#William Stafford – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky –from “Lament,” Rainer Maria Rilke

Today amidst an atmospheric river and rain’s downpour I’m welcoming the beginning of my life’s new decade. Earlier this month, I traveled in the US Southwest immersing myself in the landscape’s rugged expansiveness, its openness and astonishing beauty. From the Valley of Fire, to Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon to Capitol Reef, and from Goblin Valley to Antelope Canyon, over and over the land astounded me with its astonishing presence and elemental grandeur. Every turn of a path brought amazement. “I could point my camera in any direction, it wouldn’t matter. You can’t take a bad photo here,” remarked one man I met on the path at Bryce Canyon as he turned his camera this way and that. “How true that was, and how many thousand times did I say, “This is incredible!”

The desert is simply itself. It makes sense why in earlier times, people went to the desert for solitude. Indigenous people, Buddhist monks, and the Desert Mothers and Desert Fathers all sought out the desert as a place for reflection, meditation, and transformation. As Ryan Kuja writes in his article, “Desert Spirituality—‘The Place of Great Undoing,” “Metaphorically, the desert is a place of testing and transformation, of being divested of empire and ego.” Desertscapes are enormous reservoirs of silence. After walking for a time on various desert trails, I realized no words could ever adequately describe the land’s vast topography, its sweeping spaciousness, and the dramatic rise of its sheer rock faces. I simply fell silent.

Perhaps silence is the best way to walk through such landscape. Just put one foot in front of the other, let the walking shaking lose the mind’s rambling thoughts and obsessions. Allow the earth to seep up through the feet. Absorb the quiet and subtle shifts of air, and let the earth envelop you in its stillness.

Walking the desert lands, my body recognized why it is the earth is a sacred gift, the miracle it is to be alive and witness its wonder. Great islands of cloud floated above through cerulean skies as I walked over swirling layers of colored sandstone and alongside sedimentary layers of stone and earth formed through many millennia—the earth visually telling me its story of persistent transformation and endurance.

“Landscape is sacramental, to be read as a text,” writes Seamus Heaney. At Zion National Park the sandstone cliffs rise to formidable heights, thousands of feet up with sheer faces that catch morning’s sunrise blush and late afternoon’s glow. The name Zion alludes to the Biblical Zion, a hill in Jerusalem, or Jerusalem itself–a place described as a city of refuge, and by many a holy place. When walking through the park’s canyons and climbing Zion’s hills I felt distinctly aware I was traversing holy ground.

from the Scout Lookout path at Zion National Park, Utah, US

To spend time wandering through the desert’s expansive and pervasive openness is to become aware of one’s smallness and to enter a space of humility and awe. The desert is a good teacher. I noticed people everywhere walking with a sense of expectancy, ready to give a greeting or say a few friendly words, faces open. People were there purposely to find wonder and experience awe. As Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

Looking ahead to the challenges the next decade might bring, or that any decade might bring in anyone’s life for that matter, the desert seems a solid place to go to contemplate one’s purpose and focus. Sitting in a swirl of uplifted sandstone looking across the miles of open earth to distant mountains, I became aware how the land abides by its own principles. The petrified trees in Arizona’s Petrified Forest were once located in a forest just above the equator before Earth’s tectonic plates gradually moved them over a multitude of millennia to where they now sit at 35 degrees north of the equator. Amazingly, the trees turned to stone even before T-Rex walked the earth. Earth erodes, changes and evolves according to rhythms billions of years old. Wind blows. Rain falls. The environment will forever continue to respond and change according to the steadfastness of its internal rules.

Earth is a wondrous place and it’s a phenomenal time to be alive. In the past decade, I lived on three different continents and witnessed amazing diversity in cultures, climates and geography. I don’t know where the current decade will take me, but I can count on the Earth continuing to function on the natural principles that have been there since its foundation. At Antelope Canyon, Arizona, a sacred site for Navajo people, I watched people emerging from the narrow crack in the ground thinking how it seemed as if was a kind of birth. I want to think of this birthday as a birth into a new era of life. I know there’s a lot I still want to learn about the world I live in, how to live in it better, and how to give back to people in a way that reflects their unique beauty and radiance.

In his poem, “Being a Person,” William Stafford writes,
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call.

