Tag: ancestry

“Instructions for Having a Soul”

Take it out in the rain sometimes. 
It has vast, invisible wings that gather dirt 
and need rinsing. 
When it tries to kill you 
that is because you’ve forgotten 
to let it look into someone’s eyes 
for longer than a minute. 
It needs that the way a bee needs nectar 
in the early morning dew. 
Every so often, take it on a journey. 

an excerpt from—Joseph Fasano

This past June I took a trip to visit the place my grandparents and great grandparents lived and worked. Though I never lived there, Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota are central to my heritage. It’d been years since I’d visited these states. I wanted to place my feet on that earth once more, and sense how it felt. After writing Stories We Didn’t Tell, I wanted reimagine the lives of my ancestors who made their way through an era of extreme change during their lives while once again walking the land they walked. I wanted to stand on that land, breathe its air, and let my eyes gather the landscape into my soul. I wanted to deepen my awareness about what it means to inhabit such a place, and it to inhabit me.

When driving from Hot Springs, South Dakota to visit Fort Robinson outside of Crawford, Nebraska, we stopped the car and got out to take in the Oglala Grasslands, a vast expanse of prairie expanding in every direction. Clouds hung low. Wind whispered through the grass, quivered wild flowers’ purple tips. As I stood listening, absorbing the scene, I imagined my great grandparents walking and working the land. There’s a kind of voice in the voicelessness of the grasslands that speaks of time, endurance, and the strength of perseverance through all kinds of weather and change. The land’s silence fell into me like a pebble dropped into a deep well. Even now, if I go back to that moment in my mind, I feel the ripple effect of standing on that ground in all its solidness, a profound, ancient quiet reaching into my bones, wrapping me in it like a shawl.

Born into an era where many people were small farmers living in remote landscapes with no running water or electricity, life changed for my ancestors with the arrival of telephones, then the radio, and later the automobile with the subsequent development of highways. My grandparents survived the Great Depression, observed the airplane’s invention, and the arrival and departure of two world wars. Small farms and ranches mostly became a thing of the past as the country turned to the use of pesticides, big machinery, and industrial farming. My ancestors experienced the emergence of television, witnessed the moon landing, the rise of women’s rights and civil rights, and the emergence of environmental awareness. Combined together, these changes fundamentally and dramatically altered the way we live and function as a society.

My grandparents and great grandparents’ lives and the communities they were a part of, along with everyone else’s ancestors, helped shape who we became as a nation. Learning more of a place’s history can give us a clearer picture of what in our culture may have been invisible or hidden in shadow so we can make better choices that will affect our future. We don’t live individual lives isolated from the past or from the actions of people across our neighborhoods, cities, country or the world. The way we respond to events and the choices we make or fail to make today in connection with those events shapes our lives now and in the future.

I lived outside of my home country for more than two and a half decades. Each culture taught me different ways of seeing the world that arose out of their history, traditions, and interaction with the land the people inhabited. Returning to the US, I realized there’s a lot to learn about my country’s history that I was unaware of earlier. Writing both Stories We Didn’t Tell and A Space Between helped me see a fuller and more detailed picture of my cultural roots, heritage, and my country’s history. One book that has been especially helpful for me to understand current dynamics and tensions in the US is Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. (You can see a map of the different cultural nations inside of the US map here and hear Woodard talk about some of the main points in his new book on this topic here.) The various values and characteristics of the nations people had previously lived in who first came to what we now call the North American continent, continue to affect us today, explains Woodard. One current example of this tension are those organizations in the US that work to preserve and protect forests such as American Forests, The Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation. “Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. “When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?” A different perspective, however, is taken by the current US administration, (influenced by values prevalent in the area Woodard calls Tidewater and the Deep South.) This month the US president’s administration proposed opening nearly 45 million acres of national forest land across 37 states to commercial logging, mining, and road construction.

Why must the natural beauty of open spaces offer constantly be pushed aside in the name of business and development? Hiking through Sinks Canyon and Crazy Woman Canyon, visiting Devils Tower in Wyoming, driving around the area of the Badlands and through the Needles Highway in South Dakota, would be enough, it seems, to encourage us to answer Kimmerer’s question with a resounding yes, we need a different system, a different way of thinking. These areas are sacred places full of beauty. The entire area evoked in me a continuing sense of awe, the kind I’ve felt when staring up at the night sky sensing my small place in the cosmos. Open landscapes nourish us and help us regain our souls.

In a recent conversation with Bebo Franklin, author of The Harbinger of Elemdale about about the creative process of authoring a book Franklin writes, “The deeper I went into creating characters and understanding why they might behave as they did, the harder it became to reduce people to simply good, bad, broken, etc. They became much more complicated.” Writers create worlds in their books that help us look at the worlds we live in more closely. We might not be authors, but we’re living the stories we write with our lives. We’re flawed people trying to create the story we want to live in together, a life we want to inhabit as well as pass on. Wherever you live and whoever you are, we’re part of the creative process of life on this planet. Our character manifests itself in the place we live and the history we create. What we do ripples out through time to touch the world around us both now and in the future.

We can choose to be intentional about the transformation we bring about within ourselves and the world. We can make a practice of taking time to purposefully notice the natural world and its contribution to our lives. Go into your back yard and spend time with your favorite flower, stroll through a city park listening for birds, drive, bike or walk in some open space your heart calls you to and let that place speak to you. Try one of these fifty seasonal meditations from Emergence Magazine. “What if our metrics for well-being included birdsong, the crescendo of crickets on a summer evening, and neighbors calling to each other across the road?” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. That’s the kind of world I want to live in.