Ecology of Residency 2007

the ecology of residency essays from

The Murie Center Moose, Wyoming

June 2007

the ecology of residency

essays from The Murie Center Moose, Wyoming June 2007

Š 2008 All rights reserved. Works within are property of their respective author.

Please do not reprint without permission. Thank You. Printed on recycled paper.

For the Muries and all those who endeavor in their footsteps

Table of Contents foreword

Terry Tempest Williams

vi

the flowers

xi

the essays

View from the Middle

Adele H. Bealer

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Reading My Corporal Geography: A Visceral Story of Place Corinne Cappelletti

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Marks Katy Savage

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Writing My Natural Biography

Juliet Unfried

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Eureka?

Jared Grogan

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A Place of Love, Sorrow and Healing Natasha McVaugh Seegert

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Peregrination of Place Anndrea Parrish

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The Flowers Calypso Orchid Elephanthead Indian Paintbrush Striped Coralroot Spreading Dogbane Shooting Star Mountain Snowberry Monkshood Lupine Blue Camas Silky Phacelia Huckleberry Chokecherry Green Gentian Serviceberry Manyflowered Phlox Mules-ear Sunflower Balsamroot Heartleaf Arnica Yellow Monkey-flower Glacier Lily Oregongrape Sulfer Buckwheat

Calypso bulbosa Pedicularis groenlandica Castilleja linariaefolia Corallorhiza striata Apocynum androsaemifolium Dodecatheon meadia Symphoricarpos oreophilus Aconitum columbianum Lupinus perennis Camassia quamash Phacelia sericea Gaylussacia baccata Prunus virginiana Frasera speciosa Amelanchier canadensis Phlox multiflora Wyethia amplexicaulis Helianthus annuus Balsamorhize sagittata Arnica cordifolia Mimulus guttatus Erythronium grandiflorum Mahonia repens Eriogonum umbellatum

The Essays a

I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by, or so poor she cannot afford to keep them.

-- Margaret (Mardy) Murie

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View from the Middle Adele H. Bealer

Abduction: to be carried away, to be taken. Taken lightly, taken for granted, taken seriously, taken for a ride. Alien abductors arrive on earth demanding,” Take me to your leader.” A far more provocative request would be “Take me to your place.” Where would I take them?

Where is place taking me?

Memphis, Tennessee. Winter, a comma between fall and spring, a long grey afternoon that lingers wetly on bare branches and fallen leaves, gives way one morning to a single week of spring. Azaleas, iris, coreopsis, jonquils, crocus, hydrangeas—I remember their blooms cut early and fresh, gathered into a bouquet for the Easter flower offering.

At six, I wore a hat and white gloves to church, primed with the legend of the dogwood and the belief that flowers held the mystery of the resurrection. My friend Frances assured me that Jesus was waiting outside in the fields beyond the parking lot, not inside our Sunday school classroom, so we spent the morning hidden by tall grasses, weaving rosaries of clover blossoms. On the way home in the car, I earnestly shared this revelation with my astonished family. My mother was horrified.

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If spring was briefly with us, summer tended to linger, lulled by the drone of cicadas and the hum of lawn mowers, punctuated by the crash of the screen door banging behind me as I raced out to the backyard. Striped shirt, red shorts, a coonskin cap and a gun holster saw me ready to face the day. Our yard backed up to what was exotically referred to as the Cherry Bayou, a drainage ditch vast and deep as the Suez Canal. A sleeping serpent, the Bayou could come angrily awake following a summer storm, swollen with murky water and lashing at its banks; it was strictly off limits to me. I was generally an obedient child (the curse of the first-born), as well as a cautious one, so while I never attempted The Ditch, I often peered over our fence to the mysterious river of cement and debris that lapped at the edge of my natural world, wondering what lay upstream in the mysterious West. I wanted more than anything to be a cowboy (or an archeologist), who would find arrowheads and dinosaur bones and spend long hours around a perfect campfire telling riveting tall tales to an admiring audience of fellow adventurers. The neighbor boys made a useful posse, and I was known as a fiercely competitive Indian leg wrestler. I possessed a fine knowledge of local flora and fauna; I could kill a honeybee with my bare hands and I spent hours holding the end of a string tied to a stick that propped up a box that would surely trap a mockingbird if only I were vigilant, and he unwary. Our state bird was not obliging, but I did capture a baby rat, found wet and shivering perilously near the edge of The Ditch. Sensing that at all costs a deadly rat bite must be avoided, I was struck by a flash of inspiration. At last, a workaday purpose for those white Sunday gloves! My mother was horrified. The rat was liberated, airlifted into the Bayou.

In that same long summer of my childhood, I found a three-legged frog. Disappointingly, the frog was not a mutant but an amputee, one lower hind leg having been lost to a mower blade or other predator, but I wanted to give this specimen closer study. I abducted him bodily, secreted in my pocket, and deposited him in a thoughtfully constructed environment of grasses, leaves, a bottle cap filled with water and an assortment of dead (yet presumably tasty) flies. This habitat was carefully hidden beneath the lid of an antique school desk my mother had

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carefully restored and painted, and which was conveniently located in my room. Air flow was assured through the ink well, and a carefully placed lamp would surely provide both warmth and necessary illumination. Best of all, at any time of the day or night, I would be able to simply lift the lid and observe how my patient was coming along.

Distracted by the muffled thumps echoing from the desk’s riparian interior, I failed to reckon with my younger sister’s betrayal. My mother was horrified. The frog failed to thrive.

That Christmas I received a ballerina costume, a microscope, and a red cowboy hat. Family photographs document my attempts to become the world’s first scientist en pointe, fascinated with the world revealed in my sister’s spit and sheepishly wearing a pink tutu over my undershirt in the December chill, but I have no memory of either… only the hat lingers in my mind. The next summer, I experienced a paradigm shift in perspective: I discovered horses. I rode the world, seeing it framed between two ears, a walking meditation cadenced by hoof beats and lulled by a movement that extended my own. I had the gifts of freedom and companionship, the ability to ride away into the sunset, to be carried away on the back of my heart’s desire. Our companions shape the way we experience our surroundings. Horses were my mountains. I knew the world from the back of a horse; everything seems clearer from above. I learned to follow my pony’s lead, trusting her to find a path, and always, always knowing that she could find the way home. I fashioned a pack out of a feed sack (they were burlap then, not paper) and filled it with books and other tools of the cowboy’s trade, tied it to my (very English) saddle and rode up into a pasture.

On top of a flat hill that overlooked the barn and arena below, I dismounted in a shady spot and carefully constructed a corral around my pony, winding a web of white kite string around and through the trees and shrubs. I lay on the ground, my head on my saddle, and prepared to read to my ungrateful pony. In one of several acts of betrayal, she promptly walked through the string corral and ran wantonly through the gelding pasture, attracting the attention of some fifteen elderly and amorous school horses. Terrified, I ran sobbing back down to the barn to get help, convinced that her aged suitors were going to kill my

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pony. I was horrified. The barn manager nearly died suppressing his laughter. My pony seemed quite smug for days afterward.

Pony led to horse to horse show to horse showing. Suburbs claimed the fields and forests of my childhood, and my connection to those seemingly wild places diminished as my intention focused more narrowly on my sport. Riding becomes practice, practice, practice. You work your horse, work on your form, work out your problems. Around and around, you pursue perfection in a finite circle inscribed on the ground where no grass ever grows. You try, you fail, you kiss the dirt, you get back on, back on the horse, face your fear, jump that fence, around and around, again and again, continue, continue. You see nothing outside the ring, and you know no other thing except your horse. You build a connection to another, to this Other, and you assume that this bond is forever. You learn that hot and thirsty as you are, your horse is hot and thirsty too, and you share water from a hose only after he drinks first. You taste his feed to see which you prefer, oats or the sweet molasses-covered corn, you breathe in the warm, spicy smell of him, his breath. He inspires you, you inspire him, you blow into each other’s nostrils and share moments of liquid clarity, perfect cohabitation, grace, joy. You braid a circlet of his tail hairs and wear it around your wrist, and you blush to be caught laying your lips on the velvet of his nose. You learn when he hurts, when he cannot keep his promises. You learn what questions not to ask. The day that his leg breaks, and he looks to you in bewilderment, you kneel down beside him after the final injection and force your breathing to follow his to the last, faint exhale. He walks through the space of your knowing and into a place in your heart.

At the end of childhood’s summer I came indoors, abducted from the natural world by the Real World, a place of decisions and consequences, responsibilities and priorities. My world contracted, labored, contracted again and then expanded with the birth of my daughter. A community of two, a connection forged of blood, with another, this Other. I already know that hot and thirsty as I am, her thirst comes first. I taste her food before I spoon it into her mouth; we share the se-

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duction of strawberries and the secret heart of an artichoke. I breathe in the sweet, heady smell of her skin, and I take her by the hand, a new companion to walk with me in the world outside. I carefully compose a frame of reference for her, I sketch the outlines of her place. I show her where the tadpoles swim. I teach her to gather eggs fearlessly from the henhouse, and how to kill a bee with her bare hands. I put a basket of costumes under the apple trees, and she spends hours after school racing through the pasture, dancing to music only she can hear while a cape (or were those wings?) streams out behind her. I bring home a pony and a saddle, a proper Western saddle, and she hangs back in the shade, preferring the cowboy costume to the cowboy way.

I am mystified, but she is my daughter, and I trust that this bond will last forever. She walks through the life I have so carefully constructed around her and into her own.

I am in love, I am loved, I am going to be a cowboy, I am going West, my place is expanding again. I am fifty years old. My mother is horrified. My sister is horrified. My daughter is horrified. I am ecstatic.

Salt Lake City, Utah. I have been abducted by aliens. I have become an alien. I cannot speak the language, I have no landmarks, and yet everywhere there are mountains. I cannot see over them, I have been dropped into an environment lovingly constructed for me by my husband. We are in his element now. I dimly recognize my own furniture; the dead (yet presumably nourishing) books I find are my only solace.

The mountains take my breath, I am breathless, I cannot catch my breath. He watches me anxiously, waiting to see if I will thrive, and does not understand why I try and try to leap over the side. “Please don’t close the lid,” I am thinking. He is horrified. I am an amputee speaking in a tongue no one understands.

Salvia, penstemon, Jupiter’s beard, artemisia, agastache, Apache plume. I set about learning the language, I speak in flowers, floralalia.

I expand our community of two by reading the landscape, literally reading my way into the ground. I walk the foothills with Leopold and Austin, look southward with Abbey and Williams, read westward

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with Trimble and Fox. I run outdoors while the past echoes behind me like the sound of a screen door slamming. Our companions shape the way we come to experience our place. I put my trust in my dogs and my husband. We learn each other’s contours, to tread lightly, and to leave no trace. His eyes are the color of a Western sky. My heart is a slot canyon. I talk of Arches and Hovenweep, the Wave, Black Dragon Wash and Newspaper Rock. I buy cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. I am becoming a cowboy archeologist. Walking, I see the ground more clearly, and I sometimes walk alone. Place does not hold me—I am the placeholder, and I define its edges, its shallows, and its depths. I see magnolia blossoms on the pine boughs, and I orient myself by a great muddy river that is sometimes to the West, sometimes to the East. At Christmastime, I send cards with a photograph of me recklessly lounging in Window Arch, the red universe sprawling away behind me as I grin fearlessly into the camera. My mother is only slightly horrified.

My sister tells everyone that the only thing I photograph is rocks. My daughter comes to visit. I am ecstatic.

Abduction: the study of patterns, the search for relationships, the science of seeing the connections that flow between and around and among us all. There is no beginning of place, and no end; like a river that exists always and yet is never the same, so place is a context that moves around us and with us, and we with it. The past and the future meet in the present, and we move between tenses at the middle, always in the middle of a community that flows around us.

