Perfection of the Morning

by Sharon Butala

  I crossed another long, high ridge, started down the other side, and there it was—I knew it at once—the boulder I was looking for. I was suddenly afraid. I hesitated for a long time; more than once I turned away and took a few steps toward home. Why am I doing this? There’s something frightening out here. This is crazy. I’m going home. I felt, there is no question about it, a force out there, and I felt it was acting on me to make me feel I had to go to that rock, and because I felt it, I was afraid. But I saw nothing unusual, heard nothing out of the ordinary. Each time I was about to start for home, instead I turned back to face the boulder again. What are you afraid of? There’s nothing out here to hurt you. You’re imagining things.

  Finally I gathered up my courage and in a rush went down the hillside, across the draw and partway up the other hill straight to the boulder, feeling as though I were pushing away the air to get there, telling myself, For once in your life take a risk, be brave.

  The rock was an especially beautiful one, a light beige blushing to pink in places, rubbed on its corners by cattle over the years to a smooth, mauve shine. I don’t know what was important about it or why it was the right one and the others the wrong ones. I can only guess that it was meant—by whom or what?—as a marker so that I would find what I found next. After I’d studied the rock for a while, having exhausted its possibilities as far as I could tell, I began to walk the rest of the long flat ridge where I’d found it.

  I began to find stone circles. There were about a dozen of these laid out in a long meander from the low end toward the highest point. Two of them were only half-circles; all but the half-circles seemed oriented toward the southwest. I walked along from the low end of the ridge where I found the first one, up toward the high end, finding them one after the other as I went, noticing the small cairns some of them had along the perimeters, the varying diameters of the circles. At the highest point there was nothing but grass.

  I came to the smallest, not more than about six feet in diameter with a triple row of heavily lichen-covered rocks around the outside. I entered it—they all have what seem to be entranceways—and stood in the center looking, from my high position, out over the hills to the southwest. I felt a compulsion, a strong desire, to be closer to the earth. I knelt, but when kneeling only a small part of the body touches the earth, so I sat down, my legs stretched out in front of me. I felt—it was the same old story: part of me felt silly and part of me felt determined to do whatever seemed to need to be done—that something was happening; that some force was teaching me, that I should be still and quiet and listen, be alert for any instruction.

  It seemed to me that some homage was required because I was privileged to be in such overwhelming beauty, and because I could feel that a power lives out there in Nature, some power for which I have no name, can’t describe, don’t understand. It was a primal moment and I gave myself, at last, over to it. I felt the natural thing to do would be to pay homage to each of the four directions, which I did, by simply facing each one quietly for a moment. That is all. After a time I left the hill and the field and went home.

  I didn’t know then that the four directions are a basic component of Plains people’s tradition of worship. I didn’t know that these stone circles were necessarily the remnants of spiritual ceremonies. I held myself still and obeyed what I felt guided to do. I have said that I have no Native blood that I know of and that I knew little about Native peoples’ spiritual beliefs and ceremonies. Nonetheless, as a result of such experiences, I seem to have found myself drawn into their world as I seek to understand my own.

  I am well aware of the discussions about cultural appropriation and about the gap between cultures and between the immediate experience of centuries of oppression and suffering endured by Native peoples of which I have no personal experience. (Although it is worth pointing out that the French side of my family has still not forgotten the expulsion of the Acadians in the 1750s by the English, when they were among the dispersed.)

  I do not want to trespass; I do not want to make claims about or on things I have no right to and don’t understand because my history is a different one from that of the Natives of the Great Plains. In fact, although I do believe in spirits and in local gods, I avoid theology, even in feminism. Rather than reconstructing or copying Native beliefs, these understandings of the spirit world, it seems to me, come with Nature, come out of Nature itself; come with the land and are taught by it.

  In the course of my readings I had come across the assertion that the Cypress Hills area was regarded by Natives as sacred. When I first read this it sounded to me suspiciously like the romanticism of Europeans, and I paid little attention to it until I read the same statement, although unattributed to any source, by Dickason: “The Cypress Hills, near the international border where the Alberta/Saskatchewan border would eventually be drawn, was a sacred area for Amerindians, where hostile tribes could camp in peace.” Isaac Cowie, in The Company of Adventurers, states unequivocally: “As far back as the memory and traditions of the Crees then living extended, these Cypress Hills…had been neutral ground between many warring tribes…” That this land was once sacred, in the light of my experiences, seemed more than plausible. When recently a fellow researcher told me that Stony (Assiniboine) elders in Alberta had told him emphatically that in their oral tradition this was so, I was hardly surprised.

  In the intense summer heat, with mirages lifting fields beyond the horizon’s edge into view in the sky, with grassy hill following after grassy hill, the one much like the other, and it much like the next, with the sky—immense, burning, infinite—swimming overhead and around one’s shoulders, a man, a woman, felt free, or else felt she walked on God’s lap, rested her head on his bosom, felt daily in the wind God’s breath on her cheek, and in the burn of the sun God’s fire, which might comfort or destroy. How else to live here, without going mad? And in the winter the icy, shining blue hills, the brilliant, dry cold inducing imagery of knives and cutting, bones and death.

