What Wildness Is This

What Wildness is This

What Wildness is This is a new anthology of women's writing about the landscape of the Southwest. You'll find a full list of its contents and downloadable foreword and editor's note here. This blog is written by some of the women who contributed to the book and who want to continue to tell their stories of the land.

Call for Beauty

I just read the entire What Wildness is This collection again and am so touched by the intimacy and wisdom of women's words. We've all been hibernating this winter, but please let our words bloom again and post! I will start us out again with a tribute to an oxbow bend below the White Rim Trail.

Canyonlands

Here I sit

atop a canyon

of kind greens and reds

that cannot be described

but perhaps can be sung to.

Here I sit

where the river meets itself

and the land tilts

toward a common center.

Daughter, Not Yet Born

I hesitated to add this poem to the Wildness blog, but decided that clear lines cannot always be drawn between the natural and human world, and that one of my goals is to blend the two worlds, to rediscover my animal nature. Therefore, I am adding a poem about the experience of birth as something that forces us to surrender to the power of nature, to let our human bodies turn to the animals that they are, to see the new life within us as an infinite part of nature. I am now over 8 months pregnant and looking forward to this experience!

Daughter, Not Yet Born

You are a sleeping bud,
curled close in deepwater think.
You are a spiral galaxy,
swirling in heartbeat hiccups.
Your kicks birth stars.

Head down, you're
slicked and ready
to rend the firmament
between my legs,
so I am finally,
thankfully,
broken open.

Copyright 2007, Laura Girardeau

Searching for History in England

Alfriston path

I just returned from my research trip in England and have been musing over history in all its forms. I realize all over again that I’m fascinated with history. Those who know me would laugh at that comment, as my choice of profession–therapist–is about personal history as is memoir writing. My books Becoming Whole and Don’t Call Me Mother are about personal history and its impact on the present. And now my novel  Secret Music takes place in another time and place–the 1930’s and 40’s, before and during World War II. But the main characters live in the seventies, and each of them has to cope with how that history has affected them and haunts them daily.

Fleet Street and St. Paul’s Cathedral

Gun embattlements at fort in Newhaven overlooking the English Channel

I had a couple of goals for my trip: to find out what happened to the adult Jewish refugees–I knew that many were interned on the Isle of Man, but was not sure of the circumstances. And I needed to find a village for my luthier character, a violin maker, to live in after the war. What a hard job I had!:)

London was wildly full of people, and not all of them were tourists either. I stayed in the Bloomsbury area near where Virginia Woolf lived–another fun research aspect for my trip–and tramped the streets. Day and night they were crowded with people. I experienced the enormous crush of the population of London everywhere I went. And when I left the excitement for the country, I enjoyed the beauty and silence of the small towns and villages.

The Imperial War Museum is always inspiring as a place that holds significant history and the library there held the answer to my Isle of Man questions. You’ll have to read the book to find out more.

I found a village for my luthier too–Alfriston, about 8 miles from the town of Lewes, the County town of Sussex, meaning the largest town in the area and a county seat.

Attached are some pictures of Alfriston you might enjoy. It is a quintessential English village beleagered by too many tourists in the summer but on this sunny Sunday, it seemed classic and eternal. English history is celebrated everywhere–every square foot of ground has a story. Books by the cash register are sold about the war in major bookstores–so much connection to history everywhere.

I’ll write more about this later, but wanted to share my thoughts about the presence of history for all of us, both personal and societal.

And for the writers out there, the way I found out the important details for my book was to read memoirs–the very personal story of how larger events impacted each person’s life.

Keep writing, and if you need to research your book, enjoy!

St. Andrews church in Alfriston

Crossing a Wolf's Trail

In August, my husband, Richard, and I set out for the Pacific Northwest, determined to follow the "blue highways," those slower, more interesting two-lanes that give a feel for landscape and culture, unlike the homogenized territory of the interstates. As we drove north down the Blue River from Silverthorne, Colorado, crossed the Colorado River and passed through Kremmeling, and then wound up Muddy Creek toward Rabbit Ears Pass, I was thinking about wolves.

We were crossing the likely path of one of Colorado's most controversial recent immigrants: Wolf 293F, born in 2003 to the Swan Lake Pack in northwestern Yellowstone National Park and killed in June, 2004, while crossing I-70 west of Idaho Springs, some 420 miles from her natal home.

What was she doing? Searching for what drives us all: love and fortune.

