Across a devastated desert landscape, Tayo’s psychic journey weaves over mesas, into canyons and caves and through uranium dumps. Tayo is a WWII vet who returns to his New Mexico pueblo, ruined by modern existence and war. If you don’t know Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, you should find this classic. The physical and moral stakes are high in all. As in all great journey literature of the past (think The Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings), the travelers in these books must all navigate landscapes and mindscape through confusion, despair, rage mixed with love, elation and terror in order to live. You’ll notice that many of these books, like mine, center around orphans, widows and widowers, the abandoned, the dazed, the shunned, the outcast, and lots of women folk. But the excellent fictions I’ve listed here were even more helpful to me in how they explored internal wildernesses, mappings of psychic and spiritual paths from Lostness to (some kind of) physical, moral or existential Foundness. I walk alone in remote desert canyons every day now, mountain lions certainly-sometimes looking on from cliffs, bears in Alaska before that when cell phones weren’t a thing. I’ve lived in very wild places for most of my adult life. In these novels, you’ll find people like us-in a weird world-figuring how to survive, how to get back to the mountains, and what it means to be human.These books were, of course, useful to me in thinking more deeply about landscape, the cold-hot-hungry-thirsty smallness-of-self realizations that actual wilderness imposes. I knew some of this already. In the spirit of the holiday season, I’d like to share a few gift ideas to help your loved ones get out of the 2020 funk and into something meaningful. It also helps for us to read stories from around the world to understand how others are dealing with similar issues, often experiencing even greater impacts and losses than us. Authors have the unique ability to weave stories about loss and despair with characters who light candles in the darkness, which gives us courage and fearlessness. These stories are steeped in weird, contemporary, cultural, mythological, fantastical, science-based, and other realms, but they share a common connection: they reach our hearts and inspire us to think and act more strongly about issues such as climate change, species extinction, natural resource extraction, dwindling biodiversity, and other changes that aren’t healthy for life on Earth. A burgeoning literary field of ecologically oriented fiction connects us with our natural world, reminding us how humans are part of ecosystems. As a bonus, many stories take us into the mountains and refresh our senses. I realized that what might help us cope during traumatic times is some sort of continuity, and we haven’t lost that in storytelling. So I read fiction and think I hit a record number of books this year. Sometimes this year I couldn’t simply run to the nearest forest trail-what with moving to snowy Nova Scotia and self-isolating for weeks. John Muir said, “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home that wilderness is a necessity.” Still true over a century later, I’ve turned to this phrase often during hard times and more often during 2020, which turned out to be one of the most challenging, strange years ever in my relatively short time here on Earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |