Читать книгу The Ashokan Way - Gail Straub - Страница 15

January

Exactly Who Is Witnessing

All This Beauty?

I am here alone with a day so mild that dense mists pour off the snow banks. Following the rising vapors for almost a mile, I feel as if I am riding a great rolling wave. Soon cloaked in the white mists myself, I become part of this moving current. The mountains are rendered utterly invisible by this thick fog, but when the wind blows, it opens small portals of visibility into the valley, like a window being cleared of condensation. As the wind picks up, it opens and closes more portals, as if shutters were being rapidly flung open and then shut along the mountain range. The wind has become a deft magician, performing sleight of hand with the visible and invisible. Are the mountains really there or am I just imagining them? And then a question fills my mind, one that I have often pondered when I am out in the landscape: Exactly who is witnessing all this beauty?

As I walk further into the fluctuating terrain, the sun breaks through as bright patches of blue dot the sky. I can feel the sunshine melting my misty cloak as it spreads its warmth over the landscape. Gradually, in slow motion, the entire heavy blanket of fog rises off this bluestone range almost as if a painter was lifting a veil to reveal a masterpiece. Up, up, the mists lift higher and higher revealing the bases of the massive mountains surrounding me. And then slowly, inexorably, all eighteen peaks appear before my eyes, like giant newborns. I stand transfixed, as if I am seeing this mountain valley for the first time. And some veil is also lifted off me too, because witnessing such unexpected splendor alters a person forever.

Is such revelation accidental? There is not another person in sight and I can’t help but wonder whether this entire spectacle was a private showing just for me. It’s highly unlikely that I will see this precise combination of elemental magic again in my lifetime. These mists that I have ridden like a great wave, this wind that is a deft magician, this sunlight that transformed the valley into a newborn baby—what are they telling me? Landscape illusionists, they remind me that though there is a worthy place for will and reason in this life, there is an equally important role for the inexplicable and the miraculous. Remembering that there are ways of seeing and knowing that cannot be summoned by my will or understood by my mind is a great gift, perhaps even a salvation. I want to bow down to the mist, the wind, and the light. I want to tell them how grateful I am for this benediction that has left me rearranged.

Recalling Rilke’s line “There is no place at all that is not looking at you,” I wonder if the three elemental tricksters have been watching me as carefully as I have been watching them. Rilke joins a long line of poets, mystics, and shamans who believe in this mutual exchange between humans and the landscape. Is it possible then, that my genuine awe and gratitude for the beauty that the elements conjured today has offered them an unexpected revelation? There is no way to know this for sure. But in my heart I feel that my walk this morning was a miracle witnessed by both myself and by the landscape. And that such unheralded moments of marvel are not just for humans alone.

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Praying in the Cathedral of the Ashokan

My Mother and Faith

On this cold January day the mountains stride boldly across the blue sky wearing their winter whites. Outlined by fresh snow, the trees are backlit by brilliant sunshine. Upon this luminous, pearly backdrop, a flock of hundreds of tiny dark-eyed juncos appear as a delicate black-lace pattern in flight. Here I am on my birthday, walking through the mountain cathedral I have been attending for thirty-six of my sixty-eight years. Here I am in this sacred landscape where I have released my exhaustion and overload, found solace and renewed perspective, remembered who I am, and birthed most of my good ideas. This is my church and there is no place I love more. Walking here on this day of my birth, I find myself thinking about my faith and about my mother.

A fervent Irish Catholic, Mom made sure our family went to Mass at St. Joseph’s Church every Sunday of my childhood without fail. Indeed, after receiving the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation, I diligently attended both confession and Mass every week for years—until, that is, at age eighteen, I went off to college where I studied Marxism and later worshipped in the church of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

At the time what I liked most about those Sundays at St. Joseph’s was the quiet time for praying, the consistency of the weekly ritual, and the intimacy of my mother sitting close to me, always elegant in her Sunday best, her Dior perfume mixing with the pungent church incense. But the full impact of those years of weekly mass is the lasting imprint of my mother’s faith on me. It was such an intrinsic part of who she was that it eventually became an intrinsic part of who I am, albeit in a slightly different form. Her mystical bent grounded in a devout prayer life; her heightened appreciation for beauty, which she considered a form of prayer; her capacity to sustain her conviction in the face of great challenges, most especially her fragile health; her courage to carry the presence of death on her shoulder; and last but not at all least, her enormous confidence that I could do anything and be anyone—all these things were facets of her deep and abiding faith, and to say that I would be nothing without them only hints at their significance.

