Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten.
Jung describes the frescoes and continues:
When I was back home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to obtain the pictures for me. He could not locate them, for he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist.
In fact, the mosaics had indeed been created in the basilica as he had known, but in the early Middle Ages they had been destroyed by fire.
I see a similarity in the two experiences, which seem to me to have to do with the falseness of our insistence on time as linear, and that what I saw in my mind’s eye was perhaps a scene that took place two hundred or two thousand or more years ago on that very spot.
But further, I continued to wonder why I was unworthy to stand in that sacred circle. I wanted to think it was because I hadn’t performed the ritual properly, including a three- or four-day fast first, but I seriously doubted that could be the reason since I felt forced to be there in the first place. Months passed, a year passed; I kept reading and thinking and trying to make my dreams and experiences form a coherent whole that would answer all my questions. I read much of the small amount of literature available about the beliefs of Amerindians recounted in their own words. There can be little doubt from these accounts that these societies were male dominated, that women, although having their place in them, were considered inferior to men, worse, that at least in some of the societies they were considered pure enough to take a significant part in rituals and ceremonies only during the time they were young virgins.
Not long ago I attended the funeral of a woman who was born here and who died here well into her old age. She was a rural woman, typical of her generation of rural women, who had worked hard all her life, and was skilled at all the tasks of rural women. She was an ordinary woman; she quarreled with people, she gave unstintingly to others. There was nothing remarkable about her life in any way: she never wrote a book, never had a career, never won a prize, never held a prestigious office, or had any power in the world except as the woman of her family, a power which she underused, if anything. Yet the church was packed and the crowd overflowed into the vestibule and out onto the lawn.
While the minister prayed, I tried to understand why all these people had come to her funeral, why they came to the funerals of other old women just like her, who had never made the smallest mark on the world.
Why else, I thought, but because, whether we say it out loud or not, or to ourselves or not, or to each other or not, we all know, we all understand in our hearts that women are the soul of the world.
When I was nearing the end of the first draft of this book, I dreamt that I was out walking in the hills with a herd of wild stallions. One white stallion out of the herd walked at my side, his head close to mine. I came to a basin formed by a circle of sloping green hills and lying on her side on the ground in the center of that basin was a white mare. She had just given birth to five foals. The foals were little blanketed bundles like newborns in a hospital nursery and they were suckling their mother, lying against her belly side-by-side as pups do. Several of the blankets were streaked with the mare’s blood, and there was blood from the birth on the ground.
I halted at once, horrified, because I knew the stallion I’d been walking with would try to kill the foals. Already he had flown into a frenzy and the rest of the dream disintegrated in my struggle to hold his head to stop him from racing to the foals and trampling them, and in my anger at myself because I had brought the stallion there, however unwittingly, and knew I was responsible for the damage he would do if he got away from me.
When I was a young woman more than twenty-eight years ago, and had just given birth to my first and only child, I lay down one evening to rest and my psyche, my soul, transcended all the words in books, and all the art I knew of whatever kind, and all my past and even my future, to give me a vision of the oneness of the universe. For all these twenty-eight or so years since I have pondered it.
Although I felt the absolute, indisputable truth of it in every fiber of my being, saw that it was inarguable, I did not understand it, I did not know what to do with it. I absolutely could not see how my baby, my precious, fragile little son could be made of the same fabric as the grass, the trees, the sky. It was unimaginable in any sense, metaphoric or real. I had been raised in a fight against Nature for survival, educated at a university increasingly dedicated to progress, to technological transcendence, I had long been removed from any kind of true Nature, and so I rejected, could not even imagine how the vision could be true for me and for the entire human race.
A male figure walking by my side, whispering in my ear, being my intimate companion: I think it is time to let go of that figure, time to forget the books, forget conventional wisdom, let go of all that I was taught by church and school and history and by bitter experience in society. All these things tell me to discount what I have learned through these years of my life here in the landscape. They tell me that I am at worst quite crazy, a madwoman, and at the least that I am silly, self-deluded, romantic. I resist; although it is very hard, I resist with all my strength.
This morning I went out to walk along the winding dirt road that stretches by the river. It is mid-August of an unusually cold summer and already, down in this valley, the sun is rising later and to fog, which usually doesn’t come till September. Although it was only 6:30 the fog had begun to dissipate. The Frenchman has carved out banks twenty, and sometimes more, feet high, below which the narrow, winding stream flows. This morning its surface was perfectly smooth, the mist, although the air was still, drifting along its surface in lazy, curling wisps. In this low, slanting light the river was the color of iron, and standing so far above it and looking down without moving, the mist appeared to me to be rising out of the water or being sucked back into it.
A muskrat appeared from under the near bank and paddled busily to the other side. Farther on a pair of ducks and their brood, hardly babies anymore, glided over the surface leaving a wake of widening satin ripples. An owl was hooting, hidden in the wolf willow on the opposite bank, its tender, feminine voice speaking some gentle message I couldn’t interpret.
I thought about the perfection of the morning, tried to name what it is about the morning that is different from the rest of the day. Is it the stillness? It is true that I was out too early for gravel trucks to be rolling down the grid a mile away, and the morning was too damp for hay farmers to be out in their noisy tractors and swathers baling or cutting hay. Harvest, too, is late this year, so no combines were roaring their way across the fields above the valley. But, I thought, often on Sundays there is an all-day silence, or on rainy days or during offseasons; whatever this perfection might be, it’s more than the absence of noises made by humans and their machines.