Wolf 293 was just a pup in January, 2003, when biologists attached a radio collar to track her movements. She spent her first year learning wolf ways with her siblings.

She was a year old when she was last located by radio telemetry near Mammoth Hot Springs in January, 2004. After that, Wolf 293 vanished from contact until she was found dead in Colorado nearly six months later.

Apparently, Wolf 293's natal pack had no room for another potentially dominant female, so in her second spring, she struck out to find her own space - a territory and a mate.

Before Wolf 293 ventured into central Colorado on her quest, the last known wild gray wolf in the area was killed in the Conejos Valley in 1945, the victim of a culture that fervently believed that predators like wolves, mountain lions, and grizzlies were evil, symbols of a wild that needed to be tamed to make the world safe.

We still fear wolves, even though for the past century, no cases of healthy, wild wolves killing humans can be substantiated. That they will kill unattended livestock is no question, but then, so will domestic dogs.

Wolves are in fact the ancestors of the pet canids we dote on, from teacup poodles to Great Danes. Some fourteen thousand years ago, we befriended the same wolves we now abhor, offering them space at the campfire and scraps in return for companionship and devotion.

Unfortunately, our "tame" companions are not as discriminating as their ancestors: our pets kill an average of thirteen people and untallied numbers of livestock each year. What does it say about us that we harbor pit bulls, but we cannot tolerate wolves?

Like them or not, we may need wolves to restore the health of our landscapes. Without wolves, elk populations have exploded, stripping ecosystems bare as they eat themselves out of house and home, destroying habitat for trout and songbirds and cattle as well, and setting the stage for devastating epidemics like chronic wasting disease.

In the decade since wolves' return to Yellowstone, elk populations have stabilized, cottonwoods, willows, and aspen have re-sprouted, and landscapes are healthier for all. (And they've spawned a boom in wildlife-watching tourism: wolves are the number one species visitors to Yellowstone ask to see.)

I imagine Wolf 293 on her journey, trotting steadily south along the flanks of the mountains, edging around open basins, and stopping each evening on some ridge to broadcast her yearning calls. She stands, tips her muzzle to the sky, and hurls that rich, full-throated howl across the landscape: "Ooooooooooooooooooo!"

Then she listens, ears pricked forward, swiveling to catch any response. But there is no answering call.

She trots on, hunting, resting, but driven to search for more: home and family. Finally, she is hit crossing the river of traffic on I-70. She drags herself off the highway and dies, still alone.

As Richard and I wound through the sagebrush-clothed hills of northwestern Colorado, I thought about Wolf 293 and her quest. And I wondered what it would take for us to welcome wolves, and the wildness they represent, back into our lives.

This post appeared in a different form in The Nature of Life, my weekly newspaper column and is excerpted from for my essay "Wolf 293" in the anthology Comeback Wolves.

Copyright 2007 Susan J. Tweit

The Land of the Ancestors

I am writing this from Muscatine, Iowa, just a couple of blocks from the Mississippi River--pictures to follow once I get home! I am moved to talk about the deep feeling I get in my body when I come back to the land where I have spent nearly all the summers of my life, the land by the Mississippi where my ancestors settled in the 1850s. Today I drove down gravel roads and followed back paths while thunderclouds darkened overhead and lightning sliced to the ground. Rain splashed on my arms as I drove, and the corn stood in silent ranks nearby. I noted all the old barns and paint-stripped houses with their two or three stories, their windows like eyes looking upon the plains that stretches in all directions, a huge vista of land and sky.
I imagined my great-great grandmother Josephine settling here with her family in 1872 or so, not long after the lands were given up by the Sac and the Fox. I remember seeing when I was a little girl the house where Blanche, her daughter and my great-grandmother, gave birth to my grandmother Lulu. I feel deeply rooted and connected here, it travels to the bone and blood of my body as I drink in the delicious scent of rain-soaked grass and the aroma of mud and earth and corn. Through my eyelashes I can almost see the team of horses traveling these same roads, see the women going from house to house to help midwife each other's babies. I see the floods that attacked the land, and the snow and ice that mark winter here. With respect for the uniqueness of this place, I inhale deeply the rain-tinged air.
Seven miles away is Wapello, Iowa, where my mother is buried. I remember the intensity of insects and the almost tactile sense of corn growing just on the other edge of the cemetery during her funeral. I stop and speak for a few minutes to my mother, and reflect on our story, told in my memoir Don't Call Me Mother. I proudly see the epitaph that I chose "Daughter of Lulu and Blaine, mother of Linda Joy."
You see, I was letting her know I had broken the pattern of mother-daughter abandonment that trailed through our generations. I made her claim me finally, healing the disconnection I'd always felt with her. It is a paradox, because naturally I also felt deeply connected. Here in the peaceful quiet of the Wapello cemetery, all the sturm und drang that we lived out is quiet.
After I leave the grave, I come upon a gaggle of cud-chewing, dark eyed cows lying under trees, feet tucked up underneath, looking at me witih curiosity and unconcern. There they were, young ladies relaxing on a summer afternoon, observing the human cemetery while they created more milk for the evening milking. I spoke to them, and took their picture--also to follow!
The thunderstorms of today create an aroma that I welcome, a sprinkling of the earth that washes clean the leaves of the corn and waters the gardens that grow the huge red tomatoes of August in Iowa.
Tomorrow I say goodbye to the cradle of our family's origins and return to my current home in California, full of reminders of the land where we came from, the landscape of my ancestors.