My mother died when she was fifty-five, so at sixty-eight, I have now enjoyed thirteen more years of life than my mother was given. I used to fear how deeply disappointed she would be at my failure to be a good Catholic. But now I believe that Mom would understand that my church is this place in the mountains, where daily I say the rosary, praying for those I love along with those who need support. I feel confident that what I experience here in the Ashokan Cathedral is not so different from what she experienced sitting in the pews at St. Joseph’s Church: solace in difficult times, an abiding conviction in something inexplicable but good, encouragement to live a kind and full life, and the belief that death is a friend. I finally see that we can never know exactly what form the early kernels of faith will blossom into. But more essential than the form itself, the original spiritual seeds that my mother so carefully planted have borne fruit in me, evidenced in my capacity to deepen and sustain my faith over the course of my lifetime.

So today, walking along the reservoir, on the anniversary of the morning sixty-eight years ago when she gave birth to me, I am moved to proclaim right out loud, “I am my mother’s daughter!” On this cold January day of my birth, I feel warm and filled with grace. Suddenly I know that the flock of dark- eyed juncos I saw earlier was a birthday blessing from Mom. And that my memory of her is like those birds, a luminous lace pattern in flight held high aloft by the wind.

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A Walk with John Burroughs

Appreciating Winter’s Gifts

The molten sky with its subtle shades of gray is just waiting for the snow to arrive. Soon the quiet space opens my seeing and I recognize the red-tailed hawk sitting motionless high up in the leafless trees. Her feathered camouflage so precisely matches the hardwood forest that I only find her when I am still inside. From her lofty perch she surveys the wide sweep of the valley’s mountains, water, and sky.

The snow begins, amplifying my wordless communion with the hawk. Within our quietude I feel I can almost hear the fluffy white flakes falling, coating me with their benediction. My love for winter comes over me with such an unexpected force that tears spring from my eyes. How fond I am of the alabaster landscape, the stark naked shapes of the trees, the way the cold clears my head, the incomparable silence after a snowstorm. How I love the fact that everything seems so much simpler in this season. Winter demands more of us, but in return for our appreciation, it has so much to offer. I start to walk again, putting down tracks, getting snow drunk.

Of all the writings of the Hudson Valley nature mystic John Burroughs, it is his descriptions of winter that speak to me most deeply, including this passage from In the Catskills.

“The simplicity of winter has a deep moral,” he writes, “The return of nature, after such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not lost either upon the head or the heart. It is the philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread.”

“Yes,” I think. “That is just how I feel.” After the abundant sensual feast of the fall, the zen simplicity of winter is a great relief. Its emptiness offers the natural counterpart to such fullness. This cycle’s soft shades of grey calm me. With the bare bones of the landscape now accentuated, I, too, am invited to get down to the bones of things. My mind has more space and my thoughts can spread out. As my entire psyche turns inward, my interior life begins its richest season. Like a stew simmering on the woodstove, my creative projects cook during these months. The longer periods to think, read, and write leave my mind disciplined and sharp, my body resolved to act when the warmer days arrive. After an arduous period of mental concentration, it’s pure joy to go outside into the cold air and empty the mind once again. And for me there is no greater winter pleasure than to walk out into the snow.

And now it’s snowing hard and I have a paradoxical sensation that the cold snow forms a warm blanket for this mountain valley. Utterly democratic, the whirling flakes transform every inch of the landscape. The snow owns this entire place, like a benevolent ruler who just suddenly showed up. Sounds are magnified in the luminous quiet: the crunching of my footsteps, the clumps of snow falling from the tree branches, and the wind rustling through the forest like woodland chimes. I can imagine John Burroughs walking next to me exclaiming how “the world lies about in a trance of snow!” Or the old white-bearded mystic might be pointing out the tracks of deer or hawks, calling them “the snow walkers.” And I am a snow walker too, transported by the marvel of falling flakes. Now fully garbed in immaculate white, I open my arms grateful to receive the gifts of winter: a season to simplify and return to the bones of my life; a period to enrich my interior life through reflection, reading, and writing; and a time to create new ideas with a quiet clear mind.