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Reading My Corporal Geography: A Visceral Story of Place Corinne Cappelletti

What is the landscape of my body and how does story shape it? My skin is the physical periphery of my home and my perspective and intention extend beyond its ecotone with every breath, every word and exchange. The surface is permeable, and yet it revolves around a core of integrity. I turn to the physical home, for a sense of form and structure. Memories are the creation of home. My family home and introduced the first notion of the principle of dynamic mobility in my life. It is through my life experiences that I continue to develop what dwells in the home of the spirit and how the experience of nature and society interrelate with my home.

Physical home Everyday the strength, weight, and connectivity of my core are challenged. My sense of self started as the fire child wildly dancing to my parents’ hippie record collection, sweating to the live musicians on Fisherman’s Catch pier, and playfully partnered with the ocean waves.

I remember at three feeling how the freedom and expression of my body enlivened my soul and connected me to place. By seven years of age, I was passed back and forth between patriarch and matriarch, and home became my body. It represented the landscape of Maine, with its beacon of light searching the rocky coast for a loving place to call home. This compassing movement of the lighthouse translates today in my pivoting spiral expression that I organically move with when improvising and creating choreography. Protected in the comfort and privacy of my own living room, both in the physical and imaginary realm of my home, I can dance free and be completely me.

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When I listen and respond from a corporeal residence to these natural patterns in my movement or in the geometry of nature, my roots come into focus. While improvising on the wooded field that borders the “Around the World” path at the Muriel Center in Wyoming, I “physically” the form and the progression of time that I interpret in a Douglas Fur cone. This pivoting degage (to extend the leg) mimics the structure and function of a Maine lighthouse. I locate my self my home in place, as I compass the earth tracing it with my leg. From a bird’s-eye view of the cone, a symmetrical spiral of the dragon-tongue petals splays from the center outward. The spiral form symbolizes a cyclic returning from self to other, to environment, and back to my self in home (a connected body/mind). When I dance spirals in a fluid integration, my structure disintegrates in and out of the ground effortlessly. The world and its physical, emotional and energetic habitants, enter through “doorways” in my body, its sensory organs. To understand place, I listen and respond deeply engaged with my surroundings through my windows of sensory perception and kinesthetic interactions.

My body language and voice easily transform from one place to another. In my youth, I naturally picked up mannerisms from other people. Malleable, yet grounded in the experience of my body I understood my place, its ecology of people and land, through the practice of representation in gesture and the momentum of the body.

Deep in a grande plie, like when experienced culture shock for the first time, I rode the weighted wave of the Ghanaian pelvis dancing in the New Year and I then felt at home. In order to find wholeness, I juice through the pulp that resists contact of my body with the earth.

Each low lunge makes me more comfortable with today and where I may lay to my death. I try to surrender my weight, to be carried by the land instead of trampling on it, so that I may die peacefully. In a lingering passive weight in the yoga asana called Savasana (corps pose) I exist at the threshold of form and no-form. It is through various body art practices, particularly yoga, dance, martial arts, and the Alexander Technique that I slip happily into partnership with the earth. I have come to appreciate a low center of gravity and the affinity I share with

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“earthy” traditional dance forms such as, Ghanaian and Balinese.

Creation of home (memories) It wasn’t, however, until these embodied life experiences and the times to reflect had accumulated that the bedrock of my identity surfaced. Mapping my corporeal geography reveals personal boundaries and materials I used to construct my foundation I built my home on a foundation that supports awareness and self-trust. Throughout my childhood and into early adulthood I moved consistently. First, I rotated weekly from my mother’s house to my father’s. As a transient in high school and college years, across various concert grounds from Maine to Maryland and Ghana to Bali I discovered that my body is the safest place to call home. More than any friend, family, or substance, my home is the only place to find unconditional trust.

I invested in the faith that my sanity and inspiration source is my body. I realized it is the conduit for sensing and the mechanism for releasing experience of fear, betrayal, or sadness through my tears or with the calming wave of my breath. The functions of the body offer me the space to process life and a means for solace. Although I am a relational being, I dive deeply into the inner world to build confidence, empathy, and love. I commit to knowing through embodiment, an experiential learner of sorts. Ultimately the only way for me to move forward in the world is with the sincerity of my body. I am mind in movement. I am mind in movement: moving mind, thinking body.

Noticing and sensing the details, in the architecture of the landscape, the color and social choreography outside of me, or the sensations in my home, I focus on the point of intersection between “inner connectivity” and “outer expressivity.” In the words of Peggy Hackney1, the infinity symbol represents that point of intersection called, “lively interplay” (214). To move beyond the black and white polarities of the world, conserving the integrity of opposing perspectives or ways of 1.

Hackney, Peggy (2002). Making Connections, Total Body Integration Through Bartenieff Fundamentals. Routledge: New York, NY.

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being while experiencing “aliveness” or the ‘lively interplay” (208) integrates the spectrum of thought. I propose we use this as a model for conflict in both personal and global communities. It illustrates how listening and communicating between two binaries in an interactive way creates an enlivened whole (211-212).

Investment in the process of integration encompasses differentiated parts. To balance, acknowledge, and live out the spectrum of binaries, is to strike the resonant promenade of the ballerina. An oppositional resonance in the dancer enlivens the gravity in energetic relationship with levity. The tools such as, outdoor meditation 20 minutes a day, grounds the mind in the body thereby bridging the fast paced lifestyle of modernity to our primitive bodily knowledge. Using a vocabulary of embodiment, I hope to re-develop a language to navigate life with a greater sense of purpose and decisiveness. As a critical thinker and mover, striving for a balance between the body and soul, wild and urban, good and evil, I leap across the stage gesturing from the inside out. At times, my only choice is to dance or move through the conflicts or one-sidedness in order to arrive at and live in the “lively interplay” between binaries.

I try to confront each moment with a sense of embodied wholeness, including my memories that inform present perceptions and imagine the future. I learn experientially of mind and body, by which I situate myself in time and space. Insightful movers trust every moment, that is my “white-hot demon,” as Terry Tempest Williams may name it for me. I intend to “be” and express from my whole mind/body.

However, I undoubtedly wane between the inner and outer parts, the black or white, rather than dwelling at their intersection. Whether too deep in the inner connective “rooms” of my body or hiding fearful in the “attic” of outer expressivity, I continually work from the unknown or imbalance core back towards my center home.

Openness, love, and support construct the foundation of my home.

Metaphorically, the integrity of trust supports the rooms of this corporeal home with a chipped exterior and historical trimming.

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Reception and then conception of messages in my gut, in a hawk’s screech, or in body language builds a wider and deeper perception of the world and of my self. The love found at home, enables me to trust in my interpretation in order to express who I am.

Dynamic mobility The space in between the bones and flesh crutch me through stumbling steps of hesitation. Whether I am balanced in arabesque or present in emotionally charged discussions, a purposeful intent comes from core connectivity with the earth. Emanating from the center, my limbs reach out as if I am the displaced child who wanted to find acknowledgment and a home that synthesized two disparate parents.

My body stills me. I am able to “settle into” the enlivened or tense embrace of polarities. I recuperate here in this corporal place, just as I expect in a home.

A strategy, stability enables mobility, I discovered in a dynamic relationship of oppositional pulls while dancing, re-enforces itself in nature. My body melds with the earth and bridges with my environment thereby, shaping an easeful release that is supported and engaged with pure enjoyment. The limen of polarities speaks of the metaphoric wisdom of partnership in what I call the ecosystem of stillness. The weight of the river stone passed by flowing waters represents a partnership where each action has purpose and integration simultaneously.

Home to experience spirit of nature/society During my childhood, a chameleon tendency trapped me at a crossroad between individual authenticity and a self through others. I slipped easily into the walk of a friend. I covered my body in clothes that framed me as her twin. I adopted the inconsiderate forgetful attitude of my girlfriend, and now I don’t know if this characteristic is hers or mine. I was searching for a personality that would connection with my family and culture, to be loved and accepted. In the process I neglected my authentic self. This element of my geography tossed me in against a strong current with no choice but to paddle threw.

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Finally, I touched my toes to the bottom of the river, and grounded my core once again. In a walking meditation with Jack Turner the innate synchronicity of self with earth and with community resurfaced in my home. I walked once again to an orchestral aliveness of both differentiated and integrated energy among the community through my home.

Turner spoke of how a daily practice in representation, such as the spectrum of a color in the sagebrush, will help us capture the essence of our Earth. He focused on differentiation in any single color or between jealousy and envy. This practice holds the potential to deepen and develop character. Observation causes one to stop and listen, and through connectivity in the body, actualize a place called home within me.

The vital life force found in my identity as a mover and a dancer, establishes freedom and recognition of the life around me. Stepping on the moist forest floors, hunting the rocky coastal crab colonies, and trudging through the murky mud frog ponds, I cultivated my very own appetite for discovery outside the school grounds. My older brother, Zachary, and I set out to explore the alewives ladders of Damariscotta Lake, and beyond. We climbed across massive granite boulders to the other side of the waterfalls. Bushwhacking through sumac trees we found foundations of lost village. This magical “island� of tall grasses set a stage for the past. No matter what place, from sand dune driftwood forts to restaurants, my playmates and I always created performance. Call it dance, call it musical, or a theatrical act, the curiosity and creative force of a child’s mind has always been innate to me. Thanks to the gift of creative play outdoors, I crossed the waters separating the nature from society by way of my back, a swinging bridge both playful and strong. As I like, I can return to nature or to society for inspiration via my body.

My dearest friend, and mother, encouraged one particular kind of play: dance. We would boogie to our reflections in the glass doors of our living room. And for several summers, we performed traditional

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African dance with a teacher (come-to-be dear friend), Arthur Hall.

As the rings in my willow bark thickened, I grew roots familiar with the dancing soils like that of the roly-poly coiling up in the light of day (discovered and rediscovered under rocks during a trail construction job with Americorps). The images and characters of nature live on in me daily. Through the creative process of dance, I can pull apart the memories and unconscious that lives inside my house.

The only consistent structure to my skeleton has been dance. The only pigment I see comes from nature, and my mother drums my heartbeat. The wild seeps into my gut and my energy reaches out as brittle tethered branches, and other times, as fluid forceful river. The openness to the natural world soothes, inspires and saddens me. It reflects the horror and the beauty in ecosystems, weather systems, and systems of power. Wilderness offers incite into how we frame meaning, motion, and relationship. The integrated communication system in my home, its’ senses and perception, harnesses and processes the messages in the landscape (be it cultural or natural).

Family Home A ballerina or poised stork that stands in a pause, emanates the stable virtuosity of a triangle. For me, the triangle represents the dynamic bond in my family of three- Momma, Zach, and Rinny (me). My mother supports my leg from underneath my right gluteus muscle.

Extending out to the crease of my knee she births my brother, the pivotal anchor and the firstborn. The contact of my pointed toes with my left knee is where “I” complete the pause of my home. Through this triangular form, family traits are passed down. My brother’s unconventional decision-making and with my mother’s childish spirit meet in gesture with my Grand-Pop’s legacy of sarcasm. Together, it forms our family’s triumphant resource: laughter. When I feel discomfort in my body and receive an unconscious message from others, I remedy it with our triad of humor.

I believe in the energetic exchange between beings. Inanimate objects, such as a banyan trees that create a place for Balinese funerals, live in a dynamic tension just as the ligaments and musculature of my pyra-

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mid posture. During my college years, a yearning for comfort in my own skin sent me to exotic foreign lands where I was forced to swim the quarry waters and find the Maine walls of my structure again.

Removed from all that is externally familiar, I learned how to listen to the moment and to trust a “felt” or bodily intuition. I learned how to locate my own home wherever I may be.

These moments of improvisation tell great stories of “lived” trust.