  Now when I looked out over the rolling hills and grassy plains I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence; I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension.

  KNOWING

  When I decided to marry Peter and go to the country to live, I had expected to learn new things and meet new people; what I hadn’t expected was to be changed myself in elemental ways by my new environment, not thinking that an environment in itself could change one in any essential way. I hadn’t reckoned with the dimension that was the most basic ingredient of all in rural life: that it took place in the midst of Nature, that Nature permeated the lives of rural people, and that this was, more than anything else, the element which separated true rural people from urban people. I too would have to come to an accord with a life lived in Nature, and as I gradually began to do this over the years, that bottomless well of loneliness and sense of alienation that blighted my days would slowly dissipate. I’d been missing something from my understanding of the world and this new understanding involved more than other people and more than my intellect, but was also physical, somatic, an intermingling of place and person.

  When I arrived I did not know what Nature was in its essence; I hadn’t conceptualized it as having an essence. If, on the one hand, I knew in some sense we are all part of Nature, I also saw us—human beings—as essentially different from all the rest of Nature. I saw Nature merely as its effects, in a subject-object way. Of course, I knew about the dramatic and obvious effects on human life of Nature-as-object: crop-killing drought or hail, tornadoes that wrecked buildings, spring blizzards that killed the new calves, and lightning which split fenceposts, started prairie fires and killed horses and cattle.

  I was aware and had no doubt about the reality of the less precisely described but fairly obvious effects of Nature on the psyche—the emotions, the heart—of spacious views, sunse
ts, sunrises, an unobstructed view of the moon and stars and their nightly turning, and the clear, fresh air, all of which I subsumed within a peaceful and beautiful environment, as most people do: Nature as background, as view, as landscape.

  Thirdly, I had heard of the very subtle and rarely remarked on effects of a life lived in Nature, such as human relationships with wild animals or with places themselves—fields, hills, sloughs—or with fieldstones or gullies or trees. I knew that where these relationships developed, the method, the technique, the ways of developing them have no names, no delineation in scientific literature or existence in socially accepted ways of describing the world. They are sometimes called intuition, and the knowledge thus gained, or relationships thus established, I had placed in the realm of myth, in the true sense of the word. I did not completely discount them. I thought them either out of dreamtime, a time past, or belonging only to Aboriginal people still leading traditional lives; I had not considered such understanding of and through Nature—such relationships—as a possiblity for anybody I knew, much less for myself.

  These nontraditional relationships—with wild animals, with physical places—are probably not even universally present for rural people. For example, a few farm women don’t go outside any more often than urban women tend to, and some very modern farmers use machinery so big as to have a Star Wars quality to it and requiring artificially controlled environments as in modern buildings, factors which act to separate the farmer from contact with Nature. How you view Nature is critical also: as real estate, as resource, rather than as an extension of oneself, or oneself as an extension of it, as a larger creature with its own needs and desires and way of being in the universe. Whether or not and to what degree you accept Nature as she is makes a difference in whether you feel these effects or not.

  I now to some degree comprehend these ways of knowing, but they were not obvious to me after a week, a year, or even five years of living in the country. I also think these relationships are so subtle as to be unnoticed by the majority of even those rural people who perhaps routinely experience them. Born as they are into the life, knowing no other, how might it become clear to them that they are experiencing things that urban people don’t know about, that for the urban world these thing do not exist, don’t happen, must be classified as madness or foolishness or romanticism? Since these things are just not talked about, it’s hard to know who knows them in a conscious way and who doesn’t, and I’ve come to believe something more than one’s mere presence in a house in the midst of acres of uninhabited land is required before awareness will develop.

  Occasionally in conversation it became clear to me how huge the gap is between an older person who’d lived all his/her life in the country and someone from the city: for example, it seemed incomprehensible, unbelievable to such people that one might live one’s life never truly seeing the stars. Among such people these strange effects, although noticed, remain unarticulated, not a subject for conversation. And what we don’t talk about, bring into existence by our articulation of it, remains deniable, is relegated to the realm of madness.

  Because I was solitary and undergoing a profound spiritual crisis, I turned inward and became hyperaware of my own feelings, both somatic and psychic. Because I had lost my footing in the world and had begun to doubt I knew anything at all—that is, because I had lost all my self-assurance—I noticed them, accepted them for what they seemed to be. In a world that had stopped making sense I clung to my perceptions; I studied them; I felt these subtle forces acting on me. Feeling myself alone in Nature, turning to it as one might another person, I became sensitive to it in these mythical ways, ways I had little understanding of.

  The last four years before I came to live in the country I spent working and studying in a large building with an artificial environment. Even though I walked back and forth to work most days and lived in a house with a yard rather than in an apartment building, I spent much less time out-of-doors than I do now, and when I was outside I almost never spent time in Nature in her natural state, but in city parks, or gardened backyards. I don’t recall that I ever felt physically disrupted or out of sync with my physical self when I was at work during those years.