Life brings unexpected challenges and aging generally takes a great deal of bravery and courage. I notice these qualities in those I know who are in their eighth and ninth decades. They often demonstrate these qualities in their determination to carry out every day tasks such as putting on their clothes when the shoulder joint doesn’t function without great pain, or when going swimming every day year round at 93 years old in order to maintain strength when it’s difficult to hold one’s body up, or when a grandmother daily walks around with an oxygen concentrator so she can continue to spend time with her grandchildren, as well as myriad other examples of fortitude, patience, and resolve the elderly possess.

It’s not a given that suffering must lead to a diminishment of one’s awareness of awe, wonder, or beauty. I respect people like 95 year old Dot Fisher Smith who continues to open to awe and the miracle of being alive, not “ceasing from exploration,” to use T. S. Elliot’s words, even as she knows her physical mobility is diminishing. “I have something to give,” she says in this short film, To Be in Awe, “my light, something ineffable that I don’t know…We’re here to experience the wonder of being in a body.” I wish to live this way into the uncertain decades before me, wish to give gratitude for the mystery and wonder of being alive.

Stafford ends his poem, “Being a Person” saying,

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

I want to say thank you to my parents, family, teachers, friends, collogues, former students, animal friends. Thank you to the earth I stand on, the garden I work to nurture, and to the many places I have visited and passed through. It’s not just Southwestern US that is phenomenal. Earth is phenomenal. Everything is in its own way incredible.

…There is so much beauty
left to see in this world. And I became what I am now to see it.

Timothy Donnelly from his poem, “The Light.”

When researching for my book A Space Between, I learned histories, geographies, and perspectives I was previously unaware of. Though born an American citizen, there are many histories I am unaware of even in my own place of birth. Locations we inhabit today are the crossroads of many histories and people. As Italo Calvino showed in his book, Invisible Cities, the place we live contains many worlds.

Recently, I visited Sturgeon’s Mill in Sonoma County where I observed the mill, in operation a only few days a year, that cut redwoods that provided the lumber for rebuilding houses after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent great fire where over 3,000 people died and 80% of the city was destroyed. To date, that quake remains the deadliest in US history. According to Redwood Ed: A Guide To The Coast Redwoods For Learners and Teachers, in 1905 85-90% of the redwood forests were not yet logged. (You can view several astonishing historical photos of loggers cutting redwoods on this site when scrolling down.) The mill is steam powered, and still operates four weekends a year run by a group of volunteers.

A visit to Sturgeon’s Mill allows observers a glimpse of how redwood was processed into lumber used for building during the era before and after the 1906 San Francisco quake and fire. Old-growth redwood forests store at least three times more carbon above ground than any other forest on earth,” says Altea George. When traveling through San Francisco’s neighborhoods today, however, the disappearance of much of California’s redwoods in the effort to rebuild the city after the quake isn’t something we often think about.

Though the value of preserving forests is better understood now than it was in the last century, following WW2 between 1945 and 1948, sawmills around the Bay Area more than tripled. A further housing boom in the 1960s added to the demand for redwood and fir lumber. “Today over 95% of the original redwood forest area has been logged at least once.”

Redwood stump at Armstrong Woods State Park, California

Our homes today are the result of ideas and products from many origins we’re often not conscious of. As Kamala Harris has stated, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Wherever we go, we carry our histories with us. Our ancestors’ histories and modes of thinking have shaped our lives and way of being in the world. Those living in California’s wider Bay Area still inhabit many houses constructed with redwood taken from forests after the 1906 quake. The quake led to changes in the way commercial buildings are made. Previous to the quake, concrete buildings were thought ugly. Because concrete is an inflexible material, people didn’t want to use it in an earthquake zone. One building that didn’t fall during the quake, the Bekins building , was made of steel reinforced concrete. This observation led to a change in building codes in 1908 influencing the way urban structures are built in cities today.

A California native, I grew up on a hillside strewn with granite boulders and covered with yellow grass. Evenings, I listened to cricket throb and coyotes calling across the valley. Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause tells us, “Every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information.” Not only does the built environment help us understand where we are, the land itself speaks in a way that helps us recognize where we are, and I’ve loved the way the land I was born on has sung its shape into my heart.

I’ve also stood on a red rock resting outside the small town of Wheatland, Wyoming where my mother was born, the plain stretching far into the distance, and sensed its solid presence rise through my feet. Outside Chugwater, Wyoming where my great grandparents and great aunts and uncles lived and worked, I’ve stood in a field between the thick grassy strands of wheat and felt its welcome, touching vicariously the land of my origin though I’ve never lived there.