Especially illustrated in the form of contact improvisation, keen listening to your partner and consistent engagement with your core, allow you the flexibility and knowledge to go where each moment leads you. The senses engage me with place and community, and my body processes the perception of place the world. The required deep listening skills can be mastered through dance, a form that integrates mind, body, and spirit. To express all the various sides of your self through an intimate and respectful relationship of time, space, shape and effort is to mediate your world with integrity and acute awareness.

This kind of home strengthens cultures and ecologies throughout the world.

I follow an archaic love and freedom of dance, so Bali and Java, Indonesia as well as Ghana, Africa chose me to study and live there in my mid-twenties. Meaning from movement, how body shape, space, and effort is used, directs me in a current rushing from shore to shore. I look for the function and purpose of body movement that reflect our natural ecosystems. The saunter of colorful Balinese offerings that are balanced on the top of an Ibu’s head reflect the cyclic rhythm that transforms spectacle of the mundane into sacred. Everyday is contingent upon the intersection of three calendars, one to honor their animist Hindu temple, one to attend to agricultural cycles, and another to function in our western calendar.

My dancing wave crashed on the red dessert of Utah, and now I am beached. How does it limit me and how can I accept those limitations? This is the crucial question prying at the knotted muscles of my world. Forward folding my landscape, head to my feet, I release tension in my back. The art of breath helps me defy gravity for a

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moment, and then I land. Expanding into the three-dimensional volume, a breath transforms my mobility and enhances my stability. I expand my back body and the glowing chartreuse old man’s beard is hanging off my skin, as if it becomes the bark that protects a steady tree. I can imagine the moss-covered tree in Maine’s terrain, and locate it in Wyoming where the glacier lakes and mountain streams wet the land. Can I read the story on the cracked drought land of Utah of my new home?

The topography across my delta of toes replicate the shared pathways read on my father’s feet. Under the strong rib cage and the sternum that protects my tender heart, I embody life deeply in the structure of my corporal geography. My olive coloring and curved form links me to Italian terrain. The wide smile with which I greet people, animals and spaces leads one to imagine my mother and I as sisters. Beyond the stories of the physical features, my body exchanges new information with every interaction and expression. It is the medium through which I communicate, and from which I create meaning and artistic expression. It is the structure that holds a space for my internal process of thoughts and feelings.

I dance to reflect, question, and turn my perceptions inside out as well as experience the upside-down. As I expand and contract my body is a sponge, a porous microscope that frames my view. This conception occurs at the intersection between body and community, be it ear, mouth, or nose. The process starts through the pores of my Mediterranean skin and tunnels my eardrums. Muscle memory triggers synapses in my mind, over the neurological mountain pathways of my corporal geography. Yet it is not purely corporal, it includes my spiritual voice too. When I exchange energy with place, deeply grounded to the earth in plie or holding the family triangular pause my home brings awareness to the spirit moving like water inside, through and around me. My two greatest teachers are my body and water.

The contours of my terrain form a multi-dimensional way of thinking.

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What is not included on my map? The translucency of each layer, like a clear brook, exposes obstructions blurring the view that tell how human activity affects or is influenced by the earth’s surface. How can I engage in the layered geography of every individual and every animal to understand how each organism relates one another and to their physical surroundings?

What does it mean to “move through our thoughts” in the process of writing? Studying the interaction of people with their environment, I observe the natural choreography of movement and stillness.

Thoughts and experiences are held in our flesh. When we walk or dance a full body in investigation, we process on an unconscious level.

My geographic imagination filters my experience, of time and space, through the doors of my home and with dynamic gesture I punctuate each step of my song-line.

Home for spirit Voices melded in song while the drumbeat drives a train of Ghanaian dancers, and a tear drops from my eye onto the earth’s shuffled dirt.

A spiritual sense of community vibrated through their song and dance and shook my foundation. I don’t know, perhaps it was the pure energy of beauty, like that found in the green glassy waters crossing the border of brown and red rocks under Tenino Mountain. I believe it was the spirit and energy we share as living beings.

Imagine for a moment, my breakthrough in 2000 to understand my fieldwork in Ghana and Bali. I was being pulled and twisted through the warm pool by a Watsu practitioner. The soft bird song lulled in and out of my hearing as the water gently kissed my ear. It was this dream state, like the “zone” of physical exertion or when I synchronize with the other dancers on stage that sows the creative seeds in my soil. The various planes of my home: mind, body and spirit synthesize while honoring the differences and cohesion, and I reside in a peaceful space where time is suspended and innovation occurs. The more people engage in a life process through their bodies (meaning holistically mind, body, spirit) engaged with their environment, the visceral geography of place will write a new story.

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Marks Katy Savage

I. INITIALS Diane Orr hates tunnel vision. When photographing the ancient rock art she loves, her frustration broke out in a 360 degree camera rotation, capturing the juniper growing bedraggled beside the cliff face, the rising sun opposite. Her massive images make me feel it is a sin to crop the marks of ancients.

She taught me that I too am haunted by the symbols, the code uncrackable, the sacredness of a line placed deliberately. When her work came to St. George I could convince no one that it was worth the $2 entrance fee, and went alone.

The first image showed the profile of hands stenciled out on sandstone. Archeologists suggest the artists blew the paint out of their mouths onto their stretched fingers and palms, a religious rite, a plea to the supernatural to recognize the suppliant by signature. The sun is rising on them and I think of medieval mystics and the divinity belonging to darkness when God is beyond light. The holy absence.

Other photographs by Diane Orr reveal newer forms of marking next to the ancient art, show the cue modernity has taken from them.

Bullet holes pierce a thousand-year-old buck; TM asserts he loves BR; a moat gouged into the rock around a holy rain-bringer marks a connoisseur’s surrender in the attempt to collect this particular specimen.

And then there is a steady erasing: the rapid decay brought on by r esiding near coal-fired power plants.

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While prancing up a mountain my dearest friend asserted joyfully “Your art is the rocks you kick off the trail, the bare footprints you leave in the silt of streams!” Today in the Tetons I read a sign titled Loved to Death, explaining that the tramp of hikers’ shoes stopped young trees from growing and left the ground bare, barren. Gerard Manley Hopkins thumped into my brain:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Our marks are in absences: we show ourselves by taking away. We carve initials. Into each other, into the earth, and for the life of me I do not know what makes art and what makes destruction.

The earth scrolls out and we write our story, in the sandstone, in the topsoil. Oil rigs and corn fields, a nuclear test site and tract housing.

I stumble to spell out the lines but someone tell me is this a tragedy or a comedy or just a detailed textbook on controlled demolition?

I’m scared of internal combustion engines, and it might be the fault of horned toads. Twelve years old and in Montana, I spent the morning riding mountain trails on 4-wheelers with my siblings. That evening I wandered the paths on foot to find our trajectory was traced by flattened baby horned toads. Upon entering the cabin I announced to my older siblings that we had made a mistake of disastrous proportions. We suffered through our massacre-hang-over together, and for the rest of vacation went motorless.

I remembered smashed horned toads a decade later at Utah Lake. I fell in love with this place first by canoe, adoring its reeds and pelicans; adoring its inelegant endangered species, the June Sucker, for the same reason I loved the lake itself: I feared if I didn’t, maybe nobody would.

But this day had been by motorboat, dangling ourselves from the

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back and skidding Jesus-like on the surface, on skis, on tubes, shouting to each other over the engine to assure ourselves this was Such Fun. While they loaded the boat at the concrete dock I stumbled to a nearby foul-smelling marsh. Here was the occasional concrete heap and strewn plastic six-pack rings, but also I watched gasping carp and a golden-headed bird. A water-rodent showed its face for an instant and I considered Annie Dillard’s muskrats and I considered grace. I rested. I apologized. Not only for our mark that day of noise and propeller exhaust, but mostly for the horrifying suspicion that this place had left no mark on us.

Let’s be honest, there is a landscape that is doomed. What else would you expect of Utah’s West Desert? How else to make a living there?

It is our tabula rasa, where we can write a bombing range the size of Rhode Island, two chemical weapons incinerators, the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the country, and, of course, the radioactive landfill.

The Energy Solutions.

Our solutions are nothing new: just colonialism in new hand-writing.

The east’s radiation shipped west. Rural kids with asthma so the city kids can have their gadgets powered by coal. Once I was too talkative in a wilderness writing class over my state’s status as dump, and afterwards found a note left by my classmates. Purple pen asked: “Why do people hate nuclear energy?”

Red pen responded: “They argue about where to dump the waste.”

“Lame” “I think they should send it to the moon.”

“Too expensive. Why not just put it in the ocean?”

And then the revelation came to the mind behind the hand that held the red pen and was written large and in block letters: NEVADA. I sit cross-legged on Nevada dirt and feel dust and sage and remember

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wanting to be a paleontologist, imagine myself as arid and focused as this desert, uprooting my treasures with tiny chisels and brushes. I am outside the Nuclear Test Site and wonder what has been written on me that a Geiger counter could read.

My family, we die of cancer. We die in our early 60s. Don’t get too attached.

Downwind is home. St. George, the dragon-slayer. Brigham sent my people here, south, not to preserve the ecosystem, not to become an integrated part of this biotic community, but rather to make the desert blossom as a rose. As a big, bright, blood-red rose.

Each time I return I see our blooms: furniture warehouse, retirement community, golf course. And I wonder what became of this oasis, if Brigham would believe we’d blossom so brightly I can no longer see the stars past the Oasis Hotel and Casino billboard lights.

My brother Colton decorates his Denver townhouse with photographs of a St. George tortoise preserve that is slated to be developed.

Like video recordings of the one remaining dusky seaside sparrow or Tasmanian wolf, it is only a parody of salvation. The last remaining gesture.

We walk to his former prairie dog community, now renamed “NEW SINGLE-FAMILY DWELLINGS COMING SOON!” and he tells me of watching the driver of the tractor that tilled-in burrows and broken bodies. He says it was like staring at something unnatural and unasked-for, like genital warts on a baby. He tells me Denver is lonely for her prairie dogs.

We were supposed to plant cotton, not roses, in St. George. Utah’s Dixie: that partially explains the white D on our west hill. The other half of the explanation is hidden in the folds of human hubris, the arrogance of carving initials. To the north, the word DIXIE is emblazoned on red rock, renewed each spring by the top high school

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graduates, teenagers rappelling down the rock face with their sloshing buckets of white paint.

I painted the X. My new home in Provo is presided over by its own variable, a Y on the east mountain. I climb the foothills beneath, the boundary of my city. Where we meet the undeveloped we leave abandoned tractors and orange plastic fencing, piles of broken concrete, heaps of gravel.

Telephone poles, perhaps like gallows, perhaps like the cross. The citizens, taking their cue from the state, leave piles of empty beer cans and fly-away foam plates. There is a wrecked white couch and an incurable refrigerator. There is a bright No Dumping sign. The state would have a monopoly on this form of violence also.

Beneath the pale Y at night, BYU couples sit in trucks sucking pale red marks onto each others’ necks.

Y on the mountain, higher, brighter, bigger than thine. The graduating class diligently diligently refinishes it bright white (for purity for chastity for peace for surrender). From that perch you can see the massive expanse of Utah Lake at the other end of the valley, filled with creatures, covering most of our county, drowning out a town suddenly insecure with its unexpected smallness. No one sees it. No one goes. It is not a mark of our home our team our side our belonging. We did not paint it in and can have no love for a mark of its own making. Good place for a steel mill.

II. STIGMATA In my childhood, our backyard joined with that of our best friends, the Nobles. No, really: Nobles and Savages. In a replay of the old histories of separation, their parents soon built a cinder-block-andwrought-iron wall between our yards, spiked with metal fleur-de-lis, a command to the Savage kids to cease meddling with their Noble progeny.