  One spring I was invited to spend four days giving workshops and readings in Calgary high schools. I hadn’t been inside such big buildings for any length of time in years, and I was surprised to discover how physically uncomfortable I was in them. Inside them I felt a disruption of my normal way of experiencing the external environment; I felt disconnected from my physical self. It was as if my body didn’t end after all with the surface of my skin, and that some invisible, exterior part was being subtly disrupted by the machinery running the building. I felt as if I were minutely and imperceptibly vibrating with the machinery—I’ve felt this in airports too—as if I couldn’t locate my self inside my body because the buildings (the furnaces, air-conditioning, fluorescent lights, removal from the natural world) were disrupting my normal way of functioning in the atmosphere. Leaving these buildings at the end of each day was a tremendous physical relief to me and I couldn’t help but think about all the young people who were growing up mainly inside them, not even knowing that the buildings were warping, perhaps destroying, a dimension of their humanity. I hadn’t realized to what degree I’d been physically changed by living beyond them.

  For seventeen years now, every morning when Peter and I awake, after we have breakfasted, he, the rural man, goes outside to work regardless of the weather while I, held back by housework or the weather or work in my office, only occasionally go out immediately. Although I am deeply grateful for my modern plumbing, for my flush toilet, in a way I miss the many enforced daily trips I used to make outside, especially those in the middle of the night. They kept me in close contact with the natural world, the weather, the sun, moon and stars. I think I felt the natural world differently then than I do now when I choose when to go out and when to stay in.

  I think of Aboriginal people whose entire lives were an interaction with Nature. It seems to me so clear as to be self-evident that living directly on the earth as Native people did, with constant, direct contact with the natural world, in tepees instead of on floors lifted off the earth by cement basements, would make different people of any of us.

  A couple of years ago Peter and I traveled to New Mexico where we visited some of the dwellings of the Anasazi. At one site the local historical society had set up several kinds of homes constructed by the Aboriginal people of that area that the visitor might actually enter. One of these was a tepee and one consisted of a large, rectangular waist-deep excavation in the earth topped by a roof made of poles and brush and held up by stout posts. Around its perimeter were earth benches. I wondered how it would feel to live in such dwellings: sleeping in them, eating in them, entertaining in them, giving birth, being ill, dying in them.

  It was late in the day and Peter and I had the place to ourselves. While Peter went his way, alone, I entered each of these dwellings. I tried to shut out any memory or sense of the house I had left behind and the motel I would soon be entering for the night. I tried to tune all my sense perceptors onto and into my physical self, I tried to be entirely in the moment, to feel only what I felt at that moment and to think myself into these places as my true and only home. It was a hard thing to do, but an act of the imagination which writers are supposed to be good at. I found I could maintain the full sense of this for only a moment, but that was enough to discover something.

  I knew at once that my whole body felt different. I felt, not exactly heavier, but more substantial in a physical way; I felt more solid and the air around me seemed more real, more intense, more personal. Perhaps I should say that I felt more connected to the air, more connected to the earth, and that both of these were physical sensations which I felt with my whole body and were not merely psychic phenomena.

  I can speak only of my own experiences in this regard, and I don’t know if I’m unusual or not, although I really doubt it.
I was making a conscious effort to note and examine how I felt, something which most people don’t bother to do, but perhaps if more did—and had a range of experiences to compare—we might begin to delineate the parameters of such phenomena. I am not suggesting here that there is anything metaphysical about this sensitivity. This subtle but definite physical experience is a demonstration of a range of somatic perception—a way of knowing about the world—that I think urban living has dulled, if not destroyed.

  But my life in Nature has somehow opened my psyche to other phenomena too. This effect I place in the realm of whatever it is that produces significant dreaming, and makes one become more intuitive—whatever intuition might be, but which as I’ve said I believe has to do with sensitivity to the natural world. The most puzzling and surprising occurrence in this psychic area (aside from dreaming) was this: I have mentioned how for a time books seemed to “jump off the shelf” at me. During the time this was happening, I always found the books that appeared to me in this way—books I had never even heard of, knew nothing about—were the very books I needed at that moment. As I mentioned earlier, Journeys Out of the Body appeared to me in that way, and although simple curiosity made me want to buy it, I thought that it would be self-serving nonsense and I shouldn’t waste my money. I walked out of the store without it, only to return ten minutes later and, with some embarrassment and a lot of exasperation, buy it.

  I took it into the mall and sat down on a bench to read it while I—like farm women everywhere—waited for Peter to return from his hunt for machinery parts. As I was walking out of the store with it in my hand, a strange feeling developed in my solar plexus which I classified as pain although it was more like a very strong cramp. I had no other symptoms: no fever, no sweating or speeded-up heart rate, no nausea or bowel upset, just that strange, thoroughly uncomfortable, powerful cramp like a clenched fist in my solar plexus.