With Grace

     It’s been over a month now since the Land Full of Stories gathering, a time in which I’ve meditated some on wildness as I’ve grieved the death of The Queen of Everything, my cat companion, Grace Blanket.  That weekend, as my peers walked a little of Texas’s wild ground, shared ideas, and, I imagine, wrote furiously with the natural and communal stimuli all around them, I walked with my friend through her last days here in my community of four (three cats and me) in central Michigan.

     She had leaped out of the darkness into my arms fifteen years ago on Fourth of July weekend.  A friend had dropped by late, and as I leaned against a post in an orb of light on my porch seeing Robyn to her car, I heard a rustle in the shrubs near my feet. Before I could react enough to stand up straight, I felt a slight weight in the crook of my arm.  I looked down into the eyes of a dark, scrawny kitten already intently focused on my face. Every muscle tense, her body spoke of her fears, her need, but those eyes may have already been alerting me to my own.

     What could I do late at night and on a holiday weekend but take her in? I left her to some food and water and an investigation of the utility room as I headed toward fitful sleep with “you already have three cats, you can’t afford another, there’s not enough room” playing over and over in my head.  I acted on that practical mantra, placed the newspaper ad, and fielded the phone calls. After a few queries, a woman said she was interested and would call soon to schedule a visit.  I went back to the utility room to share this news with the tortoiseshell, now glossy and sleek.  I picked her up to a purring that stirred the air.  Out of my mouth came “aren’t you just a bit of grace?”  And then came the tears, sobs really, wracking sobs, unbidden and shocking.  When the woman called a day or so later, I told her that the kitten had been adopted.

     So, yes, there would be four cats, and she would be Grace, Grace Blanket, named after a central character in Linda Hogan’s novel, Mean Spirit. My decision could only answer those sobs, not explain them.  I think now that perhaps I saw something of my own vulnerability in her.  I was undergoing intensive physical therapy on my shoulders and was thus in constant, incapacitating pain. At least twice a day, I’d wrap dozens of ice cubes in towels, line the bed with garbage bags to catch the melt, stack the pillows just so, and sink my shoulders and neck into iced numbness. Once Grace joined us in the house, she began to participate in this ritual.  Tucking her head under my chin and stretching her already long, lanky frame down my body, she purred and slept until I lay in lukewarm water.

     Six months later myalgic encephalopathy (the likely new name for chronic fatigue syndrome) began to unravel my life.  One of its most diabolical symptoms was an unrelenting insomnia. Driven to bed for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, I couldn’t sleep, my mind ceaselessly circling, circling, circling. The exhaustion was so profound that I began to feel as though I was somehow fading out into the universe, disappearing from myself, from my place, from life itself.  So Grace modified her ritual, balancing herself now along my side, her head resting on the very top of my arm, her body stretching out and settling along the curve between my shoulder and hip.  Animal body to animal body, I slept then, the simple weight of her body pressing me back toward Earth and holding me there—for all the years of her life, all the years of my illness. Now sleep comes hard again; I’m left to find new ways to hold myself close to life, to Earth.

