Attentive to Joy

But whoever is joined with all the living has hope… Ecclesiastes 9:4a

We shall all, in the end, 

be led to where we belong.

We shall all, in the end,

find our way home.    

From The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo

Telling stories is integral to listening to our lives. We make sense of some aspect of living in other peoples’ stories we read.  Months ago in the little library on Sea Ridge Drive —those side of the road libraries are another thing to love about Victoria– I discovered The Perfection of the Morning. Subtitled “An Apprenticeship in Nature,” Sharon Butala’s memoir is the story of how she “felt as if [her] soul had found a home” in a place she didn’t seem to belong.  

Early in the book, Sharon mentions that books just seemed to come to her.  Maybe that is true for her book and me.  Five years ago at an unlikely time in our lives, we moved to Victoria, British Columbia, from the Southeastern United States. Moving from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to this island in the Pacific Northwest made possible a tangible new view of the world. 

A world away from my view from Vancouver Island, Sharon ButaIa lived in the Western Canadian Province of Saskatchewan. She considered herself a city girl from Saskatoon, the largest city in the Province, population around 300,000. In her 30’s she married a second time and moved to the isolated ranch-land in southwestern Saskatchewan, a place she never even knew existed. 

In awe of that extreme landscape and the loneliness to find social footing among the rural society, she came to realize how her life was informed and shaped by Nature in ways she couldn’t have consciously imagined. Sharon explained to a reporter that her husband, a true rural man, “understood the world in terms of wild things.” People and place form complex relationships.

So what would I say about my relationships of belonging in the world?   I asked my husband Mitch for his perspective and I immediately sensed our answers would be in parallel universes.  We read the same newspaper, sometimes the same books, walk down the same streets, live in the same house and neighbourhood; but how we see, how we feel, and what we remember are not always the same.  

Perhaps, the gift of The Perfection of the Morning is that I looked back at how place has shaped and informed my life in ways I hadn’t exactly noticed.  I have a sensory memory of walking with my Grandma Hollis along tree-lined River Road where she lived. I feel the majestic trees and mischievous squirrels and, yet, have no memory of the Wabash River that flowed alongside where we walked.  I remember the biggest snowman, snow angels, snow forts, and my mom’s insistence that we play outside in every kind of weather. I was awestruck by cornfields of fireflies and suspicious of Bishop’s Wood’s briars and dark shadows.  And as I grew older, there have always been trees: almost perfect oak trees, tall pines, a lone thorny locust, and friendlier hardwood forests.  

The places I live are more than a mere background to my life.  For me, it has not been one place that is part of me and I am part of it— all the places I’ve been have taught me and become part of the geography of me.

My reading of Sharon’s memoir became a prayer of gratitude for the landscape of the Pacific Northwest where I, too, came unknowingly.  I have discovered a relationship, as Butala writes, “in a place where words stop” alongside the Salish Sea, Arbutus and Garry Oaks, and massive rock full of life. Finding The Perfection of The Morning opened a door to view how place shapes and sustains me.  

Sharon Butala reflects on the turn in her relationship with the prairies,

Now when I looked out over the rolling hills and grassy plains I began to see, in place of emptiness, presence; I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one; a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension.

Is it possible that my longing to belong— the settledness that has eluded me over my life— has gradually been found in the landscapes that have sheltered me along the way? These relationships transcend whatever place I am physically part of and also weld me to the natural home of the created, the dwelling place that is larger than one city or region or country.  How is it possible to belong not only to the visible landscape but to belong to the places of awe and wonder and humility where words stop?

Perhaps, as Sharon Butala reflects, “I’d been missing something from my understanding of the world and this new understanding involved more than other people and more than my intellect, but was also physical, somatic, an intermingling place and person.”  I have experienced a shift that comes by living into imperceptible insight.  Perhaps, instead of searching to belong, I live in the present, paying attention to what is— that can be seen and unseen— and leave room for what I cannot explain. 

In his book of meditations, Places Along the Way, Martin Marty reflects on the story in Genesis 46-47 of Joseph’s brothers move to Egypt.  The land of Goshen, “the best part of the land” was a place that promised hospitality to Jacob and his sons who considered themselves aliens in the new land. Marty writes that Goshen is still here for us: a place of refuge in beautiful surroundings.  He warns that we would do well not to get attached to any place connected with human promise. We are to enjoy our surroundings without thinking of them as lasting.

Perhaps, Victoria is a “Goshen” for me: a beautiful place where we have more than been provided for, another respite along the way?  

That is what I cannot know.  I do know that this place of welcome, of challenge, of lessons, of fresh breath keeps us as we experience the invisible landscape that is beyond words.

Arbutus Trees in Saxe Point Park