Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 76th post, Helena remembers time spent with her sister and young daughter. Enjoy!
Auntie Jo
We were buddies, Theo, me, and Jo. My daughter, Theo, my sister’s niece, and Jolene, they had it—they had that thing, they had chemistry. Jo the planner always had some itinerary for the three of us.
Theo, we called her Theodora then, said “Auntie Jo” very early. She spoke sentences by ten or eleven months. (Once, when Ted held her in his arms, we were saying goodbye to a guest at our front door, the guest, I can’t now recall who he was, said to Theo, “You are a sweet little girl.” Theo corrected him. “No”, she said, “I’m not sweet, I’m smart.” She knew what I would come to know. She didn’t know then, though, that he was also tender.)
Auntie Jo had sparkle.
It was as if my sister, who never had children of her own, waited for this child. When the film 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, Jo took the three of us to see it. Theo maybe six or seven. I sat in the middle, Jo to my right, Theo to my left. I was not a planner, like Jo. I take life as it come to me. I live intuitively. My sister had a linear mind that embraced realities I couldn’t dream of. The world really was her oyster. She was the traveler, the explorer, and there we sat in 1970, Dr. Heywood Floyd speaking so casually over his dinner to his wife and daughter on a screen from space, the word, Zoom, 60 years in the future. The film made a deep impression on me. I had read Arthur Clarke and knew he had been in the Gurdjieff work as I had. The Inner Work, that has scattered its seed over the years since the Twenties, when Gurdjieff taught. There are so many of us aware of the inner universe now, the “as above, so below” of things. Then, Gurdjieff’s work was in the realm of secret. Why? Because who, then, could accept that we live on an internal level and can work on our lives. We can wake up to ourselves. A secret, something that seems hidden, yet a knowledge intrinsic to being alive, an experience built into the brain and into the soul of a human being. Self-awareness of the transcendent kind.
But now I can travel back to that day and experience again, Theo’s enchantment with her Aunt Jo, and Jo’s enchantment with my daughter, Theodora. Theodora, who we would, before long, at her request, call “Theo.”
Eat Talk Wait
On our sojourns to the city, or any of the places we went, we, of course, ate. There are the three of us in a diner, or a sandwich shop. My sister and I savored food, particularly in each other’s company. Complex as our sibling relationship was, we enjoyed each other’s presence—a place of a kind of perfection, a heaven, and now Theo completed it.
There we are at a table somewhere, we’ve ordered our food—ordered our hamburger deluxe, onions, lettuce, tomato, fries, milkshakes. Jo and I have cleaned our plates. We’re talking. Theo eats slowly. More and more slowly. Jo and I talked and talked, each of us, glancing at my daughter’s unfinished plate of food.
“Are you done?” finally one of us would ask. Theo would nod, she was waiting for dessert. My sister and I exchanged looks. Then one of us would take a knife and evenly divide Theo’s hamburger, one quarter eaten, then divvy up the fries. We served ourselves, ate as if we hadn’t had our own full meals, and ordered a dish of ice cream for Theo. Then we paid for our meal and, stuffed, floating in a kind of food stupor, bumped along out of the place, like whale floats in a breeze at a parade. We got ourselves onto the bus to the Museum of Modern Art, or the Met, or the Museum of Natural History, or the movies.
Of course we laughed. We knew how funny we were, Jo and me. We knew. We bonded over food! I think that kind of bonding, that knowing, that laughter, belongs to self-awareness, is in the realm of that ancient practice we call the inner work. The phrase is ancient, The Sufies, Pythagoras, The Buddha, Sinai, the Nazorean, the Hindus, the Koran, the work of people I will never know about.
Gurdjieff himself said that women do that work, that inner work, naturally.
I have only a general memory that I can enter, as if entering one memory of the three of us eating together, though we ate together for years, so much of the time.
How do you define the concept of inner work? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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