     In the last two days before her death, I had run out of things to offer her.  Her heart and kidneys were failing, and her coat of glossy black with its splashes of cinnamon and buff was almost gone.  Only a few guard hairs remained over her shoulders and along her sides.  All of this rendered the content of my words meaningless, pills and ointments pointless, and, of course, she rejected every soft spot I devised. Except for one—my lap.  So I pulled myself out of human time, eased into the recliner, pulled up a throw, and waited.  Soon she would make her slow way to the base of the chair, dare a wobbly leap up, and settle gingerly, painfully into my lap.  I’d wrap the throw around her tense, trembling body, stroke her head, and talk softly of our history.  Often it would take an hour, but eventually she would relax and slide into deep sleep and the tremors would stop.  I would sleep then too within the circle of those final blessings as the hours passed.

     As a kid, I tramped the fields, fencerows, and ditches for miles around our family farm in Michigan’s Thumb. As an adult in Utah, I hiked the Wasatch and Stansbury ranges near my Salt Lake home and fell passionately in love with Utah’s Red Rock country, especially the Escalante River watershed.  I’ve known wildness, then, defining it, when I came to define it at all, as something remarkable and exotic, something “out there” attainable only in rare, dramatic moments.   But here in the quiet of my living room with a domestic cat, I felt my own wild nature at its deepest in the space we created around us.  I had to become still and alert so that I could extend myself toward that which was alive and in need but still, for all our years together and her domestication, a creature distinctly nonhuman. I had to slip fully into my animal body in order to offer my only comfort to her—my body’s warmth and scent, the softness of its belly, the caress of its fingertips, the timbre of its voice. 

     While Grace had called her primary name out of me, her “middle name” had been a literary, intellectual affectation.  I was showing off, trying to be clever by adding “Blanket.” She would have none of my self-consciousness, my feeble aggrandizement: with her intelligence, playful wild heart, attunement, and body, she made her whole name literal, fulfilling every promise it implied. She had come out of the darkness, unbidden.  As I traveled as far as I could with her back into that mystery, that place of ultimate wildness, she called upon me to put down any pretensions I might have had left, to face my fear directly, and thus to learn that I, too, could offer the deep, essential shelter of my animal body.

Where Has All the Wildness Gone?

Fond memories of fun camping days as a kid must have been dancing in my head when I decided recently to take my extended family on a campout. I could still taste those good old hot dogs and s’mores. I could still feel the thrill of skinny-dipping in a sun-drenched pond. I could still hear the screams and laughter as ghost stories were told around a campfire. I could still see the deer and raccoons that had accepted peanuts and cookies from my hands.

Decades had passed since my last such excursion, so I felt a little intimidated about making the arrangements. Simple. I turned it over to the official family organizer, my sister Susan. In the wink of an Internet eye, she had booked “the perfect spot.” Seven of us (Susan, her nine-year-old son Caleb, my son Jeff with my daughter-in-love Amy and their daughter Annsley, my husband, Tom, and I) would spend a long weekend together in a trailer at Beavers Bend State Park in Southeast Oklahoma.
“Er… how big is this RV?” I asked.
“Huge! Sleeps six,” Susan assured me. “The best part is they’ll set it up and stock it for us so all we have to do is show up. It’s cheap, too.” That should have been my first clue.

Jeff and his family would meet us there. Susan and Caleb would drive up with us. To accommodate the fold-up chairs, suitcases, backpacks, first-aid kit, iPods, Gameboy, backgammon, cards and other games, charcoal, lighter fluid, two cases of soft drinks and water plus a backup supply of vodka, wine and beer, four coolers, three watermelons, and twenty-seven bags of miscellaneous groceries, we soon realized we would need both her car and our truck for the journey.

Off we went! From the rolling green hills of East Texas through the waterlogged cornfields, fruit orchards and pastures along the way, we watched the looming clouds. After more than sixty straight days of rain, we all were more than ready for fun in the sun. The weather forecast predicted just a 30% chance of showers. Ever the optimists, we interpreted that as a 70% chance for sunshine.

A few hours later, we spotted our camper in site #4 of the camp inside the park. Not exactly huge, the trailer was at least cute with its own little awning and picnic table. Knowing that Beavers Bend is located alongside Mountain Fork River and the shores of Broken Bow Lake, Susan had asked to have the RV set up as near the lake as possible. It was facing a wooded area on the row farthest away from the river, about eight miles from the lake. Our disappointment eased a bit when we heard that all the lake’s beaches were under water, so we unloaded and moved in with moments to spare before the sky fell. For the rest of the afternoon and into the night, the rain was relentless; the road in front of our camper became a raging river. Turned out we were parked on waterfront property after all.