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And so we climbed up and over the spikes, propping up old logs to boost us, delicately maneuvering around black widow webs and not minding the adventure. Not even when I slipped on cinderblock and the iron left a gash in my tender right inner forearm. Not even when my brother Josh impaled his neck in much the same fashion. The fleur-de-lis missed any major arteries and we kept hopping over to corrupt our Noble neighbors. Josh has now joined the Minute Men and I point to our scars as my last silent gesture concerning the wounds of fences, the meaninglessness of boundaries when people will otherwise.

Through fences we mark each other. Like the walls between the houses and the highways, our remaining wounds are moats: a warning you got too close.

It is the bruises on my wrists from the large hands of my first boyfriend, and me making up apologies.

It is my brother Colton’s self-made piercings, appearing when he came out gay. Each hole became infected and the metal was removed, to be later replaced. His ex-wife asked me if I thought he might want to destroy himself.

Colton called me one night, drunk and with pus coming from his eyebrow. He told me there were holes all around, like a prairie dog town, only these were holes for hauntings. At night they all spring up, too many to hold down, like some demonic whack-a-mole.

And I damn whatever man hijacked his childhood, and while he talks I rock back-and-forth-and-back, hunkered down and hurt-wrung that my but-I-love-you mantra heals nothing now.

As my marriage fell down around me I took up the guitar, not for the music but purely to alter the shape of my hands. Stuck still and stagnating, this was my first alchemical change. Family told me I was

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picking it up quickly, and I smiled, thinking not of chords and strum patterns but of my blistered fingertips, of my disappearing fingernails, of each point of pain where a callous was forming, of the moment when I would feel nothing at all. Summer nights I escaped to the foothills with only a guitar, horrified and thrilled that once again Dave had said he did not want to come with me, horrified and thrilled that I was holding nothing but hollow wood, that here I was troubling someone’s dreams, that here was my ragged voice and fingertips, gorgeously self-shaped.

Anatomy and destiny. Find the shifting folds of my brain and tell me which causes which.

There is an anatomy that is pathology. I have never seen the body of an old woman. Rumor has it their breasts hang low, but apart from that I am only left to guess what time will do to my own skin and muscles covered in clothes. An old woman’s wrinkled body is humanity’s dirty secret. They do not make it on beer commercials.

Time is a disease, heroic surgery our only weapon.

Tasha tells me high definition television has brought trauma to the porn industry. Now the viewers can see the cellulite on a woman’s thigh, the scars beneath her breasts. Producers look now for a body without marks, search for purity for their porn stars.

Tonight I wonder what marks my mother’s body bears. What damage done by forceps, what stretch marks were my doing, what scars does she not show? Could we have a family resemblance there, at least?

Anatomy and destiny. Change a woman’s place, you change her body; your mistake marks her visibly. An early 1900s obstetrician, crying out for “a fair chance for the girls,” argued that higher education is incompatible with a woman’s anatomy. How can you ask a poor girl to take exams during menstruation? They are meant for a different life-

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style, and the data show that college on a man’s terms destroys them.

If she perseveres down this track in spite of her ovaries, her breasts will likely dwindle, her uterus atrophy, her period become irregular, and she loses the sweet womanly grace in her demeanor. She becomes a category mistake.

What, you want me to prove otherwise? Did you see me lying pale and ventral-side-up in front of a corpulent doctor, staring at his diamond tie-pin as he deciphered my erratic menstrual cycle?

Are you stressed? Depressed? Do you exercise too much? You can be honest, Katy: are you anorexic?

Should I suggest it’s from too much manly college? He hands me the proper hormones and assures in a month I’ll be running like clockwork.

Stigmata: I was taught that wounds were sacred. That when we see Christ he will bring proof and like the apostles we will first feel the nail-prints in his hands and feet and then thrust – that is the exact word used – thrust our hands into his side, mimicking the soldier’s spear, straight to the heart. You crucify Christ daily, I crucify Christ daily, and all ancient tradition assures is that we too can become so righteous we show on ourselves the scars we have created.

III. PURITY I have owned my bicycle since sixth grade, and it is only by the grace of stunted growth that I can still ride it. It is aquamarine and named Juniper and I have been known to speak to it in garbled French as though it is a steed of chivalric heritage which can be coaxed on with the right cajolery.

The middle-schoolers in my community mocked me, and the old men raced past me on the way to work, but still each morning last year Dave took the car and I jumped onto my girl’s bike to wend from north Orem to BYU campus. A slight uphill tilt joined by a head-

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wind was enough to convince me that This Time I wasn’t making it home. But even at my slowest I grew giddy at this great 360 degree earth about me: Don’t laugh, but I am strong.

Don’t laugh, but my music is my asthmatic breath and squeaky gears, my marks are my banter with the neighbor kids and the track that swerves around a beetle on the road. Winter came, coaxing me to cocoon up in a comforter with sadness and Sylvia Plath, but I coerced myself onto the bike, into movement, under what sunshine remained.

Don’t laugh: I am pure.

Our most destructive marks on the land and on each other are usually attempts to keep ourselves unmarked. But is this home? Can we belong to a land that has not branded us?

If I won’t say that humans ought to be peeled off the earth like a scab, I will at least say this: Evolve. We must evolve. Steinbeck envisioned a desert man and woman, small and hearty, thick-skinned. This family could peek out into a world destroyed by apocalypse, and carry on. He saw we can’t forever change our landscape: the landscape particular to us ought to mark our anatomy. Our home must be written on us like granite on pika fur, dunes on the belly of a side-winder, mountain thermals on the primary feathers of hawks. Our geography signified in the body, our community signified in the body: this is home.

And about purity: I accept that all is nibbled and nothing is whole.

What I want is tamarisk sticks tangled in my hair after making love on the banks of the Virgin River, what I want is spider bites and eyes wrinkled from laughing into the sun, I want this blister on the fourth finger of my left hand from holding this pen. I want the impurity of scars and scabs and bones broken against rock, against real rock.

And what I have called sin is only a fence against experience, a foot shod, a bar between us and the dirt, the steel cage of a car of an office

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building of a wedding ring.

Time to muddy my feet.

I fell in love with the desert when I found it printed on me. Not just the perpetual orange grime around my ankles, in my hair, under fingernails, but the secret that I am part of this cryptobiosis, a part of the written code that hasn’t been cracked because how could they guess that the meaning is the figures themselves, the beauty of a code unbroken? And the words: red rock and red blood and red rock and red blood. We are bits of battered matter, we are patterns written of rust.

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Writing My Natural Autobiography Juliet Unfried

Day One After spending a week at the Murie’s Ranch talking about place with some of the most amazing minds I have ever encountered, with the task of writing a natural autobiography before me, I knew one thing: I had to escape. With the excuse of getting my computer from my house I got in my car and left. I fled from the intensity and intimacy of the Muries. But as I drove away on the Moose-Wilson road I encountered a different intimacy. Around the bend from the Murie Center I was confronted by a familiar picture of the Tetons with a grove of aspen in the foreground. The beauty of the scene gave me chills but there was more to it than beauty. I realized that this view changed my life in a profound way four and a half years ago. The Moose-Wilson road was the final stretch of my drive cross-country from New York. I was coming west to clear my head, figure out what I wanted to do with my life and then do it. I anticipated that this process would take four to six months, and then I would leave. I had spent parts of many summers and winters in Jackson Hole and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I had seen the Tetons before. I’d seen aspens before. But in October of 2002 I stopped. I had never seen aspen trees in the fall. I had never seen the Grand Teton framed by aspens in the fall. I stopped to take in the vibrant colors of the foliage, the power held in the mountains, and the cool, clean, crisp air. I couldn’t believe that I had lived so much of my life in ignorance of autumnal Tetons. And now that I knew would I ever be able to spend a fall without these trees and these

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mountains? It occurred to me that I might be in Jackson for more than four to six months.

On this day in early June 2007 I am looking for answers again. Where is my place? Where am I at my best? I look up at the mountains and am struck by how stoic they look today. How fortunate I feel to observe the fresh, white dusting of snow mingling with the dark grays and greens of the earth. Same place, different time, different colors, same emotions.

I am on my personal map of time and space. Just on this section of this road I have several memories of wildlife viewings. Up on the hillside I once saw a black bear mother bending a branch down so that her cubs could eat its fruit. Down the road a young fox, not knowing that it should do any differently, sauntered along the center of the road.

To the left are fields in which I have spotted numerous coyotes.

As I drive home I become aware of how important this land is to me and that we do share a history. Even though I didn’t grow up here yearround, I came here to live year after year. These little trips west shaped me, my values, and the way I hope to lead my life.

I’ve got my computer now and am headed back to the Murie Center, hoping that my computer will miraculously channel Mardy’s energy into me. Driving again, I crane my neck to see what I can see and I am brought back to countless rides in the back seat of my parents’ car watching my father do the same as my mother called out to him, partly in fear, partly in irritation, and partly in habit, “Watch the road, Steve!”

I am brought back to one particular trip to Yellowstone during which my family spent days driving and stopping and driving again. We were trying to check as many things off our list as possible. Old Faithful; check. Moose; check. Bald Eagle; check. It was our last day in the park and we had yet to see a bear. My father grew desperate. Back in

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the east he was a workaholic, spending the majority of his life at the office. He didn’t take much time off and that meant that we had to squeeze as much into our vacations as possible. On this trip that meant seeing a bear. It was our final day in the park and dusk was approaching. This was our last chance, but, he optimistically reasoned, the best time of day to see a bear. We were all instructed to “keep our eyes peeled” as we wound through the park, growing weary of this fruitless search. My father had the same energy, enthusiasm and optimism for seeing a bear that he had had all week. Suddenly he pulled the car over. In a fit of excitement he got out of the car, and pointing to a tiny black dot a mile away, cried out “bear!” Humoring him we took turns looking through binoculars at his little black dot, which even I at my young, trusting age believed to be a rock. “I can’t tell from here if it’s a black bear or a grizzly,” he said. “Neither,” we thought to ourselves. It could have been anything his imagination needed it to be in order for him to be able to return to his life at the office with satisfaction. He needed to check that last item off his list in order to feel like he had a complete experience of the park.

Although the pace and style of our visit to Yellowstone was different than my (and his) ideal visit, this trip taught me to value my time and experiences, real or imagined, with nature. My father remains adamant that the black dot was really a bear, though his laughter confesses a different truth.

At night I look to Mardy and ask Mimi what story wants to be heard. I dream of bears. In a circle we talk with bear fetishes and wonder how we are all going to live together. What is our community going to look like? What needs to happen for it to be peaceful? I dream of three elderly women. They are wise. They are maternal. They are mentors. I don’t know who they are but I am glad they are there.

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Day Two Terry says we should walk. We should walk through the conversations and experiences of the past week. We should walk out our stories. We go to Cascade Canyon to walk.

I’m walking deliberately. Heel toe. Heel toe. I’m concentrating on my breath trying to take as many steps on my inhale as I take on my exhale. The question that keeps coming up for me is “So what?” So what about the Tetons? So what about home? So what does any of this mean? As I walk I realize that I have a story! I have a story of conservation. It is a tradition carried through my family since the Great Depression. Pack rats, economists, environmentalists, members of the CPC (Clean Plate Club); it manifests itself differently in each of us but the values are the same. “Waste not, want not” was the mantra of my household. Take care of things to increase their lifespan. Respect the gifts the world bestows on you. I took this story for granted. It was so much a part of me that I thought it was a universal truth. But when I see people approach wildlife or find litter I recognize that conservation is not a part of everyone’s stories. My initial reaction when I see such behaviors is disgust but after giving it some thought I wonder, “How can one know what one has never been taught?” It’s not fair to be disgusted with the individual for damaging behaviors because it’s a community issue, which means it is my issue. Somehow we need to make conservation a part of more and more people’s stories so that it eventually does become a universal truth. I’m going to have to do some serious walking to figure this one out.

