cognitive damage from lengthy lockdowns, lack of human contact, incessant use of masks, stress and so called “social distancing,” which has been anything but social.
NBC’s Today show, in a quest for a ratings boost, has enlisted a series of “experts” to warn their nearly three million viewers that “Too much [pandemic] stress can literally destroy memory cells” and lead to permanent “brain fog.”
Under the new social-psychological dispensation of media and government collusion during the Covid pandemic, with online death meters spinning a 24/7 tale of disease and mayhem, one of the most pernicious side effects has been the conditioning of nearly everyone to think of themselves as a victim. This culture of ubiquitous victimhood has now spawned a spate of treatment and therapy recommendations that are nearly as corrossive as the mental problems they are supposed to solve.
Perhaps Rosey’s story offers a better counter narrative. Hopefully we will see her soon at a book signing for her best-selling memoir. It will surely be a book that helps us reconnect with the beating pulses of our own fierce, anarchic hearts.