I was awakened the next morning by the sound of thunder and a two-by-four plank upside my head. Okay, I banged into the wooden canopy inches above my nose in our “bedroom.” There was only one way in and one way out of that bed—prone body, crawl-scooting inch by inch across the mattress. Tiptoeing over my son, who obviously had lost his battle with his half of the sagging sofa-bed and ended up on the floor, I made my way to the two-foot-square bathroom. Undeterred by the standing water in the tiny shower, I bravely flushed the toilet. How can anything that small make that much noise?

Not the most popular co-camper at that moment, I escaped to the great outdoors. Standing beneath the awning, I watched a cantaloupe, two bags of chips, and a bikini top float down the river/road. Where was everyone? I seemed to be the only person up at seven o’clock in that fairly full campground. Recalling the late night wailings of a family reunion teen band—microphones, drums and all, I was tempted to march in their direction with a megaphone or bugle. I wisely opted for a solitary stroll in the woods.

How I love the smell of rain, even after too much of it. Mingled with the scent of pines, it's intoxicating. As I waded deeper into the glade, I was struck with the greenness of it all. Anyone who has spent much time in Texas or the Southwest will understand my fascination with a summer landscape of immeasurable shades of green in the grass below my feet, the bushes around me, and the trees above my head. Had I magically awakened in Ireland? Uninterrupted even by wildflowers that must have drowned already, this emerald world seemed unending.

A glint of color suddenly caught my eye. Turning for a closer look, I spied a glorious scatter rug of golden mushrooms thrown across the forest floor. I snapped a photo to help me identify the species later. (Seems now that they were chanterelles—a variety of mushroom prized for their flowery flavor and apricot aroma. Or maybe Jack O’Lanterns—a poisonous mushroom in the same orange to yellow shades but with gills that harbor nighttime bioluminescent qualities.) Wish I had been daring enough to collect a few and experiment.

At no point during my exploration did I run across another human being. By the time I returned to our trailer at 9:00 a.m. or so, a few people were beginning to stir. Next came the biggest surprise of all… An ice cream jeep, complete with accordion music, was clanging across the campground. Adults and children alike appeared from nowhere, clamoring for snowcones, fudgcicles and bottled water. The clouds had made room for the sun; maybe it was all in the timing. But whatever happened to the smells of bacon or trout frying over a morning campfire?

In the afternoon, my family ventured out to see more of the park. We drove to the river’s bend, where everyone rented canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats to float three or four hundred yards to the dam and back again. Bumper-boats were available, too, for those in the mood to spin madly, crash into one another, and yell a lot. From parking lot to shoreline, the swimming beach was covered with warm bodies sporting Ipods, cellphones and other electronic gadgets. Those in the water were having great fun kicking up a muddy mess and floating atop it. We decided to take our chances elsewhere.

Driving across the bridge above the dam, we finally spotted Broken Bow Lake—a beautiful expanse of cool, blue water inaccessible through normal routes. Ever the adventurers, we followed a back road until we came upon a swiftly running creek. Hot and sweaty, our crew jumped from the truck and raced for the water. Splash! Brrrrrrr… Our screams probably were heard for miles. Who knew that clear stream bordered on subzero temperatures? We stuck it out for an hour or two, though, before returning to the truck in various shades of red and blue.

Back at the RV, we waited patiently for the coals to heat up enough for Tom to grill burgers and hot dogs. I noticed that a young couple had set up two tents at the site next to ours. A tiny pup tent, apparently for sleeping, and something resembling a portable gazebo with screens. Cell phone glued to her ear, she obviously had located a pizza place. I watched in amazement as a guy in a van delivered it to their tent door. To her credit, the woman offered her man a paper plate and napkin as she settled down beside him in the larger tent and popped Spiderman II into a DVD player. Susan swears that couple never left the tent the entire weekend, nor turned off the DVD player, except to make a fast-food run or go to bed.

Tom dropped the grid and part of our dinner into the coals at some point and had to start over. The burgers were worth the wait, but some of us had already filled up on chips and watermelon by the time they were ready. My sweet grandbaby gave up long before and was sleeping soundly in the camper. After supper (the best part of camping may be the ability to toss paper plates on a bonfire following a meal rather than washing dishes), we all decided to clean up at the public showers rather than chance waking little “Junebug” or flooding the RV tub again.

