In the dark and early morning, I can hear civilization waking up like a glowing orb of electric, high-speed and digital pulsation. It’s like a living beast, throbbing and breathing through rubber tires hitting the pavement and neon store fronts buzzing on their “open” signs. It rises up from the earth around five am, first with a few heaves of distant semi-truck delivery trails and closes in with the neighborhood garbage collection, engines starting, machines sucking in and out oxygen as houses breath alive and awake the morning coffee and television. It gains momentum as the common man encapsulates himself in technologies and industrialism to push forward through hell and high-water, collecting tokens to pay back society’s insistent indebtedness to being alive.
As the day lightens ever so slightly, the pulsing orb of electrical stirring grows up and out, reaching the sky; the heavens are shaking with engines and whirling winds as the birds and bees disappear and the river is lined with cement. Smart phones are plugged in. Satellites are transmitting. The air becomes filled with invisible pulsations of man’s “progress” and I lean, tearfully, into a blade of grass and whisper, life, life, life.
I have become, as some may call it, a “lightweight”, when it comes to civilization.
Back home, certain stars and the light of the moon reflecting off the snow let me know what time of night it is. Certain calls of seasonal songbirds let us know the sun is about to rise, and our trusty goats never fail to let us know that the sun has risen(!) and it is time to feed them. We hear the distant train and can see occasional car headlights from our land, but for the most part, our sensory experience of daily life is one filled with snow and ice, wind, clouds, sloping hills and muddy boots, open air, silence.
* * *
“Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one release one’s sadness,” Don Juan said. “A warrior is alwasy joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to their beings.” ~ from Tales of Power, by Carlos Castenada
* * *
My daughter and I journeyed south to visit friends and family, most of whom who have never met my little one. In my all encompassing excitement to reconnect with a place and a people I had lived among for so long, I had completely forgotten how tender I have become, living like we do in the wilderness, at the base of a mountain I have come to love so much. I was grievously unprepared. Everything shattered.
Concrete-locked and nervous, I walked my daughter along the black asphalt roads of a friend’s neighborhood. I was looking around, hungering for a bit of wilderness, anywhere, anything, and I realized that I have, unknowingly, earned my place as an actual species of this earth. Not as an extractor of earth, but as an actual living part of her body. And I looked around, wondering, where is she?
I saw in my mind’s eye this image of a beautiful young woman, her long black hair hanging down, wrapped around her crouching and naked body, underneath all the cement and asphalt. Her back was curled. Her hands were pushing up through the plastered sidewalks, driveways and foundations of houses. She was still there, like hibernating, holding all that “development” up and away from the still-living roots that danced around her ankles.
I could relate to the feeling.
One morning I had three dreams in a row of our country being attacked. One after the other, bombs and fire and water. Young soldiers that looked just like us. Violence. Fear. Twice we escaped.
By then, I had just about it had it with the all consuming, pollution-producing, radiation-emitting machine we call society, adorned in strip malls, taco stands, superficiality and spent needles in the sand beside gas stations, that I packed up my car, bid my friend farewell, and was decidedly, GOING HOME.
And then, another option revealed itself.
My daughter is now blissfully sleeping and I am typing away from inside a small and cozy camper down by the river at the bottom of a dead end road, at the edge of town. I am looking at beautifully bare cottonwood trees and tall stands of grasses blanketing the banks of the river. We saw a blue heron the first day, and many, many birds since. Apparently a goat lives a few houses away and the sound of his bleating makes us feel right at home.
I am learning that HOME is where I can sense the living presence of the earth. HOME is where I can taste her seasonality and smell her fragrant shiftings. HOME is where I belong, where all my tendrils of perception can expand and meet beauty and LIFE. Home is where I want to raise my daughter; it is the place I want her to know and love and recognize as part of her very own self.
Beautiful!
Sweet...contrast gives us appreciation...we are sooo blessed to live where we do & in community...the art work is so wonderful! Thank you for your rich insights!💞