Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  The other woman was someone I seemed to be living with but who had taken on the persona of one of my new urban-rural friends from just before and after Peter’s death. She didn’t look much like the real woman, was dressed in light grey slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, and wore her perfectly smooth pale blonde hair in a sophisticated French twist, a style the real woman would never have worn. I never saw her face, just that perfect, gleaming hair, but she was directing and helping me with the flood of water that was spreading and spreading from the hidden source that we were trying to find. I felt no grief, fear, or panic in the dream, just mild concern because the rug was getting soaked, although we couldn’t see the water on the floor until we stepped in it and it soaked our shoes and rose ankle-high. Awake, I struggled to remember where I had seen that rug that I felt was one I knew intimately. Then I remembered that it was the one Peter and I put down in our bedroom in the ranch house, as one of the very first tasks we did together in the first months of our marriage.

  As it happens, the dream insisted that the other woman was Scandinavian, and I knew that would make the centre pole Yggdrasill (pronounced “ig’-druh-sill”), the holy tree, the world tree of Norse legend. On waking, I had some vague memory of having heard of this legend, but I knew none of the details. Years before I had bought a copy of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings, and now I searched my bookshelves until I located it stuffed between Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By and Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, none of which I’d looked at in years.

  Yggdrasill, the book on Norse myths said, is the tree that “shelters all creation,” whose branches reach into the heavens and beyond. It has three great roots extending deep down into the earth, ending no one knows where. Under the first root is a spring called Hvergelmir, where a dragon gnaws corpses and does evil against the tree; under the second root “flow[s] the well of Urd, the spring of destiny,” and nearby live the three maiden goddesses, or Norns: Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld (Fate, Being, and Necessity). The third root goes into the realm of the frost giants and under it is a spring guarded by “wise Mimir,” “and the water in that well gave insight to those who tasted it. . . . Odin had given one eye for a single draught from it. He won immense knowledge there and with it the thirst for yet greater wisdom.”

  The dream seemed to be that last, fitting comment that I was waiting for, telling me as it did that I had had the fullest possible life all those years that I lived in the wilds of the country among the cattle and horses, the birds and animals, the wind, the grass, and the stars.

  And yet, I don’t think that my path, strange as it might have been (although I think it is closer to commonplace), is necessarily the right one for every woman left in late mid-life to make her own way in the world, alone, lonely, and dealing with the deepest grief. I don’t want to set myself up as an example to be followed; life is not like that. But sometimes on the streets I see women, strangers I guess to be about my age, walking by and I see something missing from their faces and their eyes that is more than the effect of growing old. Granted, immense sadness, loneliness, and also age fade our faces and melt and dissolve our once svelte lines. But this absence I’ve seen seems to me to be caused by the flickering light of a spirit going out.

  I believe that once you find yourself — your real self — still there inside that old-woman exterior, and you begin to see yourself as alive and, indeed, as worthy of a life, a real life (instead of living in a steady state only as a person nearing death), that drabness will slowly disappear as the spirit flares up again. Grief has its own timetable; grief requires from the sufferer, besides its measure of misery that must be endured, careful, wide-ranging, and intense thought both about the sufferer’s life, and life itself. Grief’s claws grasp deep and cling; it is only the face that, eventually, turns toward things-as-they-are-now, and the future, that can cause those claws to release.

  But no one knows better than I how hard it is to do that, and how much courage, indeed, as James Hillman has written in The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, how much pure force of character it takes.

  8

  The Gift

  It had been determined by fate that I would not live in a house again, but only in rented apartments or condos because I could not handle cutting the grass; managing the trees, flower beds, and decorative shrubs; or, in winter, shoveling the snow or breaking the sidewalk ice, or fixing eaves troughs or roof shingles, and I already knew from life on the land that getting somebody to do the work would be harder than doing it myself. I would never again even be able to open a normal, ordinary door onto a backyard with a lawn and a lawn chair; I would not again grow a vegetable garden, or plant a flower bed, nor would I ever again be able to wander the prairie at will, go in any direction that appealed to me, or find Aboriginal artifacts or features, or routinely see wild animals from my kitchen window. From now on my connection to nature would be only in my strolls on asphalt paths through manicured parks with hundreds of others strolling the same paths at the same time. Or so I thought.