I looked across to the hills on the far side of the valley, shrouded and muted by the fog, and at the closer hills where the mist had dissipated in the sun’s rays. I thought of early afternoon during the summer when no animals are stirring, lying deep in their cool burrows or curled up in the shade of a copse of stunted poplars or saskatoons, when even the insects rest under blades of spear grass or cool red stones. Then in the intense, silent heat, hills, stones, burnouts, buffalo grass are imbued with magic, an otherworldly air descends over them.
And what about the end of the day when in the wash of golden light all blemishes fade and disappear and peace descends over the yellow grasses and the luminous sky? Then, too, there is such perfection that all desire for heaven is absorbed in the glowing, fragile plains, the radiant hills.
And in the night, the sky a swirl of glittering stars from its ape
x an unimaginable distance above, all the way to the precise line of the hills, in the vital darkness of its shadows, the earth has a solidity that is missing from the day, and we retreat indoors, out of the way of secrets it is not ours to know.
This morning I bent to smell a yellow clover bloom and a drop of cool, translucent dew touched and clung to the end of my nose. I stood on the bank and looked across the river at the grasses and the yellow and white blooms of cinquefoil and wild aster, at the shiny blue-gray leaves of the wolf willow lining the bank where white-taileds had made trails coming down to water every morning and evening, and where, picking chokecherries, I’d once heard a doe talking to her fawn.
In the purity of the morning, I understand how much more there is to the world than meets the eye, I see that the world fails to dissolve at the edges into myth and dream, only because one wills it not to. Now I begin to understand the meaning of that vision. Now I see the truth of it.
SOURCES
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Bennett, John. Northern Plainsmen: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
Brody, Hugh. Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1981.
Bullfinch, Thomas. Bullfinch’s Mythology of Greece and Rome with Eastern and Norse Legends. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1973.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. Vol. 1, Primitive Mythology. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
Castaneda, Carlos. Tales of Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974.
Colorado, Pamela. “Wayfinding and the New Sun: Indigenous Science in the Modern World.” In Noetic Sciences Review. Summer 1992.
Cowie, Isaac. The Company of Adventurers. Toronto, William Briggs, 1913.
Dickason, Olive. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1992.
Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Fraser, James. The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore. New York: Avenel Books, 1981.
Friesen, Gerald. The Canadian Prairies: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. (Not cited in text)
Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989.
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.
Haines, John. The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.
Harding, Esther. Women’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern. London: Longman’s Green & Co., 1935.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Macmillan Pubishing Co. Inc., 1961.
Jung, Carl, ed. Man and His Symbols. Reprint. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1979.
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Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. The Oxford University Press, 1966.
Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
--------. Crossing Open Ground. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1989.
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van der Post, Laurens. The Lost World of the Kalahari. London: Penguin Books, 1962.
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A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
I owe thanks to many people for their influence on my life, and hence, their contribution to this book, but for practical reasons, I’ve tried to narrow my gratitude down to a few specific individuals and groups. I owe thanks to the women of the Divide-Claydon area and to those from the valley near Eastend who befriended me and taught me much. The writers who came to stay in the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend during the time I was working on this book also provided support and encouragement, in particular, Sean Virgo and Terry Jordan. Nor would this book be as extensive, as detailed, or as comprehensible as it is without the sensitivity and incisiveness of my editor, Phyllis Bruce, who often seemed to know what I was trying to say when I wasn’t sure myself. Any shortcomings in the book are my responsibility. Thanks to all of them, and especially to Peter and my family, without whose loving support I would have given up long ago.
Praise for The Perfection of the Morning
#1 National Bestseller
“One of the most perceptive and moving meditations ever written by a Canadian on that mysterious and often misunderstood presence we call nature.”
—Maclean’s
“Butala’s magic is such that she breathes life into ink.”
—Calgary Herald
“Butala in The Perfection of the Morning is taking us on a long walk across sometimes difficult territory, through mud and dust and blizzards. It makes for an extraordinary picture, this journey into nature, as the figures at times are practically indistinguishable from the landscape…Her insights are hard-won, her voice honest and true. She is a wonderful guide…The Perfection of the Morning is a beautiful portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman on the unbroken Prairie.”
—Books in Canada
“Butala’s beautiful, unusual book is remarkable…[The Perfection of the Morning has] carved a new spiritual geography in a place where truth and myth collide.”
—The London Free Press
“The Perfection of the Morning speaks of the peace to be had by simply walking and listening to nature.”
—The Globe and Mail
“The book is not starry-eyed about her experience—Butala describes the beauty of the country, but also its harshness and social limitations…Few readers…will be immune to the appeal of Butala’s memoir.”
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“Sharon Butala makes a spiritual journey and renders a moving elegy about the power of nature to transform.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“Her reflections on nature are free of the often dense, florid and calculated imag
ery of Stegner and Dillard, and so it is her voice, rather than an approximation of nature, that you read.”
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—Ottawa Citizen
“An interesting, deeply moving book.”
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“[A] personal—yet universal—search for integration of person and place.”
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Also by Sharon Butala
Non-Fiction
Harvest
Coyote’s Morning Cry
Wild Stone Heart
Old Man On His Back
Lilac Moon
Novels
Country of the Heart
The Gates of the Sun
Luna
Upstream
The Fourth Archangel
The Garden of Eden
Short Fiction
Queen of the Headaches
Fever
Real Life
Plays
Natural Disasters
A Killing Frost
Copyright
The Perfection of the Morning
© 1994, 2004 by Sharon Butala.
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