Driving down roadways, we move with the traffic’s flow, all those around us carrying their own histories and stories. Whitman wrote, “(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” We don’t have to have lived in a place to sense a connection to it. Many homes coexist in us. There’s the home of our native tongue, the home of our way of seeing and thinking, and the home of particular clothes we wear that allow us to feel relaxed. There’s the home of foods that comfort us such as spaghetti, or tom kha gai soup, the home of routines with morning tea or coffee, for example, and the home of habits we follow such as reading the morning news, sitting for a morning meditation, or taking an evening stroll.

We rely on resources from around the world to create homes we live in. What is the value of knowing the history and origins of our way of life that have come together to create a place we call home? I’ve lived in six different countries outside of the US. Each one has left its imprint and came to feel like a kind of home. We can move across the world, to live in or visit a place that has entirely different protocols for how to eat food or negotiate and still can find connections to those around us, to the city, or the natural world. In Vietnam I’ve stood with hundreds of others in Tien Son Cave who lifted their arms with hands outstretched hoping drops of sacred water. In Saudi I’ve shared iftar after Maghrib prayer, and have stood in an empty lot with students in Kuwait, waiting to be cleared after a bomb threat. I’ve worked with fellow divers and a Cambodian family to build house, celebrated the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival with friends in Singapore, and endured torrential rains in the forests on Mt. Kinabalu. I’ve attended weddings in New Delhi, and funerals in the US. I’ve ridden calmly to my destination with thousands of strangers on subways in London and St. Petersburg, been swept along by undersea currents near Palau. I’ve walked through Columbia’s Catedral de Sal de Zipaquirá carved by miners beginning in the fifth century BC, and have stood on the African continent’s southernmost edge and thought of the many ships that sailed past its windy coast whose voyages changed the shape of history. Each experience and countless others have helped me understand that though I was born in a particular place, my actions are part of a greater stream of life. All that has come before me as well as the variety of ways people interact with the world shape what I experience at any one point in time. What we call home is a collective making. Each of us are part of a greater whole. As Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “Past and present and future are not disjointed but joined.” Each of us is a continuation of the past, an embodiment of the present. We hold the future in the way we pass on our thoughts and carryout our actions and intentions.

William Stafford, in his poem, “Being a Person,” writes,

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

Though we are born into a particular place in time and way of thinking, we benefit from expanding our awareness of the worlds and people that create the place we call home. We can renew our lives through choosing to be hospitable to new ideas and ways of being, even seemingly foreign ones. Here’s a few possibilities: Ask relatives about the stories of their lives and the experiences that shaped them. Try taking a new route home or tasting a new food. Listen to a type of music you’re not familiar with. Practice a few phrases in a language you don’t know. Visit an art gallery and read about how that art connects to the thinking of a particular era. Read about the history of your city. Find out the names of plants on your street, which are native to your area and which aren’t. Learn the story of a bridge or building in your area. Have a conversation with someone of a different background, age, or ability level from you. Listen to what they tell you about their lives. Look for new insights and connections. There are many ways to renew and expand our experience of home and to be at home with those around us.

Every day we make use of ideas or rely on inventions passed on to us from elsewhere and previous times. The wheel, the battery, and the telephone–we rely on myriad things that weren’t part of our original human home. Languages borrow words from other languages when there’s no equivalent in one’s own language. For example, the Turkish language has borrowed the word asansör from the French ascenceur (elevator in English) and the Japanese language has borrowed arubaito アルバイトfrom the German word for part-time job arbeit. None of us are the product of a single, unified story. Embracing new words, ideas, and even worlds can enable us to thrive and grow whole.

Lumber mills like Sturgeon’s here in Sonoma County that cut the redwoods that rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 quake changed California’s environment. Ancient redwood forests once occupied 2 million acres. After visiting redwoods near Eureka, California, John Reid in his opinion article “Thinking Long-Term: Why We Should Bring Back Redwood Forests” published on the Yale School of the Environment‘s website writes, “The beginning of the old growth is like a threshold between beauty and magic. The giants make time visible. Which makes me think a thousand years forward. If an entire landscape of this should exist in the year 3023, students of our culture may be tempted to conclude that, in our time, forests were sacred.” We share the world together with our neighbors as well as those across the world. What are your dreams for the kind of home you want to inhabit? Most of us would like to live in a world that is both beautiful and kind. As Stafford says, “this dream you are having matches/ everyone’s dream, and the result is the world…/ How you stand here is important…How you breathe.”

Tag: #William Stafford

Walking in Wonder

Our Many Homes