Balancing rubber sandals, pajamas, panties, oversized t-shirt, towels, soap, face-wash, shampoo and conditioner, I hurried over to the utilitarian concrete bathhouse. Five women sitting on a bench inside obviously had the same idea. Chatting amicably, we waited and waited and waited while two teenage girls did whatever teenage girls do in the only two shower stalls available. I finally entered one of the curtained stalls an hour later and disrobed. With great anticipation, I reached up to turn on the hot water. Not! The sudden icy blast caused me to jump back against the curtain, knocking down the supporting rod and exposing myself to the now seven ladies in waiting. Modesty has no place in the camping world.

When we awoke the next morning to the gentle sound of raindrops once again falling on our metal RV roof, no one had to say a word. We were on our way home within an hour, fond memories and all.

Paula Stallings Yost
http://www.alifesketch.com

The Texas Taste of Home

In early June, I landed in hot, muggy Texas on my way to the “Land Full of Stories” conference in San Marcos. Immediately after disembarking, I know I am in a new place—the airport festooned with neon cowboy hats, boots, lassos, horses, and barbed wire.

The conference was a celebration of the newly released anthology What Wildness is This, edited by Paula Yost, Susan Albert, Susan Hanson, and Jan Epton Seale, published by the University of Texas Press. Over one hundred authors contributed poetry, personal essays, narrative nonfiction and memoirs about land and place, how it profoundly affects our identity and contributes to our soul’s transformation. During the conference, speakers, poets, and readers enthralled us with their experiences of place, landscapes that had weaved deep meaning in the writer’s lives. Through the various workshops, were inspired to consider the special places that have meaning in our lives, the spiritual and healing places, landscapes that we associate with home, and landscapes that have challenged us or taught us something significant.

One workshop took writers into Gruene and the hill country around San Marcos. Gruene is a historic town between San Marcos and New Braunfels, Texas. The Guadelupe River rushes past the Old Mill restaurant. Sitting at a table over looking the river and sniffing the Texas landscape, I ordered catfish, deep fried Texas style, despite the diet I was on, and I enjoyed every bite. The week before the conference, the Guadelupe had flooded, knocking out the bridge in Gruene, reminding me how much, in big ways and small ones, our lives are affected by the particularities of place—weather, animals and plant life.

A two hour walk with my roommate Linda Wisniewski allowed us to experience the town on a hot Texas night. We explored various neighborhoods and found ourselves lost, crossing several bridges over the San Marcos River several times, directionless in the Great Plains, until we saw the campus and found ourselves. The night was laced with mournful train whistles echoing across the open plains. We encountered native trees, grasses, and flowers, and night animals swimming the river, surrounded by the scent of Texas hill country on a summer night.

This June night is etched in my memory because I experienced it with all my senses. Every time I come to Texas, I taste the Oklahoma grit in my mouth from the past, reminding me where home is.

--Linda Joy Myers
http://www.memoriesandmemoirs.com/

Saving the Silence that Nourishes Our Souls

Half a lifetime ago when I was twenty-six years old, I set out to hike across some of the wildest territory in the lower 48 – the Absaroka Mountains and the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park - accompanied only by a borrowed German Short-haired Pointer named Sadie.

My marriage had recently shattered, and in short order, I had left a promising career in field ecology and moved away from the landscape I loved. My life was a mess. So I ran away. I packed up Sadie and returned on foot to the mountains I knew intimately in search of solitude and the balm of silence.

When I am stuck and cannot extricate myself from my problems, I head for wild country, for someplace removed from the noise and busyness of humanity. Seekers of all kinds have retreated to the silence of the wild, from the solitary treks of the Christian Desert Fathers to Native American vision quests, Aborigine “walkabouts”, Indian mystics in Himalayan caves, and rustic church camps.

“True silence. . .” wrote Quaker William Penn, “is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.” Silence is where we go to meet our inner selves without distraction, where we tune out the trivial and focus on what is at the core of our lives.

It’s not that nature is actually silent. On the contrary, the wild world is as full of sound as it is of life.

But the sounds of the wild – the whooshing of wind in evergreen boughs, the haunting calls of sandhill cranes, the rasp of a grasshopper’s jaws, the click as a seed pod splits open – may enhance introspection and meditation, perhaps because they sing the rhythms and cadences of life living itself. The “silence” of the wild is more like restful quiet, a soothing absence of the adrenaline-pumping din generated by humanity’s cellular phones, video games, televisions, computers, dishwashers, car engines, airplanes, jackhammers.