In the meantime my mind goes back to my story and why it’s important to me. Conservation and respect are values of mine.

Nature embodies these values. I am at home in my values. I am at home in nature. Most of my wilderness experiences have taken place in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It is where I am at home.

Yesterday Terry helped me identify the animal I would most like to be: the Water Ouzel! I was thrilled by this discovery. What a relief to

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have one fewer thing to have to learn about myself. She described the way it flies over rapids and dives into river currents to hunt for food, how it has lenses that allow it to see underwater and suction cups on its feet so it can navigate slippery rocks. When I heard about the bird I immediately recognized myself in it. I was attracted to the Ouzel’s ability to gain perspective through the gift of flight, and its nature to dive into water, which is life itself. The Ouzel is capable of both observation and participation. And it must be a light-hearted, playful creature to dance in and out of water the way it does. Oh, to be an Ouzel. Today Terry generously offers to help me on my search for the Ouzel. She takes me to some pools in which she had seen an Ouzel earlier. As we sit on the rocks next to the river two moose emerge from the woods; a mother and her yearling. They look over at us and then proceed to the river. Once in the river the yearling playfully kicks up its front legs, and the mother follows its example. We laugh in disbelief and marvel, “How playful!” Believing their liveliness to be fleeting, and possibly my projection of human activity and emotion onto the moose, I expect the duo to continue across the river. But the playfulness is not fleeting, nor is it my imagination. Terry and I take in the sight of these two moose playing in the river. They cavort, chase, and tease each other in a joyful dance through the water; back and forth, around in circles, tossing their legs up in pure acts of joy.

It is unlike anything I have ever seen or heard about. I am glad that Terry is there to confirm the spectacle. After several minutes of playing, the moose climb up the bank on the opposite side of the river and calmly go on their way as if nothing had happened.

Terry and I do the same on our side of the river. As we walk away a group of hikers come up the trail and notice the moose displaying, what I had previously thought to be “typical” moose behavior. Today would not be the day for these hikers to witness the magic of the moose dance. I feel so honored that the moose included Terry and I in their expression of joy.

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When hiking with my backpack it has become my habit to rest my hands in the slack of the pack’s chest strap. I walk this way though the canyon with my hands together at my heart, as if in prayer. I am walking through my place of worship. I still don’t have all the answers but there’s enough light to see the next step and I walk on.

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(Eureka?)

Jared Grogan

`

FACING west, from California’s shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western Sea—the circle almost circled; For, starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia—from the north—from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south—from the flowery peninsulas, and the spice islands; Long having wander’d since—round the earth having wander’d, Now I face home again—very pleas’d and joyous; (But where is what I started for, so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I. The Golden State Los Angeles is often referred to as the ‘City of Angels;’ but the original Greek άγγελς more properly denotes a messenger. I recently left the greater Los Angeles area, and while the last four years were ceremoniously wrapped up in commencement, I get the feeling nobody quite understands what the day meant. What did we graduate from, and what to? I’ve been trying, really trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps it’s my post-modern sensibility, or the insight that we no longer seem to believe in angels… I’m a religious scientist, and literary existentialist by training… but maybe we still can… if we realize that angels are just messengers. Who knows? We might even hear them…

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San Juan, San Gabriel, San Rafael, San Francisco. They span the coast of California Alta, as if called to arms against the great void the Pacific. Or perhaps they are there in her defense. California is famous for her missions… imperial twilight, vestiges of Rome, emissaries of Peter and Paul. They bring good news: the end of the world is upon us. They might as well have said the end of Rome, for the ancient world centered about the Mediterranean1. It’s the hour of political nightfall in the old world; an age of gold meets an age of darkness. And what of darkness? Perhaps history is not linear, but diurnal. A new and catholic2 Rome travels west into the wilderness, piercing the great-earth-shadow, and bringing ‘civilization’ to the very edge of a New World. Of endings and beginnings, they are equal part opening and closure; on earth, they are as in heaven: falling bodies.

Nestled amidst the foothills of the San Gabriel Range, Pomona College is dedicated in “tribute to Christian civilization.” For Rome so loved the sacred grove… Pomona, Goddess of the orchard, returns to her golden state. This was once something of an Eden, a patchwork idyll of orange groves and vineyards. Forbidden fruit. With knowledge comes graduation, exploration… civilization: forbidden enterprises. The ‘mission’ has been secularized – these are liberal arts – but the ideal of the universitas remains higher education; as if one could climb high enough to scrape the sky, to reach the heavens. Yet Babel, the Bible betrays, comes crashing down, lest us humans make a name for ourselves. Babylon, Rome, New York City… it makes no difference. There will be no universal language, no Pax Romana, no World Trade Center. Tragically, edification, or progress, is wrought with the Fall.

Jacques Derrida, the father of philosophical deconstruction, argues that Western intellectual history is a series of ruptures. The epistemological structure falls to time and a new cornerstone is elected: ‘World Trade Center’ becomes ‘Freedom Tower.’ It has even been claimed that 20th century even witnessed the “death of God.” Ashes to 1

Literally, “middle-of-the-earth”

2

Literally, “universal”

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ashes. Our thinking has an iconoclastic bias; but it is deconstruction, rupture, or any experience of impermanence that opens the mind to creativity. Knowledge is the fruit of the fall, the trauma of boundaries. Trauma, from the Greek τιτροσκειυ, “to wound,” or even to pierce.

(May the light of being pierce these words…) The passion narrative prepares the wound, the clearing, to which a god, (or at least an angel), might return. *

*

* 3

Έναρχη ηνο λογοϛ Literally: In a beginning was the Word (John 1:1).

I’ll grant that all language is metaphorical, but which Word? I am a collision of words – images, sounds, memories – vibrating in echo of divine incantation: I am a text, a story… illuminated manuscripture of spiral-helix-calligraphy; my body recounts Genesis, how the story was spoken, and called me into the world.

In the beginning was the metaphor… and the metaphor was God. A metaphor functions by identifying something with something else4.

Identity is always a revelation, a metaphorical relation. Perhaps it is even possible for a metaphor to become true; maybe we can become our names. And so the Hebraic God identifies Godself to Moses in Zen-koan-like fashion, YHWH: I am what I am5.

When I don’t know what or who I am, I know that I’m myself when I play music. Sometimes I write songs, and I find that many of them are really just names, explaining or identifying something about me. I’ll tell you why I write about my life: it’s in order to find my voice. All writing is auto-bio-graphy.

3 4 5

Word, reason or cosmic principle.

For example, x=7. Or I am Jared Exodus 3:14

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I grew up in southern Wisconsin with my grandparents and my mother. As modern life accelerates exponentially, I realize more and more that I’ve been blessed to be the child of two generations. And my grandparents were blessed too; it was only in their retirement that there grew to be time enough for that which was once so burdensome: family. My grandfather is the child of Indiana cornfields, the Great Depression, and of course, the War. In the 20s and 30s, summer break meant working the farm, not taking vacation. From grandpa I learned to “hit the books.” A teacher, an engineer, grandpa was always searching for better things by the sweat of his brow. His selfimposed exile took him east of Eden, and to a post with the Johnson Administration in Washington D.C. But Washington is no land of ‘milk and honey,’ and he ultimately returned to Wisconsin. From grandma, I learned to persevere. Her father died when she was six, and her two older brothers in their twenties. In her teens and early twenties, she assumed the role of mother, working, providing for her mother and younger sister. Just a few years later, she would give birth to the first of six children. We spent summers together weeding and planting the garden.

II. To the Navel, the World.

Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda. Fall 2005 As an infant, I often tried to climb out of the crib. Once, as a toddler, I slipped through a set of rungs, but this was the overhang of a steep staircase, not a crib. Before I could fall some two stories below, my grandpa caught me, by the head. Family tragedy is averted.

“Don’t fall!” he repeats, … “Don’t fall…”

Twenty years later, journaling while abroad, I recall my grandpa’s wisdom and chuckle to myself. I’ve recently finished John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a work that boldly claims to “justify the ways of God to man.” The theological Fall is written in Genesis and therein lies its redemption: it is good.

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My journey to Kenya marks something of a re-turn, a reflection on twenty years of life, of memories I have yet to revisit. I remember sitting on grandpa’s lap and watching National Geographic footage of wildebeest migrations. Green pastures, ancestral calving grounds: home. In The Hero of a Thousand Faces, which I discovered this summer, Joseph Campbell speaks of the archetypal journey to the ‘world navel,’ the source of life and wisdom. At every turn, I’ll be looking for signs of the source, or navel in hopes of transformation.

Before I left, I dreamt that I was back in high school English class.

Mrs. Spencer introduces me explaining that I graduated a couple of years ago, and now having returned from Africa, I’m going to speak about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, specifically the ambiguous pair of civilization and savagery. Moments later, the scene shifts, and I’m walking city blocks, listening to a street performer’s doleful melody: “Oh I wish, you’d wish me well/ Wish me well, and let me go” I woke up, the tune ringing in my head. The prophets knew inspiration in dreams, but seldom do I succeed in drawing the ethers of the subconscious into reality. With urgency and inspiration, I leapt up and reached for my guitar, plucking the chords and committing the chorus to memory. It now seems part biography and part eulogy.

September 6, 2005.

It’s grandma’s 83rd birthday. I haven’t even been in Mombasa a week, but just writing her name – Dorothy Wells Grogan – in my journal, I’ve found new meaning in my family name: Grogan becomes Grow Again. Together, my grandparents marry Grogan and Wells into the family tree. I am the fruit of their love. Grogan-Wells united in my heart, as in theirs; the heart, source or fount of life, growth, and renewal. Onward to the world-navel, and into the depths of the heart.

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No-place (ουτοπο): Utopia. November 2005.

Ngong – The Maasai word originally denoted an eye, but by the grace of imagination, it came to also describe an eye-sized stream of water – spring, source – emerging from the earth. Ngong – eye, spring.

Ngong, spring, a town west of ‘Cool Water,’ modern day Nairobi.

It is a landscape characterized equally by grandeur and emptiness, the Great Rift Valley. I am alone in these dusty-white plain, with neither place nor purpose to guide me. Pardon my heartland naïveté, but I believe “there is no place like home.” Amidst these great African plains everything seems strangely reminiscent of the American West.

Perhaps I can find something of a pastoral gospel, a home on the range. The Maasai after all, are a semi-nomadic, pastoral people, with no one-place to call home. Song and oral tradition record life in the great valley, and map the landscape of Maasai identity. Just like cattle, rain, and pasture… home wanders.

People seem to think that life is more real here. Maasailand is so down-to-earth, visitors say, struggling to describe its simple but sweeping majesty. Emptiness and clarity breed soul-searching otherwise obscured by modernity. ‘Do you remember what it is to be human?’

Maasailand asks. I certainly hope I do – I’ve come to study anthropology. How could one not feel more authentically “human” here? This is, after all, the evolutionary cradle, from which we sprang; where we began. I believe that religion is a science of identity, meant to give us a sense of place amidst this cosmic emptiness. Perhaps I have come here to plant roots. I speak Whitman’s password primeval. I believe… a leaf of grass... There is no-place like h-OM-e. * * * “The nearer to Nyeri, the nearer to bliss.”

Robert Baden Powell, founder of the Boys Scouts After three-weeks in Maasailand, I head to Nyeri, a small town in nearby mountains. It is from this range, known in the Maa language as the “drying cowhide” that the Maasai allegedly descended from the clouds with their cattle and the blessing of God, Engai. My friend

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Eamon and I arrive by bus late at night to get a room at the Nyeri Star, as recommended in Lonely Planet. While out for dinner, someone breaks into our hotel room, stealing all of our cash, credit cards, even my field recordings of Maasai music.