  Once arrived in the city, I had also thought that I would spend my usual walking-in-nature time in the vast Nose Hill Park, a wild prairie park of historical significance, with features going back to pre-contact times — it is the very large grassy hill visitors can see from the windows of their plane as they land or take off — the obvious place for me to recover some of what I’d lost in terms of being in the wild. But, as it turned out, Nose Hill Park was miles from where I lived, and could only be reached on the city’s system of freeways and major feeder roads, roads I simply was not ready to drive at the time. I looked longingly at it whenever I was at the airport but have walked it only twice in eight years, with people who wanted to walk it with me. Instead, I got out the city map and found the large parks near where I lived.

  I was surprised to see how wild they were. One of them, Fish Creek Park, has Fish Creek, a mountain stream, flowing through it, which is in some seasons dangerously wide and fast. During the great flood of 2013 it gouged out sections of the paved walking paths and knocked out not only trees but the smaller footbridges, not to mention picnic sites and playgrounds. In other seasons it is reduced to placid pools connected only by a thread of water. One day, as I was walking down a path, an ambulance or police siren went off somewhere in the near distance, and suddenly the woods around me set up an answering howl, and I realized to my amazement that they were full of coyotes.

  The other park I began to walk in runs around the city’s reservoir, created in 1932 by the damming of the Elbow River to provide a water supply for the city. Part of the park is called the Weaselhead Natural Area (after a Native leader), and includes a long, more or less circular looping trail that, near where I live, runs from just behind Rockyview Hospital, then through a residential neighbourhood, and next, an outdoor shopping centre. Along this section the path is nearly always busy with people, and it is tame — except for the time I came up the path at the back of the shopping centre and in the midst of dozens of placid strollers a buck deer with a magnificent rack stood there, head up, looking both startled and bewildered as we all gave him a wide berth. Farther west, though, except on the very best summer days, the number of walkers thins and the path goes for a few kilometres through forest and into an area where there is a long, high bridge that crosses the Elbow River and a beautiful, wet, and green wild area.

  One day my son, running there at the extreme western boundary of the park, saw a mother bear with two cubs break out of the woods on one side of the path and cross just ahead of him to disappear into the woods on the other side. Another day, as I walked down near the water’s edge, I came within an inch of putting my foot down in a pile of berry-pit-laden fresh bear scat. Every once in a while a bear will invade the neighbourhoods adjacent to the park, and parks and animal protection people along with the police and/or fire department will have to come out and spend a couple of hours trying to corral the bear, usually getting it first down from a tree, before tra
nquillizing it and taking it into the backcountry.

  I suppose a committed ecologist would have to say that the Weaselhead is a degraded wilderness, because in the part in which most people walk, there have been a few incursions by “tame” plants: caraganas have moved in, as well as some versions of flowering plants that must have come from the nearby neighbourhoods, and studying assiduously one small area off the path, I realized that it had once been a homesteading site. Still, do the animals care if the tree that gives them shelter was imported from the Russian steppes or was native to the area? And the weary sunstruck walker is happy to rest in the shade of a non-native tree.

  To be fair, I once came upon members of the parks’ staff in a small field digging out a stand of plants they knew would do damage to the area’s native biodiversity. I am all for trying to preserve a pristine wilderness — don’t mistake me about that — but a less-than-perfect wilderness can be most valuable too. I see it as an improvement over a park with mown grass, carefully sown flower beds, and a clump of trees planted for an aesthetically pleasing effect. Not that there isn’t a place for that kind of park, or even that I don’t enjoy one — I love them too — but I tell myself, this is Calgary in the New World, it is not Versailles.

  Calgarians often say — it is an article of faith here — that the best thing about living in the city is how close you are to nature, usually meaning the mountain parks, of which the first is Banff, only an hour or so away. They pay less attention to the parks I’m writing about, that have brought me such pleasure. Yet I am sure I’m not the only park walker who sometimes gazes with longing eyes across the chain-link fence mostly hidden by foliage and tall grass to the meadows and rising treed blue-green hills on the other side where First Nations people, the Tsuu T’ina, have their reserve, a place that looks as if little of it has been despoiled. Nonetheless, heading west on the Weaselhead each day, I am walking toward the mountains that rise along the skyline, snow-peaked, or purple and blue, rugged, wild, and stirring up that endless yearning of the human for the true wildness and purity that we all crave.