Contemplative silence is an undervalued resource, a rarity in landscapes dominated by humans. Incessant noise overwhelms mind and spirit, drowning the small, still voice of our own inner wisdom: in the constant barrage, it is no wonder that we cannot hear ourselves think.

When I was 26 and in turmoil, I needed that kind of silence. So I set off into the wilderness, laden by a towering backpack stuffed with every conceivable necessity and accompanied by Sadie. Eight days and 110 miles later, Sadie and I emerged from our trek dusty and thinner, having forded waist-deep streams, traversed the Continental Divide, and survived getting much too close to a grizzly bear.

The long days hiking with only Sadie for company forced me to face my fears and taught me that no matter where life took me, my survival depended on heeding my inner voice: those utterances of intuition and insight saved Sadie and I more than once.

In the twenty-some years since that trip - through marriage and moves and step-motherhood, through writing and teaching and the unpredictable progress of life - I’ve often imagined returning. My imaginations, however, have stayed just that. It’s not only being unable to find the time: the truth is I no longer have the physical capacity to make the hike.

When I need the tranquility of the wild nowadays, I retreat to a sunny spot atop a nearby urban stream bank where I can bask in the fragrant clump of sagebrush my husband and I planted, soothed by the murmur of the creek. I miss the solitary days I once spent in wilder places, but I take heart knowing that others can trek to those landscapes and hear the stirrings of their souls.

As our homes and neighborhoods grow noisier, we need sanctuaries of contemplative silence within easy reach, easily accessible places where we can retreat and listen to the stillness without multi-day, hundred- mile treks. We need wildness close to home.

Whether actual wilderness areas or simply bits of urban space protected from despoilment and din, these reservoirs of wildness and peace preserve something increasingly rare in today’s world: the kind of silence that nourishes our hearts and souls.

Susan J. Tweit
http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com
http://susanjtweit.com

Here be dragons

From Wikipedia: "Here be dragons" is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the infrequent medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps . . .

At the "Land/Stories Conference" a couple of weeks ago, I led a workshop called "Here Be Dragons," where we talked about the challenges and (sometimes) terrors of place, and another called "Personal Mapping," which asked people to become more aware of the physical aspects of the place they live. For example, we drew a schematic map of our neighborhood: that part of our city, town, or rural area in which we spend most of our time. And then we talked about the map, and about places we enjoyed living (and why) and about places we'd never want to live (and why).

The responses were interesting. One gal said she'd never want to live in Alaska: too remote, too cold, too dark too much of the time. A lot of people agreed. I said I'd never want to live in New York: too many people, too much congestion. Another person said she'd never want to live in Florida because of the hurricanes--but it turns out that she lives in Galveston! Which led me to ask whether she was concerned about a hurricane hitting Galveston (wouldn't be the first time--the Galveston hurricane of 1900 is still the worst natural disaster in U.S. history). She said she didn't want to think about it--and when I asked if she'd chosen her hurricane evacuation route, she didn't like the question.

I certainly can't blame her. I don't like to think about the big "downside" issues about the place where I live--and there are some, most of which I can't do anything about. But as J.R.R. Tolkein once said, "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."

And it seems to me that we need to require ourselves to be aware of these challenges. (I use the word "require" because facing dragons is not something we do happily or with enthusiasm.) The Gulf Coast has its hurricanes. LA and San Francisco and Seattle are prone to earthquakes. Here in the Texas Hill Country, it's flash floods and tornadoes (yes, we have an underground shelter, which I chose over the new kitchen cabinets I wanted). When I lived in New Orleans in the late 70s, lots of people worried about the levees being overtopped or broken through--and that was 35 years before Katrina. And not all the dangers of place are related to natural events. Who remembers Love Canal? What about Three Mile Island? The Youngstown Flood?

I'm not preaching fear here (we have enough of that already, for heaven's sake). But I am suggesting that while we're thinking about place, and trying to understand the significance of place and the way places affect our lives, it's not enough to think and write only about the good, the grand, the awe-inspiring, the soul-stirring. We need to spend a little time thinking about dragons.

Because here be dragons. Here, in our front yards, in our home places. Not over there, somewhere out of sight, off the map.

And it does not do to leave them out of our calculations.

Susan Wittig Albert
www.susanalbert.typepad.com/lifescapes