I’ll Sing What I’ve Said: Looking In The Distance
by Ruby Sara
Greetings, best and beloved friends, from the wind-swollen streets and dancing, wooded pockets of the fiercely-wild urban midwest! The October week stretches on in such dazzling style that I have to admit to you, I’m a little lost for words. I’ve used them all before, see: heart-shattering, heart-mending, breath-taking, ensouling, outrageous, gorgeous, delicious, beautiful, extravagant, knock-down, gobsmacking, earth-shaking, heart-smoke-turning, jump-up-and-down-shouting brilliant. That’s the weather come fall. The sun is gentle and the wind is pregnant with glory. The air is sweet as crystal honey – the leaves are a soft green turning to yellow. The red crunchy ones on the ground tempt feet, young and old. The reed blossoms are downy and float above the earth like the wings of great birds, and the seed pods rattle when the wind rips them by. I’ve said as much before. But it does bear repeating. The big blue sky says “Hey! Glory Glory Earthalujah! Praise the Land! Gloria in excelsis Terra! Don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party?” and who am I to blow against the wind?*
Just this morning a friend was remarking to me how much she too loves this season; as much as it all seems to signal the coming winter, we can’t help but be madly in love with each darker day. And then too the spring. Those liminal seasons that never seem long enough, whereas summer and winter do seem to drag on and on towards their end. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure – something about the preciousness of perfection most likely. It’s a moving and permanent revelation, the Mama’s seasons turning.
I went wandering today out by one of those wooded pockets amongst the concrete where my oft-mentioned friends the common reeds were shaking a holy tailfeather to the cottonwood trees’ susurrus. It’s a mass of bramble, this little lot of wildness beyond the race of industry. I looked upward, and the leaves on the trees were sparking in the light. I looked left, and old thistles were snaking alongside dying sunflowers. I looked right, and a scrabble of earth had made purchase in between the cracking asphalt. I looked as far as my eyes would go, and caught the whisper of horizon there between the trees, oh oh, further yet. And something let go between my shoulderblades. I said a prayer for more horizons.
We don’t get a lot of horizons in the city. It’s interesting how often I would look out into distances when I lived in the country, and how little I get that chance now. As the saying goes, “all religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance” (Vasily Rozanov). I recently read the idea that perhaps it is looking in the distance that inspires religion in the first place – and I can buy that. I’m reminded of the gorgeous book Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception by Laura Sewall, where, to my understanding, Sewall argues that what and how we perceive via our visual sense affects our worldview in radical ways – as one example, the fact that we gaze out into the distant horizon with much less frequency since the development of civilization and the advent of urbanization is intimately entangled in our psychology as civilized persons, which in Sewall’s view is related to our current destructive relationship with the planet. It is a compelling argument (and a beautiful book – I highly recommend it). But from a more personal place, I can also fundamentally appreciate the need to look into the distance, to seek out horizons and look to wilderness places, because I feel, in my body, how it nourishes me to do so. My body becomes organic again, the clamor and bang of the perpetual motion machine of the city falling away, reminding me of what is real. Some string is pulled taught and tuned in the core of my chest. Some hand plucks at the hem of my jeans.
There is a place along I-25 over the border of Colorado and New Mexico called Raton Pass. It’s a small stretch of the Sangre de Cristo mountains lumbering across what would otherwise be a straight shot down the Eastern plains that run up against the foothills of the mountains. Naturally, it’s beautiful. But the best part of Raton Pass is the moment just before it ends, when the whole of New Mexico comes unfurled out in front of you. And all the better if seen at sunrise or sunset, when the mesas are on fire in roses and blues, and the hills and mountains and flat, flat, brilliant flatlands hold themselves out like arms in offering, and forever rests lightly on the tongue. Out of that horizon I can imagine the birth of religion. Out of that beauty, prayer is inevitable.
I’ll sing what I said
We come and we go
That’s a thing that I keep
In the back of my head*
Grok horizons on the sweet curve of the Mama’s cheek, beloveds. Pray the smoky distance, the unfurling forever, without ceasing.
*From “I Know What I Know” by Paul Simon…arguably one of the greatest song lyricists of all time. Sometimes I think I could make a whole religion from Paul Simon and Sweet Honey in the Rock songs.
Hello RS!
This post speaks to something that I have been thinking about lately – the experiential component of religion. On the surface, it may seem that religion as experiential is a statement of the obvious, but I think that in this theological culture of post-Enlightenment, postmodern interrogation and paralysis, and battle between rationalism and empiricism (which should help ground us, but somehow does not), that there is an overall distraction from the Body by the Mind, and that we tend to put the ‘varieties of our religious experience’ through an intellectual distillation apparatus. Intellectual rigor and inquiry are a bedrock of my approach to religious practice, but I think that I (and my closest religious cohorts) can easily distract ourselves from the bones of our practice and belief (and thus our own bones). I am ready to revel in the chill and crunch of this fleeting autumn season, and to re-imagine my theology from the ground up – to get to the bare bones of the matter.
PS Samhain’s food theme: Bare Bones
Thank you, Cathryn, for this beautifully articulated set of thoughts regarding the need to consistently return to the embodied bedrock of things. I absolutely feel the same way. And I think Samhain is the season for it – to feel refreshed coupled with the impulse to relish bones. To get down to brass tacks.
RS
That’s link between worldview and visual perception is really intriguing. I remember when I moved into New England from Florida that I felt a big impact of the change from a flat to a rolling landscape. I also love this season–in urban settings too. Though there are lots of street performances going on in Summer, there’s somehow more of a festive sense at this time of year with people warming up by bouncing and bopping around to music. I think there’s also somehow more of a clarity to the sound with the crispness in the air.
[...] has been a consistent piece of human culture since the beginning of our human awareness – sitting in that chair and looking in the distance. Worldviews change through a change in culture, and if religion and spirituality are an intrinsic [...]