The next morning, I wander the hilly streets of Nyeri. Above the treetops, snow covered Mount Kenya dominates the horizon. I walk past the taxi stands on my way to the bank. Men call to me, walk with me, sometimes grabbing my arm.

“Mr. Jones, friend, come with me, I will take you to Nairobi.”

I’ve just come from Nairobi, and as much as might like to go back, no bank will accept my two remaining traveler’s checks without official identification. Anxious, and frustrated… I stumble down a narrow street. “Grogan Car Wash,” the green sign reads. I walk up the muddy alley, searching for anyone who might be “Grogan.”

“Grogan ni wapi? Jina langu ni Grogan na ninataka kusema na Grogan.” Where is Grogan? My name is Grogan, I want to speak with him.

Laughing, an old Kikuyu man responds in English, “He was a governor or something, very popular. The whole east side of the town is called Grogan.”

Car Wash, Wells, water… How absurd. The burglary seems so strange, like it’s all been part of a trick. I smile, knowing that I am in the right place at the right time.

The next day, by a string of luck, Eamon and I catch a trip to Aberdares National Park in time for Kenya’s Independence Day. The Aberdares are skirted in tea and coffee estates. Ascending the bamboo forests to the moorland, we stop at a trailhead, and then continue hiking down into the forest.

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An intimate waterfall encircled by a mossy rock wall. High above, exotic birds circle and call as we stand at the pool. Earth primeval.

Saying a prayer, I smile and cast my stones into the forgiving well.

Absurd, I know – but I don’t know where they’ll go. To find oneself6, Krishna teaches, one must renounce action. One by one, I wish them well, and let them go.

III. Welcome to Hell I’ve met up with new friend and fellow Wisconsinite Greg to continue the journey after the program. Our peculiar, manifest destiny calls us westward. First stop: Hell’s Gate, Maasailand. “Welcome to Hell,” the park ranger says as we enter, making sure to point out such merchandise can be found in the gift shop. Having recently spent several weeks in Maasailand, I have little patience for dust-storms and drought. The landscape is literally devouring itself. I long for the cool mountain water, the Edenic green and comfort that met me in the Aberdares.

Upon recommendation of a friend, we continue northwest to Uganda, we raft the Nile from its source at Jinja. The river Nile is the incarnation of time, carrying equatorial waters to feed the Mediterranean and the history of civilization. Despite all of our safety-gear, we leave humbled by her awesome power, knowing that we have escaped with our lives.

Onward, 18 hours by bus to Kigali, Rwanda. It’s Christmas Eve. We’re low on cash, but luckily the Hôtel des Milles Collines takes credit. Merry Christmas: Luxury. After checking we learn this is the infamous “Hotel Rwanda.” I get the feeling this contemporary ‘heart of darkness’ is summoning us… perhaps we should’ve known better than to enter Hell’s Gate.

The following morning, we catch a motor-taxi to the Kigali Memorial Centre, a mass grave for 250,000 victims of the still recent genocide.

Still trembling, Greg and I decide to head south to Butare with the 6

And one’s self is most truly Brahma.

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hopes that a visit to the nearby Nyungwe rainforest will lift us up. We have an hour before the bus departs, so I step into an Internet Café and compose an email to my girlfriend: Dear Ashley, Today Greg and I visited the memorial here; the wounds of 1994 are deep, and fresh. I’m still sick to my stomach right now and I don’t even really want to be in this icaf but it’s raining outside… I didn’t know the history very well before coming here – I’ve never even seen the film Hotel Rwanda – and had only read a basic summary of the traumatic history...

Greg and I checked into Hotel de Milles Collines (aka Hotel Rwanda which sheltered the Tutsis) yesterday and enjoyed a luxurious Christmas day... but walking around outside yesterday morning -- it was a virtual ghost town -- there was a woman with a baby walking around begging for money for food; she had a nasty scar on her head and said she was a victim of genocide. further down the street, a man, who looked as if he’d fallen in a hole -- no legs, not even thighs, just sunk into the side walk with his hand out. all i could say was “joyeux noel.” I feel like such a scrooge. but i don’t even know what to do…

Today, at the memorial, we walked through the gardens which offer beautiful views of the hills … before entering the memorial to read the history which lead up to the genocide. a regular Cain and Abel story… a million people in this tiny country killed in just three months. absolute madness. you read the facts and the names of the leaders and the parties and nothing quite sinks in... but there are videos which intersperse victims testimony. children being forced to murder their parents. children dying in their parents arms. nothing was a sacred. nothing spared. and as the memorial continued, we entered rooms which pictures of hundreds and hundreds of people. families. lovers. Smiles. i just lost it there. i can’t even explain the weight. the next room was full of skeletons. skulls with one, two, three bullet holes. fractured... shattered... bludgeoned... sliced with machetes like coconuts. clothing that people wore in their last moments. i felt as

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terrified as i ever have been in my life. i just wanted my mom and dad… and then i imagined these kids watching their parents being murdered. just crying and holding on to the pictures or clothes they could find. any souvenir...

I am a man of tremendous faith, but today shook me to my core. to see such evil, such violence... everything was done to be as evil as possible. women raped in front of children... people shot and left for dead just to agonize before they came back and finished the job days later... i can’t handle it. how? as the exhibit continued it read: “to our beautiful children – you might have been our heroes...” pictures of smiling kids... from 15months to 17 years old. their favorite foods, and things do... and every gruesome detail: “my best friend is my mom. last words: mommy where do i run to? 8 years old. killed by machete.”

“2 years old, smashed into wall” “4 years old, loved jogging with her dad. stabbed to death through her eyes.”

I’m crying right now. it just makes me want to be a kid again. to be safe and innocent. To sing for how much my parents love me and how much i love them. For the bonds of blood and family. for our blessings. presents under the tree. i just want to go home and be safe and loved and cradled. i am so blessed and i just want to honor… what is good and what is worth living and dying for: love. …the US and UN ignored calls for help. right after Somalia and unpopular i suppose – but if America is to be a champion for human rights, we only have God to answer to, not the public... alright, that’s enough of this... i’ll be home soon. love

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In Butare, we meet a radiant young law-student named John. He helps us find a place to stay, and invites us to take meals with him and other students. We can’t make it to Nyungwe, so John suggests we visit a nearby memorial at Gikongoro.

We catch a taxi out of town, and then walk dirt roads through the canopied and rolling hills to Gikongoro. For its beauty and its tragedy, Gikongoro is the most powerful place I hope to ever visit.

Thousands of Tutsis had come here seeking shelter, holding up in what was once a technical college nestled amidst terraced farms just outside of town.

What is it to be haunted? Perhaps, it is not so much a presence, but the presencing of an absence felt deep within one’s heart: in just four hours, some 50,000 people were killed here. Many of their corpses are preserved with lime in the buildings where they sought shelter. A guide takes us to see them. My eyes are so startled, moving from the outdoors to and into the musty room, that I struggle to see anything.

The first thing that hits me is the smell. It’s suffocating. Putrid. I begin to wretch. And then I see the bodies.

Gone is all color, any sign life; all that remains is the grizzled and ghostly form. Shrunken, broken, tattered. My stomach begins to sink and twist. They cannot rest in peace; it is their calling to disturb, alarm, and jolt us-the-living to defend their memory. Never again, we all feel. At the tip of my tongue, a verse from Paradise Lost describing the scene of fallen angels after battle on the fields of heaven: Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t/ Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks/ In Vallombrosa7.

How humbling: fallen bodies strewn about the campus like leaves trampled underfoot. What do I want to identify with, the leaves, or 7 Vallombrosa is Italian, and translates as the ‘valley of shadow’: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Psalms: 23:4). (Paradise Lost, Book I: 301-303).

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the Tree of Life? I’ll take the latter in hopes that I might survive the cosmic seasons. And so spring brings another ring to the tree; we grow again.

Despite the very fresh wounds of this country, Rwanda, (or perhaps owing to them), I feel more at home here than anywhere else we have visited. I actually feel safe here. As traumatic as it’s been, it’s as if the tragedy has reminded what it is to be most authentically human. Yes, we are shaken, but, we know that what we feel – fear, pain, sorrow – is absolutely real, and wholeheartedly true. I’m at home in my pain.

Like Adam, Job, or Milton, I understand that being human means asking how? or why? … and demanding that God be called to answer the human entreaty: “Maker, did I request thee make me from clay?”

And so pain has wrought communion among us. As a traveler, never have I been so sincerely welcomed. “Feel at home” John says. He must have thanked us nearly a dozen times simply for coming, for sharing the place that is Rwanda. He understands what it has done to us, and now I understand we need to feel safe and sound. And loved.

IV. Welcome Home I have often wondered, if one were to cut down the Tree of Life, what would the rings reveal of one’s life? After much reflection, I suppose the rings – all of these concentric chapters of self-overcoming – tell a story of survival. As I write about my life, I know that twenty was an abnormal year for me. There’s an old saying that when it rains in pours. Twenty is the age I fell into the world.

It’s New Year’s Eve. Bring out the old, ring in the new. I’m arriving into JFK, trying to put Rwanda behind me. My grandpa’s health has been poor, and with his manic depression, he anxiously fears that this will be his last holiday. I return home to Wisconsin just a week before spring semester begins in California. Grandpa feels hurt, abandoned; or maybe he just needs attention. When I was a child, he used to tell tall-tales about the ‘wild west.’ That was where he got the Indian name “Wounded Bear,” he joked. In his pain, that is exactly what he

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was reduced to. A wounded bear is the most dangerous and desperate of animals: unpredictable, and unsteady. He strikes out against all those who love him; for the first time, I am not spared his pain. No longer can he catch me. Before returning to Pomona, I say goodbye, realizing he is not himself, and that he might not ever return.

I’m still trying to exorcise the ghosts of Rwanda. I feel raw, vulnerable, shell-shocked. Just weeks after returning to school, my mom calls: “I have cancer.” Surgery is the day before Valentine’s Day. Seven months later she will have another from which she is now recovering.

Meanwhile, the school semester is engulfed by the drama of a friend’s drug abuse. I’ve been stateside for three months, but don’t feel like I belong here anymore.

How is it that the garden becomes a heart of darkness? Because it most undoubtedly does, again and again. Many in Rwanda have asked themselves this. But it’s inexplicable how fickle life is. Where is the comfort? At the genocide memorials, all I wanted was to be home, safe and sound, with presents under the tree at my grandparents home. And yet, I feel as if I have returned to exile from my loved ones, and from myself.

My nomadic friends taught me to seek refuge in the journey. Like Dorothy’s desperate attempt to run away from home, I’m driving out to Utah, with a grant from Pomona College in hand. Perhaps the West will help me bridge the experiences of the past year. If I can glean just bit of the clarity of the sky, perhaps I’ll be able to find that prophetic ‘voice in the wilderness’ to guide me. I’m looking for Manifest Destiny. Not the traditional kind, but maybe a mystical or subversive rereading that can help me understand what it means to belong. What is my destiny, and how do I belong to myself? I want a covenant promising my eternal body to me… I want to feel at home in my own skin.

Something isn’t right. I’ve been waiting for something to happen.

But it’s forced. Rushed. The days and weeks pass at terrific speed,

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and I’m tracing the same contours over and over. Always driving. My friend Tom is flying out into Las Vegas. We’ll drive back together, bringing the trip to a frantic close.

Tom never quite feels safe in the desert, and by and large that’s a good thing. We have to be weary of Coyote. But I’m already weary. In fact, what I’m looking for is a sense of security or peace. I want to learn the practice of making a home, or being at home in the midst of danger.

That’s why I came to the desert.

“Why don’t we sleep under the stars tonight?” I suggest.

“What about rattlesnakes, scorpions…” he says, “and mountain lions?”

