Pop 89: Walk it Off
By Madonna Hamel
After another scare concerning my brother’s health I feel weak and wobbly and find myself pacing my living room like a caged creature. I am caged in my own fear, shock and confusion. I am made suddenly aware, once again, of the truth that is always there: I am powerless over the outcome of this moment. And, as I have done all my life, whether running from the dinner table, escaping at midnight, or walking off the darkness of a breakup, I go outside.
“The way is made by walking,” a pilgrim once wrote. Because anxiety historically jazzes me up like coffee, I walk knowing I will make my way out of my anxiety by moving through it. I will walk it it off, burn it out, I say I say to myself. I will not feed it, which means I will not beat it like a foe needing crushing. Over the years I have arrived at this gentler approach to my jazzed-upness. Walking does not have to be in opposition to helplessness, but an acknowledgement of it. It can be an unwinding. A humbling. And, above all, especially out here on the prairie, it can be a relinquishment into a force larger than me - the divine force that “drives the tender shoots” of roadside plants and hay fields, as Dylan Thomas writes.
Walking along Cemetery Road toward the sunset I feel the tension loosen. I breathe in and out, slowly releasing my persistent desire to direct things. I look toward the horizon where earth meets heaven and the future lies. Here, on the prairie, where ancient reality is as close as a giant boulder dragged all the way from Hudson’s Bay on a sheet of ice and on which lichen grows on an average of one centimetre a year, time and space collapse into each other. I may not have control over what happens, but now, whatever happens, is placed in the perspective of the long game.
As the sky grows redder, the ground loses its sharpness, lurking shadows become projections of my worries, until I can let them go and let them be just the gently nodding little yellow flowers they actually are. They will remain what they are, no matter what I think or feel. On that I can depend - and that fact brings unexpected solace. Eventually, all that is left is sky and the promise of another day.
We may be sophisticating ourselves at an alarming rate with all manner of technology and gadgetry, but our bodies haven’t changed much from the days we started walking upright. Highly evolved tools mean nothing in the hands of emotionally and spiritually immature people who overreact to the adrenaline rush of fear. Many of the world’s loudmouths in the public arena are egotists with inferiority complexes operating from a hyper-vigilant stance. They act on the urge to control their environment dating back to the day when their ancestors eyed sabre-tooth tigers crouched in the bushes. Only today, the tiger is an immigrant in a hijab, a farmer in a ball cap, or a young man in a hoodie.
Vigilance is my double-edged sword. As a child, I played Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’Arc), brandishing my weapon of outspokenness - lunging linguistically at anyone who threatened my younger siblings. Later in life I did the same thing in an art class where I felt certain the professor was unconscious and unconcerned by the effects of some borderline abusive psycho-drama exercises she haphazardly engaged us in. She led us down some psychically dark paths and neglected to see us return fully to a safe place. So, I took it upon myself to call her out - to expose her flawed methods and lack of boundaries.
Was I thanked for my chivalry? No. Why would I be? I was the interrupter, the hyper-vigilant self-appointed leader of the charge against the Empress with no clothes on. It never occurred to me that, even if she was an abusive presence, able to do real damage (which indeed she did do, later, after I graduated), it was not for me to save the others. Everyone has their path, their journey, their long walk, complete with dangerous detours into the brambles and bushes.
Where the dirt road dwindles into the pasture along with the setting sun, I begin to turn around, about to head back home. Suddenly, sheet lightning lights up the sky. I gasp at the beauty of it and experience a brief surge of awe. Awe, I have been told, is a doorway back into faith in the world and our fellows. It’s the brief transcendent experience that allows for faith to take precedence over cynicism, suspicion and vigilant outrage. Awe happens rapidly; it sneaks in before we can rationalize it away.
When I get home from my walk I pick up the novel I was reading when I got the call about my brother: “Followed By the Lark” by Helen Humphries. It’s an exquisite insight into the life of Henry David Thoreau. “More and more,” writes Humphries, “ he was interested in the small particulars- the blue flower, the drift of rain, the single note of a blackbird - and less inclined towards the larger world, where talk of full-scale war was bubbling up … I don’t seem to have as much energy for outrage, he said … But I always have enough energy for praise.”
I think about the little yellow flowers on the side of Cemetery Road. How, inexplicably, their presence calmed me. I climb into bed, “I say my prayers to the close and holy darkness” (quoting Dylan Thomas again). Eventually, I am lulled to a much-needed sleep by the praise songs of nature: The one-hit wondrous chirp of the solitary cricket singing under my window all night long, the rise and fall of the cool breeze rustling the cottonwood leaves, and the approaching thunderstorm’s rumble which eventually recedes with the rain.