Cada cabeza es un mundo, says an old Spanish proverb.
Every mind is a world.
Mr. Olive was a member of my father’s church in Louisville in the early 1970s — tall, olive-skinned, and ancient to my 17-year-old eyes. (He may even have been 73, the age I am now.) The way I remember him is in a beige leisure suit with a tie. His light skin was dotted with dark freckles or moles. And he wore his thinning hair slicked back from his face. Gray and longish, it hung in curling strands along the edges of his collar.
I did not like him. Mr. Olive did not converse, he took you hostage. He loomed in front of you, trumpeting his importance in the world, all his accomplishments, to anyone who happened to be standing there. He insisted on dominating any circle he entered.
One of his signature moves was to pull a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and flash it in front of you. He toggled between showing off his cash and expressing terror that he was about to be kicked out of his apartment.
My father pastored Mr. Olive the way he did everyone else. He paid attention, listened to him, tried to learn about his life. Dad told me, “I never met a person I could hate once I’d heard his story.”
While I admired my father’s generous spirit, I could not stand Mr. Olive. If I saw him coming toward me, I got busy doing something, anything, in another room, if possible. Or I beat a retreat to the ladies’ room. And I know I was not the only one, whether Black or white.
One night, the parsonage phone rang. Dad answered. It was the police. They had found Mr. Olive’s body floating in the Ohio River. As far as they could tell, he had jumped from one of the downtown bridges.
He had $500 in his pocket. And his rent was paid up several months in advance.
What was Mr. Olive’s story? What was the world he carried in his head?
Last weekend I attended a virtual writing retreat, Write Where You Are, with five other writers — six including the leader, Patti Digh. We met on Thursday night for an opening circle, followed by two days that began at 10:00am ET. We met from 10 until 1:00pm, wrote on our own 2:00-5:00pm, and reconvened in the evenings from 7:00 til 9:00 to share our writing, if we chose to do so. The retreat ended with a closing circle on Sunday morning, 10:00-12 noon.
It was not my first retreat with Patti. I’ve been attending these online gatherings since 2020 and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. I love being there. I come away every time with something I didn’t know before and/or something I did not expect. And over the years I have found a community of writers and friends.
I looked from one square on the screen to the other. Three of the women I knew from previous retreats, two were new to me. We were different ages and skin tones. We lived in different time zones, and we gathered from lives that offered a variety of challenges: recovering from surgery, recovering from cancer treatments, caring for aging parents — and for aging selves. Married and unmarried, with children and without.
And those differences barely scratched the surface. We were a crazy quilt, with no visible unifying theme.
Patti invited each of us to make a list of moments that we could remember in detail from when we were younger. Then we were asked to choose one and write about it — first from inside the moment and then from a distance.
Everyone had the option of sharing her work. And although sharing was not required, in the end everyone excepted the invitation. Some of us shared what we had written following the weekend’s prompt. Others shared something they’d written before. From memoir to fiction, what each of us shared was deeply personal.
At the end of the weekend, we were bone weary, but reluctant to leave. We had come to care about each other and our stories.
But if the sharing of stories brings us together, I know, too, that the withholding of stories keeps us apart.
If it is possible to know another’s world, it is also possible to lose the chance.
Cada cabeza es un mundo.
If every mind is a world, then there are about eight billion worlds on our tiny planet. Multiply that number by the myriad of stories in each one of those worlds. Now, try to imagine that total.
Patti Digh has said, “The shortest distance between two people is a story.”
Which is why I find myself exploring the stories of people whose experience is a world away from mine, even though our histories may be tangled and grafted in ways that are painful to dissect:
Toni Morrison (who began to write, because she did not find the lives of the Black people she knew represented anywhere else);
James Baldwin;
Edward P. Jones;
Percival Everett;
Clay Cane;
Octavia Butler;
Cebo Campbell;
Jesmyn Ward;
And so many more — these are just the writers I’ve been reading in recent months.
Stories from worlds of the present, past, and future.
What was Mr. Olive’s story? I will never know. That is my loss.
Thank God for the writers, filmmakers, actors and artists who commit themselves to telling the stories they know, many of which have gone untold for centuries.
Now, to pay attention, to listen and learn from the worlds that remain.
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For more information on Patti Digh’s Write Where You Are Retreats for 2027, click here.