“I guess you’ve got a point there,” I answer.

It goes on. Lightning. Cacti. Danger. And then there are Arches.

Everything is dangerous: the Serpent threatens within Eden. Trickster energy maintains a delicate balance between the worlds of the living and dying. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, and lions? I haven’t seen any. I have to confess, this is becoming more like “the Wizard,” than I had hoped. I just want to get home, wherever that is. But we might need some brains, heart, and courage to get there.

I’m fascinated by delicate arch. A classical symbol of triumph, pierced agonizingly slowly in testament to the subtle traumas of time. An opening, an icon of hope…

Devil’s Garden… like Hell’s Gate, I should know better… We venture down the path for ten-minutes before breaking to the left to catch a view of the valley. Climbing over the red rocks together, we stop at a ledge one of the taller monoliths and pause together. I’m desperate for insight – we’re going home tonight – so I continue to the top.

Meditating beneath the vaulted sky, I am the eye above the pyramid.

Clarity in every direction: mountains, roads, campers, parking-lots…

Tom asks if he should come up. No, I tell him. This is it. Up here on my perch, for once I feel at peace, at home, and alive. I’m in the sky, and the wind is so strong that it carries my eyes over the valley.

“I want to go soon,” Tom calls from below, “we’ve still got a lot of driving to do.”

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No more interruptions. No more destinations. I’m already here, sitting on the throne, surveying the kingdom. I’ve got it, that precarious place: peace amidst great danger.

“Alright, we can go,” I say eventually.

Yet I can’t help but feel resentment. This is all the illumination I have, am I’m awfully reluctant to let it go. I start to come down. It’s always easier going up than coming down. There is one edge that is particularly tricky – just out of reach – but after that, I can practically walk the rest of the way. I ask for help, a spot, just to make sure, and enjoy the extra time it buys me near the top.

“Actually, I don’t think I can do it man,” he calls.

Below me he hops down like a mountain goat.

“Fine,” I say, “I’ll do it myself.”

I feel anger, not so much at him, but toward the world. If it can’t help me, I wish it would at least leave me alone. I’m an only child. Gone is the clarity of the summit. If I could move with such composure I would probably be safe, but anger and resentment are exceeding risky in harsh environs. They distort every act. I’ll take a risk, and go at great lengths to prove myself.

V. Illumination: The Name What does your conscience say?

Become what you already are.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

In a beginning, was a name, and the name was with me, and the name was me.

“Let Jared be,” spoke my parents, the spirit-breath, πυευμα, carrying their words, and me as I birth-fell into the world. And I believe it is the everlasting spirit of this love that carried me that day at Arches.

I don’t how far I fell. Once I started rolling, Tom said I went over a ledge, 20 or 30 feet. I broke both of my wrists. One shattered into

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twenty-eight pieces. Miraculously, they broke my fall. I’d been waiting for something to happen. And there you have it, illumination: learning how to let go. I know the original pain. I know that it is (in order) to be human. A doubting Thomas no more, I know my savior by the mark where the nails, or rather eight screws, have been.

And so, I’ve been listening for angels. Perhaps if I’d been listening for them last summer, I wouldn’t have had to pay so dearly. But then again, I wouldn’t be myself. I went out in search of destiny, and I confronted it in the form of that ultimate possibility; all stories, whether told by falling leaves or the setting sun, must cross the horizon. Trauma opens a window. I can now esteem my scars, my wounds the way one would delicate arch: balance, fragility, beauty, and victory. I am not in spite of, but because of falling into the world. Twenty, the Tree of Life will reveal, is the year I found my name. Of Biblical Origin, Jared means “Descendent, or To Fall,” in Hebrew. And so growth is wrought with a fall. My names belong together, and I to them.

There is another world, another place, of which this world is but the surface. Where and what it is, we cannot know: it is no-place, and no-thing. So let us open ourselves, our hearts, in the hope that we may hear it, perhaps even speak it. The Greeks understood that the arts are Orphic, born of a journey to the Other Side. Mohammed, in turn, realized that poetry comes from the divine. In meditation in the mountains of Arabia, he received the messenger Jibral, or the archangel Gabriel. While graduation may have taken me from the San Gabriels, it is only now that I hear them. These words and bodies are not our own. They are messages – seeds of awakening – meant to be discovered, interpreted, and recited. Perhaps the breath, the holy ghost will carry us beyond ourselves. Where I fall beyond the sunset, I am recovered. Elsewhere, I grow again.

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A Place of Love, Sorrow and Healing Natasha McVaugh Seegert

June 7, 2007 Dear Dad, This is a letter of love and of sorrow. It is a letter of loss and of thanks.

It is my attempt to grieve, and to celebrate. It is to let you know that I love you.

You and I are children of the West. Its vastness and unpredictable temperament have molded each of us. Never ones for family pedigrees, our kinship resides in the open space where sky meets land.

Our faces bear the marks of this land. The creases at the corners of our eyes carry rivers of tears on a parched land that continues each day to greet our life-giving star. Our foreheads furrow like the Waterpocket Fold of Southern Utah. Calluses and scars adorn our hands and tell the stories of work, accidents, and relationships. What scars do your great hands bear and what stories do they tell? What gifts have your hands given? For me, your hands were a gift of safety, strength and comfort in my life. I can still feel the cadence of your walk and my small four-year-old enveloped in yours.

The gifts you have given me are too numerous to write in one letter.

I have tried in the past and I always fail. Some of your gifts continue to mold my being. Thank you for your gifts of patience and respect.

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I know that you want me to go back to school, but you have never chided me. You have respected the lifestyle Alf and I have chosen which includes our choice to not have children. You know your daughter and you have the wisdom to recognize that my womb is not empty simply because I do not bring literal life into the world. There are other ways to reproduce one’s yearnings and hopes into the world. At out wedding five years ago you spoke about the joy your surprise child brought to you in your late 30’s. You spoke of my nurturing nature that blooms in my connection with the people and beings who fill that place I call home.

What place do you call home? My Hopi friend says that place is a witness of time, and time is story itself. Where does your story lie? I sense that it is the mountains and craggy peaks of our basin and range.

Those spots where you camped, hiked and rock climbed. It is a space you shared not only with your family, but also with your students. It was the physical half of your identity that balanced the intellectual half. The mountains were your solace, your refuge, your soul’s medicine. I grieve that you do not feel that embrace of mountain and movement. The diabetes and consequent surgeries on your feet took that half of your identity leaving you with your academic intellect.

As a child, the power of your intellect overwhelmed and inspired me. It still does. Your mind ran while mine sauntered. You are still capable of drawing up obscure knowledge, and of exploring complex issues from multiple perspectives. And, you still hold to those things which you believe to be true. I was the lover of animals whose canine companionship provided me with connection to the fields, creeks and meadows surrounding our home. These animals were also my comfort when I felt the unspoken divisions that come from being the child of non-Mormon father living in a rural, Mormon community. Thank you for holding true to your beliefs regarding religion. In many ways, it was this role of outsider that led me to the outside. Holding close to truth can result in unexpected results.

Thank you.

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I, and I believe all of your children, have inherited another gift from you. It is the painful gift of deep empathy. It is this quiet, internal gift that manifests itself externally through tears, laughter, and a still, listening body. This winter we went to an exhibit of photos from National Geographic. You stood before a photo of a young, Peruvian child who had tears streaming down an anguished face. In the background were the blurry corpses of sheep that had just been hit by a car. The livelihood of that child’s family had been destroyed. In a moment everything can change so much. Tears streamed down your cheeks and your face mirrored that of the child looking out from the Peruvian mountains. Thank you for these tears; after all, what’s wrong with a little emotion?

Indeed, it is what compels me to act out of compassion and love for the places and beings of my home. If life was lived without connection to others, but solely the intellectual pursuit of identifying the objects of the place – the plants, the animals, the geology – would there be value and love for the land? Or, does value only come from the sacramental act of knowing, sharing, and celebrating a place with others? For me, the physical realm is grounded in relationship.

The land and the beings that inhabit it shape each others joys and pains. Though your youth resides in the deserts of Arizona with the Superstition Mountains supporting your back, your fatherhood resides in the mountains of Utah and Wyoming. That is the space I share with you. It is the space that has shaped our relationship. I do not know what space I share with you now. I do not know how to make my way through the shadows of past events to connect with you.

November 17, 2004. We never discuss the specifics of that date. It is a family story that, like so many others, lies hidden. It has been swept underneath the carpet and remains there despite the palpability of its presence.

The story of that day is far different for you than it is for me. I am going to share my story with you. I hope that someday you will share your story with me. Alf spent that day sick at home. His head pounded,

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he was vomiting non-stop, and his neck ached. In an attempt to help him feel better we sought refuge in walking with Mia, our dogchild, in the foothills of Salt Lake City. A cyclist decided he was tired of dogs on trails and proceeded to attempt to rundown our gentle companion who stood patiently with her back to him. I screamed at Mia to run and at the cyclist to slow down. Mia listened, the cyclist did not. As he raced past me in pursuit of the deviant dog my fist shot out in anger and rage and love and I struck him. I recall your doing the same in San Francisco when a car narrowly missed hitting me. Your fist shot out in anger and rage and love and stuck the car. I understand your fierceness and your love. I understand your desire to protect.

The walk did not help. Alf was sick, sicker than I had ever seen him and my presence was required at the University for a screening of that climatological blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. Its fantasy-based, fear-inducing depiction of global warming makes a mockery of a death force. When I returned home after the film and lecture by a geophysicist I was met by a very grim faced husband who told me to sit down. He said that he had bad news and worse news. The bad news: he needed to go to the emergency room. His body was dehydrated, his neck hurt, he had a fever and a friend, who is a nurse, encouraged him to be tested for meningitis.

The worse news: you were in the ICU with a brain injury and might not live. You had been working on a ladder at the front foyer and had fallen backwards onto the stone floor taking all the force of the fall on your head. Your skull was the only bone you broke, and the impact of that fall continues to assert its force on our lives.

That night I sat with Alf while they gave him pain killers and then inserted a needle into his spine to test for meningitis. While we waited for the results I distracted myself by recounting the exploits of that crazy character Global Warming who, true to Hollywood tradition, depicts devastation of the earth through the destruction of that bastion of stability and freedom, The Statue of Liberty. This cinematic distraction was short lived. I feared what the day after tomorrow would bring. I wept for you. I prayed to you.

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I prayed that you might have the strength to find space where you could identify the needs of your own soul. I prayed that you, and not the medical system, would be able to make the decision to stay with us, or to move on. I was helpless to save you, and so with two sticks and three balls of wool I shaped a hat for your injured head. I selected the colors with intent. The silver was the color of your beard, deep orange the color of the red rock mesas that surrounded the memory of your youth, and a blue the color of our immense western sky. The hat had stars to guide you on your path and birds to serve as companions.

I gave you these symbols of the external world with the hope of healing the internal wounds of your injured brain.

You are here with us now. Was it you who made that choice to stay?

Do you resent the decisions that were made for you? Do you resent the dialysis, the therapy and the mechanisms of the medical system that sustain life without considerations for truly living life? Do you greet the mountains of your home? Are you happy to be home?

Eventually, you did come home. You yearned for it, asking each day if you could go home. Alf too came home without meningitis but with a hole in his spine that leaked spinal fluid, and resulted in another botched visit to the emergency room and three weeks of lying flat in bed waiting for that needle-sized hole to heal. While your head was swollen and hemorrhaging, Alf remained flat so that spinal fluid, the substance which cushions and supports the brain, would not drain from his head as it did each time he became vertical. I was scared.

