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My Spiritual Life

This is an excerpt from the personal log of Kathryn Janeway, recorded shortly after Voyager's return to Earth.

I have not had many spiritual experiences in my life. But I find that as I get older I think more often about spirituality, wondering if perhaps there isn't something important that I might have missed. I don't mean to sound as if I were nearing the end of my days, but sometimes I feel as if I've been forced to grow old quickly. I have faced death, the unknown, faced responsibility and freedom – the responsibility to live by a code of ethics, and the freedom to expand and modify that code when it fails in its objective. So many things I've done, so many strange places I've seen, that it strikes me as funny to think that there would be something else. Can anything surprise a Starfleet Captain? Can anything take her breath away, frighten her or erode her strength? For me, it is the weight of my slowly unraveling past. There are the visions and plans of childhood, and there is, still, the painful clash of the real world against my imagination. My private room. My spiritual life. Unfinished, unloved.

When I was a child, I jumped from a hundred rocks, believing absolutely

that if I couldn't fly, it was a result of some miscalculation on my part. I would not say,

nor would I think, that it would never happen, that I would never feel the wind beating on my outstretched arms. If this was a source of concern for my parents or teachers, they only showed it when I turned up with a skinned knee. I invested a great amount of time and energy into the pursuit of spontaneous human flight, and one spring when I was seven, I hurt myself quite badly trying to jump to warp from a rickety tree house. But I chalked it up to experience and found a lower point of lift-off. As I grew, all the bruises healed, leaving no trace of my early space missions, and the world around me changed. I learned many important things, not the least of which is that flight is a task: making a system work, fueling a warp core. I learned that secret beliefs are less important than hard facts, and I learned that becoming a Starfleet officer was what I wanted. The days and nights of my seven-year-old life grew dim, and eventually became the stories I would tell to amuse people I met at the Academy, and later, on real space missions. By the time I took command of Voyager, I could hardly remember what it felt like to land barefooted in the soft grass, wanting only to try again. But if I looked at myself long enough in the mirror, I remembered. And still I would not say, nor would I think, that it would never happen.

Voyager left me with more than skinned knees – if it were not for the miracle of medical technology, I would be a woman badly scarred. I still remember all the places on my body where I was hurt, and sometimes I imagine myself as bearing evidence of all my battles lost and won. I imagine that I am tattooed with pain and with triumph, and I do not believe this makes me ugly, only more real, more authentic. I see the past in my face where others see only clear skin, a bright smile. I still know where I was touched, harmed, loved, and hated. I can see the innocence drained from my eyes and the hard work that has made my hands warm and rough. I do not shrink from my past, nor do I wish to reclaim anything that Voyager may have cost me. I accept myself as the product of my experiences.

But I no longer want to try again. I no longer want to leap up and find the next precipice from which to spread my latent wings. I want to forgive, to resign myself to the inevitable, to grieve. I fear that having been in-flight for so long, I no longer know what it is to fly. I used to know that flying is throwing your head back and laughing as you pass the eagle at twice his speed. I used to know that flying is a feeling beyond experience, beyond thought, beyond reason, but now all I know is my experience, and how to wrestle with it. I have come so very far, but I fear that I have lost sight of the path that brought me here. I have lost my spiritual life.

When did I lose it, I wonder? Standing too straight on the bridge, watching the great Earth double, then triple in size? Missing the sight of Q leaning lazily on my desk,

Leonardo da Vinci's workshop, the few seconds of truly understanding a star before you know its proper name and forget everything else? Or perhaps it was the way we all were

that day – each at one another's posts, and me, caught in between them all, being introduced to a new kind of solitude.

On the day we left Voyager, I saw Chakotay's medicine bundle, just the blanket, poking out of the zipper on his suitcase. I first saw it when I happened to pass by his quarters on my way to the turbo-lift. His door was closed, but sitting right outside was his duffel bag with its long black strap, and the medicine bundle inside, the blanket just visible. I saw it, passed it, and tried not to notice it again. But only a few hours later I was standing on a long platform outside of Voyager, a crowd of thousands at its edge, and instead of listening to what people were saying or bothering to take in the scene, my eyes were fixed on Chakotay's black suitcase, quite far away from me this time, the strap in his hand, the blanket of his medicine bundle still showing through. I tried to concentrate as the day's proceedings went on, reminding myself that I was still on duty. But very little else crossed my mind or struck my sight. There were beautiful lanterns shining through San Francisco. The Starfleet band marched in the brightly colored streets wearing their dress uniforms, and the boom from the bass drum shook me where I stood. News reporters anxiously flashed their front-page photographs, and once I saw my own pale face reflected back at me in a huge television monitor. But none of that kept my attention for long. I was always looking towards myleft where Chakotay stood with his suitcase. Sometimes I caught sight of it immediately, other times I had to search for it through the crowd around us. People kept weaving in and out, the lights changed, the questions and answers changed. The hands that grasped mine were alternately smooth and clammy, old and young, sometimes timid and sometimes strong. But Chakotay's medicine bundle remained the same. I wasn't quite sure why I was so fixated on it. I almost wanted to walk over to him and ask him to open the suitcase. I wanted to find out if there was still something of myself wrapped inside it.

