Pop 89: The Love of A Place to Land

By Madonna Hamel

My brother is making his way back to his island home, longing for land to light on. I am left with an empty home. Who knew that at sixty-six, I would experience empty nest angst? But such is love.

Love is something I've been experiencing a lot lately. I was going to say, "thinking about," but love works differently and is deeper than a thought process. It envelops the entire being and tugs at the heart, forcing it to expand. Evidence of struggle in one you love sparks a wildfire of feeling. 

Tears spring to the eyes at the sight of a scribble on a piece of paper - my brother's attempt to describe a dream about a gate in the back of his orchard. I found his toque yesterday and actually felt a cold breeze pass over my head just thinking about his bare head. I pray for a miracle. And what comes to mind are the words of the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh: "The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on earth."

This embodied love is not restricted to my brother and his struggle with all the craziness of a stroke. Shimmering on the surface, this Love & Tears duet is triggered - yes, there are triggers of love, joy, happiness and hope as well as triggers of pain - by the sudden return of the grackles and the prairie crocuses and the red globes of geranium blooms in the window. I like this feeling, so I must protect it. Feed it. 

And so, remembering the monk's words, I make for the Grasslands.

Today, it's just me and the wide open space: The undulating sand dunes giving way to mounds of hard clay and scatterings of crystals, and deer paths navigating around wild juniper cover, their roots poking through the crust of the earth like snakes jumbling out of a pit. I stop and sit. Here is where the inner atmosphere of love is filled up like a tank taking water or fuel. I refill by simply watching and listening to the bare branches of the aspens trembling in the warm breeze. And by gazing at the ever-changing face of the constant sky as it moves from late afternoon to evening. The only other creatures around are giant bunnies, curious deer and creaking magpies. And a hawk or two. Oh, and ticks.

I come here to feed this love in the same way the mystics and the desert mothers and fathers and Christ himself went to the desert. Why this particular wilderness is so conducive to an expanded sense of love, I cannot say. Nor is it even necessary to know. What I can say is: when the sky goes on forever and the land beneath is serves as a Translator of Light, then everything that is immortal in me must echo everything outside of me and expand. Apparently into Love. Worry, anger, pride, and resentment simply cannot sustain themselves here; they are too small and too petty. And the longer I stay here, the longer they go without feeding - I starve them off while at the same time filling my soul with this prairie feast.

"This here's a spiritual experience," I laugh to myself. Though I no longer try to wax on about it to my prairie friends. They know better than to break its spell by squeezing it into language. Once, my friend Ervin cut me short as I blabbered about my intense experiences on the land. Now I know why. It's not that I don't get what you're saying, he tried to explain. "We just don't talk about it." 

I'm seeing how humans can't really talk about Spirit anymore than we should be telling others about our sex. It's a private, intimate, ineffable matter. To explicate is to disintegrate, to deconstruct, to rupture. And while these are all popular words and actions in the post-modern secular art and academic scene - they are death to the Spirit and to Love.

I exist in that space between land and sky, between the Spirit of Love and the God of Dirt, between being frustrated by my attempts to talk about poetry or theology with my neighbours and in awe of their cellular understanding of the poetics and divinity of the land. These are people who have spent thousands of hours alone with hawks and deer, and ticks and steer, who've not just wandered occasionally with them. They've come up against storms and tangles far bigger than themselves and had to bend to the task and their own egos. They have seen and felt and known Earth and Heaven in ways they cannot explain nor feel a need to. And that's why I need to be here. 

But I am a writer and will continue to seek for a language that does not separate. We don't all see eye to eye, but we share some things in common. Life is where you put your time and energy; I tell my writing students. It is also about place - the place where our feet land and meet the ground - common ground. To find what we used to call "our common humanity" seems more efficient and worth our time and energy than spotting a common enemy. 

The other night, I made a beeline for a giant boulder. I wanted to get a closer look at the lichen on its back. Maybe rest on it for a while. I figured if there were any rattlers living beneath it, they'd still be asleep this time of year. Sitting there reminded me of the first time I saw an erratic. The giant, plucked and dragged and dropped by ice, looked so alone. Misplaced. A reminder that, out here, time and space share the same face. Those of us, plopped here, like that big rock hundreds of years ago, share a common language: The language of love of a place to land.