One illness was enough, but two required me to find strength from sources outside of my parents and husband. Had Alf alone been sick I would have turned to my parents for support. Had you alone been sick I would have turned to my husband for support. Neither option was possible. I am grateful for the strong community of friends and neighbors that surround us. I am grateful for the act of walking which maintained my sanity. I am grateful for the presence of non-human animals who are capable of companionship without conversation.

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The events of that winter continue to guide my behavior. You are a child of the desert and you know the power and secrets it holds. The mysteries of Escalante entered my life the autumn of 1998. It was the first solo camp trip with Alf. I fell in love, not just with my companion, but with the contours and colors of the land. Happy with new love I danced in the sand, bid the scrub jays good morning, and molded my body into the shapes of the slot canyons we flowed through like water.

During the past nine years those trips to the desert have continued, but like you, they are changed. I am sure you recall how we would go to the desert at a moment’s notice and as frequently as possible.

We experienced delight, exhaustion, fear and peace in that space of color and light. That spontaneous movement to red rock country has changed with your injury and Alf’s illness. We are much more deliberate about when and why we get in a car. We are now more acutely aware of life’s fragility; of the knowledge that in a moment everything can change so much. Our sense of awareness is heightened and we are more cautious. The way we live, perceive, grieve and laugh are transformed by the understanding of our physical and emotional vulnerability. We now feel in our rooted feet that graced gift we share, the rare opportunity of a full life overflowing with love and growth.

We are aware of how quickly that can vanish. That November night, my life, perception, grief and laughter changed. I knew that you could die. I knew that the father I had known and loved would never be the same. I grieved my loss and I grieved your loss. I still do.

I do not know how to help you. I do not know how to help you. How can one maintain an intact soul when the things we so identified with have been destroyed? What can I give to you?

The gift I offer you is simple, my hand open and outstretched for yours as we seek for the peace of the path infused with sage-scented dreams.

I love you, Tashita

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Peregrinations of Place Anndrea Parrish

We are always coming up with the emphatic fact of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective, in other words, there is properly no history, only biography. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

I came to the Murie center to escape the very frightening possibility that my mind was becoming homogeneous, full of ideas that no longer could be considered my own; a strip-mined imagination. I came to drink and to dream and to breath deeply in a way that only wild places allow you to do. I came because I had been given a rare and precious gift not know --yet intuitively felt. It is a frightening sensation to dare myself to go the place I am most afraid of and write from that place. Like much of humanity I have tended towards cultivating the backwoods of mind into neat rows of thought rendering little space to the untidiness of wilderness. Just as the range of the Teton’s stately image collects in the cool pools at her feet, wilderness hold up a mirror: demanding us to sever our civilian ties in acknowledgement of our wildness. For this reason, I find it fitting that I return to wilderness to remember chiefly what I came to the Murie center for: a sense of place.

This communal space that has been created over this last week has invited me investigate my wildness. Here at the Murie’s place I have been embraced by the good grace of the land and her residents, in

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return I have walked with attentive care, trying not to squelch the tiny young plants that unfurl at my feet. Challenged to live more authentically and charged to do so in the form of writing, I offer my autobiography of place. In the words of Yeats “had I the heavens, embodied cloth inwrought with golden and silver lights, and the dim and the dark cloths, of night and light and the half light, I would spread cloths under your feet; but I being poor have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

It is said that humanity is a thin veneer, a collection of dreams that we may at some point awaken. We hang our civility like dream catchers above our beads at night in hopes that we will rouse to the same world that delivered us to dreaming the night before. Yet, as victims of wars and genocide can attest, it is impossible to know the potential or limitations of one’s actions at any given moment. Human civility casts an ominous shadow that most often we choose to ignore. War, crime, poverty, addiction, malnutrition, terrorism and other forms of civil disintegration are notably common themes even as we cling to a façade of civility. We may parade the enormous chunks of meat we carry within our skulls, as evidence of our superior intelligence, but in relation to the grizzly or prairie vole, a moral high horse is not ours to ride. This is not to say that humans and civility are inherently evil.

I would not be in your good company if I believed this were the case.

Instead, I am demonstrating that our darkness offers a unique vantage point from which survival in a very literal sense is always at stake.

Fundamentally we are wild and without this acknowledgement we cannot fully understand ourselves. So heavy is the imprint of our environment and evolution branded upon us that little autonomy remains in granting us purchase on who we are. After all, it has been slightly less than half a million years that modern humans first emerged and only in the last 10,000 years with the advent of agriculture can we claim any facade of civility. This leaves roughly forty-nine thousand years of wilderness momentum to wrangle with. I must hand it to our species. We have been wildly successful. Since our exodus from

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Africa, our species has reached a broader range of habitats than any other animal ever to live. Being the most pervasive species of this planet I ask, what is our place? Divinely granted or violently seized, we are poised to make decisions that shape all life on this tiny blue marble we call earth. What decision will you make? I have decided as my initial quote suggests, tell my story of place, “to tell it strait and tell it authentically� as Terry Tempest would say.

In the tumultuous electronic, regimented, dotcomme universe that I so often find myself in, I have realized how often I operate without any real sense of place. I am oddly in the habit of finding comfort in the possibility of relocation. Perhaps I do this as a gesture to my hunter gather ancestry or as a resistance to redundancy. For whatever reason, I measure my success in the miles from home that I have traveled and the number of experiences I have collected. I had planned to move to the west coast as soon as I was able. College seemed the most likely cause although finances were painfully limiting. One degree in BS later and I have yet to move form Utah although I cannot claim to be limited in experience.

In fits of parent offspring conflict, some mothers threaten to give their children up for adoption. Unfortunately my mother did not even have the courtesy of arranging an adoptive family for me. Citing religious differences, my mother quite literally changed all the locks to the house while I was in school. The yellow sticky note read: you are no longer welcome here. I was enraged, every window was locked even the one cinder block framed window leading to my bedroom.

How ironic that I had spent all my time plotting my escape from my bedroom and now I wanted desperately to be let in. My only recourse was to break in like a criminal. I had committed the iniquitous crime of doubting the existence of god. A scattering of glass and tears rained into the house as I scavenged for a few token belongings. I left with a change of clothes and two books, one that I have no recollection of and the other entitled wilderness survival. This was my first clue that I had gone I had entered survival mode and naively I thought no one could lock the doors to wilderness for me. Sandwiched between

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its pages, I carefully placed a picture of my brother and I the last remnants of my family and of place.

Couch surfing is not fun. People who go couch surfing for fun are either seriously demented or seriously stranded. Perhaps I was both.

In my attempt to get a better gig, I looked for a boyfriend. I do not condone this approach in finding a living arrangement but it suited my particular circumstance. This is where being female can come in handy. The equation is simple, timeless, and unquestionably lacking in civility: the sex with the larger gametes must compete over the sex with the smaller and therefore more coveted gametes. Those men that don’t compete don’t win. Game over. This equation proved favorable for me in my circumstances and I quickly had a place to live…oh and a boyfriend.

My new boyfriend’s name was Paul. We I lived with his parents.

Never had I met a family that lived so unnaturally although they were fine models for the polygyny that I had sensed was so typical of our species. Little details emerge about humans and their contradictory nature that if you pay attention to, can be very insightful. Paul’s mother publicly preached a life of celibacy and privately fucked like a rabbit.

His father in turn took a mistress, gave into the 50 percent marital loss and made the mistress his wife. There are many features of Paul that not worth mentioning; his athleticism, his dim-wittedness, his fertility. The later feature would be the one that made the baby.

In an attempt to keep an authentic voice, I will confess that I never really liked children. I never babysat, never read to a small child except for my brother, never cradled a baby in the crook of my arm and cooed in their impossibly tiny pink ears. When offered a precious newborn, I nervously passed the helpless bundle to the nearest mother who would inevitable relinquish it’s anguish with a couples of bounces at the hip. Believing myself to be unfit a mother, I sought the only responsible route I knew; a scenic detour to Planned Parenthood. Unfortunately my decision, like those of many females across the world, was usurped by the male voice. Paul broadcast his

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news across our mutual community, squandering our remaining years as teenagers without recourse.

By the age of eighteen my son was born. I named him Nikaiya --Tibetan for the keeper of compassion. He was more than beautiful; he was perfection. He was born without protest in the morning hours; his slippery body unfurling like a floating lotus into the warm waters that we shared. His eyes mirrored wilderness, hominid ancestry, a wisdom that my Scandinavian grandmother possessed all collapsed into one. I had joined the ranks of motherhood, the fiercest of warier clans. Musing at my new status a sense of responsibility and sacred joy emerged; I understood what had so long been a secret to me. The most miraculous occurrences are found in the everyday mundane; in the birth and deaths born of joy and pain. Such teachings lend immediacy to place untainted by time. These experiences are infinitely personal and universally the same.

Wilderness does not hide this understanding from us; rather she displays it proudly, reminding us how ephemeral life’s experiences truly are. We must pay attention to this wild call, finding solace in it’s many meditations. Our guided walk with Jack Turner offered one such meditation: A collection of bleached hoops and a lonely bracelet of fir against polished hoof. Encased between these ribs, the silky phacelia strains her lovely head in a timeless effort to chart the sun’s course.

If we as humans are nothing but a “bundle of relations a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world,” than all we can offer is our authentic voice. Saving the world is too much. “Just as fins in the fish foreshadow that water exists or the wings of an eagle in the nest presuppose air,” we are not meant to live in the absence of a nature. A hurl of metal buzzes cacophonously overhead, rudely disturbing this writings rumination. As sighting of these metal giants of the Teton sky come with increasing regularity, we must find comfort in a world scourged by inconsistencies. We must force ourselves to resolve the beauty of living against the excrement of our creations.

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I pay attention and I listen. The hum of lodge poles in unison announces a sudden shift in the wind, their slow sway and close proximity remind me of last lovers on a dance floor. Beauty is not gone; it just must be more tenaciously fought.

In the paved jungle, humans reign supreme. However, surrounded in nature unadulterated by our desire to rationalize the landscape, we are mere idiots. We are not privileged with the eyesight of the eagle whose keen vision can detect the rustlings of a field mouse a hundred feet above nor can we utilize the current the way a cutthroat does to lure nutrients into his serrated mouth. Nature reminds us our vulnerabilities; grinding our egos much the way glaciers shape a landscape.

I wonder if our reckless carnage of the natural world is an attempt to stave off such vulnerabilities.

We hurl our human vulnerabilities at the beasts of wilderness, serving only to further polarize ourselves from our natural ‘other.’ Perhaps the science of anthropology should be extinguished in favor of the science of collectivology. For in truth we are an animal society with a tendency toward cultural embellishment; little difference exists between wings and hands ...sap and blood.

John Muir writes “trees are travelers…they make little journeys, not extensive ones it is true; but our own little journeys; away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings –many of them not so much.” Lying on my back admiring the complex layers of green that filter through my retina, I have realized that without traveling, what distance I have made. Here in the Murie’s home wayward sojourners of place gather as tinder. Together we have ignited a tiny fire, hardly noticeable from afar. I suppose this is the work of communities; offering small flickers of illumination. Under the watchful presence of an Easterly rising Orion I ask myself: can such illumination warm a world blighted of ignorance and fear within its ruby hue? As my lungs compress against the chilly air, I rewrap my turquoise scarf tightly around my neck and head back to the Murie’s home. Inside there is fire and friendship and I am warm.

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the ecology of residency 2007

From left: Juliet Unfried, Corinne Cappelletti, Jared Grogan, Katy Savage, Natasha Seegert, Terry Tempest Wiliams, Daryn Melvin, Anndrea Parrish, Adele Bealer

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special thanks Terry Tempest Williams Brooke Williams Lyn Dalebout Daryn Melvin Charlie Craighead Teresa Cohn Edward Riddell Lee Carlman Riddell Jack Turner Mary Gibson Scott Bob Greenspan The University of Utah College of Humanities Ryan Parrish, Illustrator