I did not get that chance. Chakotay is gone, and so is his suitcase, leaving me to wonder about its contents. I still remember all the things he kept, three or four items from his past. I remember the green of his small green stone. But it doesn't matter to me whether or not I will touch that stone again. I may never find something of exactly the same color or exactly the same texture, but I know that this stone exists and that I touched it once, and that is enough. It is not for the sight of any physical object that I feel the need to open Chakotay's black suitcase all the way, and slowly fold back the corners of his blanket. It is not for the akoonah, and it is not, either, to take a vision quest or to further explore the traditions of his culture. None of these things have such a decisive hold on my attention or on my memory; still I am kept awake in search of Chakotay's medicine bundle. For he has been, almost as long as I have known him, the keeper of my spiritual life. I have given that part of myself to him so completely that I don't think there is anywhere else it could reside but inside his suitcase. That part of myself I gave to him even when I could give nothing else, not a smile, not a word, when I could not meet his eyes. And I thought that he knew, even though I never said it, that my fondest desire was to jump from some commonplace surface and not touch the ground. I thought that if one day he were to see me, caught off-guard, balancing from a low tree branch with my arms outstretched, he would only look at me and say, "Kathryn, try again."

For this reason, I now have no contact with my spiritual life. Once you give an item away, you cannot have it returned. This goes for any number of things, and usually when you do give something away, you do it deliberately and probably don't miss it once it's gone. But I am in a rather different situation. My soul is, I think, in Chakotay's suitcase, and he will simply walk away with it, when I had always meant for it to stay, at least, on the same ship as the rest of myself. Now I have no way to know where the suitcase will go. He will take it with him – where? Any number of places. I have no idea where he might go, but wherever it is he will undoubtedly take the suitcase with him. Will he take it to work? Will he take it on vacation? On his honeymoon? Will it rest on the stairs, in a doorway, at someone's feet, in a closet, under a desk? Will it be on his bed? Will that big black suitcase lie on his bed wide open, zipper sprawling, the stained blanket of the medicine bundle lolling over the flap with my soul inside? My seven-year-old soul, asleep in a suitcase, never knowing what horrible things have been done to her and in her presence.

And so I come to understand what I have lost. This understanding is the final weight of the real world on my shoulders. My seven-year-old soul is out of reach, and so is my aging soul, my forty-five-year-old soul, too big and awkward to have to fit inside someone's suitcase. How can she ever grieve for what has been taken from her? Her peace, her serenity, lost and now irretrievable. Her sexuality, unexpressed and now incapable of expression. He has taken all of these things from her as the real world has taken my imagination. Science. Reason. Water boils at a hundred degrees. All 5.9742 times 1024 kilograms of the Earth's mass fall on Voyager – why should it be said the other way around? My home is destroyed, the private room I never visited enough, and my skinned knees are healed.

I do not believe that childhood dies, or simply merges with the adult personality. Somewhere my seven-year-old-soul is asking questions. She is wondering why I betrayed her, why I sold her most precious ideas at any cost to a man who cares little enough for me that he will not stand beside me at our journey's end. She is learning, with much resistance, to listen to words of wisdom from adults. She is learning that flying is for birds and other winged creatures, and that humans must live on the ground. She is learning that we cannot create the world according to our own design, and she is suffering from this knowledge. Finally, she understands that suffering is natural to the human life, and that often, we lose what defines us and what we most love, all in one breath.

Why should she have to understand this, I wonder? Why should anyone? I have forced it upon her, upon myself – or else the real world has done it. I could argue with Chakotay, remind him that he never used to be so fond of the real world either. But clearly he has made his choice, and he and his suitcase will travel over plains and foothills of the 5.9742 times 1024 kilograms of the Earth's mass. I have no influence with him on this topic. But still there is the matter of my seven-year-old soul, my forty-five-year old soul, and yes, someday, my seventy-year-old soul, all of who will grow old in their way, wrapped in a medicine bundle. Can I appease them somehow even if I never see them again? How can I once again convince a child that flight is worth attempting, when I myself am no longer convinced? How can I right the wrongs I have done to my spiritual life?

I never thought this would mean so much to me. I never thought I would long so much for it, but here I am ready to give anything for it, thinking of nothing else. I have seen civilizations born and destroyed, populated land and space with no boundaries, the curtains of the universe pulled back and then drawn again. I have crawled on my knees and I have stood as proud as a lion, but none of that means anything if I do not believe.

The energy of a warp core burns, forcing a ship to travel at a velocity greater than that of light. I send a searchlight catapulting off the port bough. I am looking for signs of life, creatures similar or different from myself, who perhaps can show me the way home.

I do this today, alone, standing on the sidewalk's edge, looking for the life inside of myself. How does one practice the science of navigation? Tactics? The craft of diplomacy, the art of sculpture? Are they not all attempted again and again by the patient student until success is achieved?

I will be an Admiral in stiff black boots, and I will walk on this Earth as a woman of great valor and distinction. World leaders and ambassadors to other worlds will know my name and use it with pride. And I will accept all of this with the right amount of humility and the right amount of aplomb. But still I will jump, not step, from the folding stairs of a shuttlecraft. I will do this studiously, with much attention to method and detail, expecting no more in return than my effort warrants.

And one day, if ever he loves me, I will feel myself landing jauntily on the hard ground, and be very surprised.

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