  One day, in my loneliness, I paused in my walk to lean against a conifer tree that had grown about a foot from the path and that had no bushes surrounding it, so that I had only to step to the right and put my head and shoulder against it, while I sighed like a lovesick character in an Elizabethan drama, lost utterly, for that moment, in my sadness. The tree trunk was only about a foot in diameter and for a conifer not tall, not more than maybe twelve feet high, so a young tree. We stood there, the tree and I, in perfect silence. I cannot recall my thoughts, but I straightened and stepped away, about a foot from the trunk, but so that I was still under the branches. Suddenly, a pine cone fell and hit me smack on the top of my head. I am sure I laughed, feeling that the tree was acknowledging my presence. Then another cone fell, and another, then two or three more at the same time, and then, as I stood there in surprise and pleasure, the tree shed around me its entire load of cones. It was like standing under a waterfall as the cones fell all around me, dropping without much speed, ceaselessly, gently, none of them now touching me in their downward passage. I stood motionless until the last cone had hit the asphalt path; I could hardly move for wonder.

  As I know that most of the world doesn’t believe that such things happen — that is, a tree communing with a human — I decided to ask if it was standard practice for such a tree to drop all its cones at once. Nobody I asked knew; the “experts” seemed surprised by the question, as if it hadn’t occurred to them to wonder how long it took a single tree to shed its cones. Weeks? Months? Days? Hours? But all at once? I gave up asking. It was then that I began to believe that nature is as much itself in the city as it is in the place I’d come from, miles from the nearest residence.

  On another occasion, in a different park, when again I was alone and the path was otherwise empty of people, three snakes crossed in front of me. They were just garter snakes of differing sizes, but I had never seen so much as a hint of a snake in that park before, although, of course, I knew that they had to be there somewhere. And so when the first one came gliding out of the undergrowth I took note, a sort of hmm! And then the second one, and then the third a few feet farther on, and I thought, either it is the time of day (about five p.m.) and they are going for water, or I am seeing things. I try not to let the mind-set of the scientifically oriented taint my own worldview, as if there has to be an explanation for everything. Is there a mind in nature, a consciousness, even a purposefulness? Is there no such thing as a soul?

  The contemporary German philosopher Georg Misch wrote that when people “find themselves not congruent with the cultures they live in, they seek to regain the harmony and inner tranquility of a right relationship with nature and the spiritual world.” The older I get, the more I think about my own life, the more I think Misch’s statement is a final truth. It was certainly true of my life on the grasslands when I was Peter’s wife and found that I could not easily make my way into the lives of the local women, and I began to wonder if I was to blame for this.

  I understand now that my need for solitude to write was part of what caused this to happen. I am often surprised by people who think they live solitary lives, but who seem to me to not know what real solitude is. Solitude is when year after year nobody, or almost nobody, drops in just to see you. Settler women without children knew this kind of solitude, isolated as they were on homesteads far from neighbours or villages. I’ve come to accept my need for solitude in itself as part of my nature. More and more I notice how urban writers and artists seem to be intent on experiencing that kind of true solitude by making arrangements to go into a cabin in the woods and stay there all alone for a week or a month, or who seek solitude through religious retreats and living in religious communities. These people go into nature by choice, knowing instinctively that it is in nature that the human can best find herself. I think that the two are interwoven in the search for a quiet soul and for spiritual answers: solitude and nature. During my walks on the prairie, I struggled hard to find my authentic self, the real self, the one that I had had, perhaps, from before my birth. One of the effects of this determination to find some kind of rock-bottom certainty, which apparently couldn’t be found in the cultural institutions of the “real” world, was to give myself permission in that daily walking in nature, to let my intuition take the lead.

  What is intuition? It seems mostly to suddenly strike us without any volition on our part. Intuition is light, nearly weightless, at least it is for me. It involves listening to your inner world, after you have subdued the steady, omnipresent mutter of consciousness, so that the urges of intuition have room to come forward and be noticed. It takes courage, too, to follow those urges, to slow your thinking down. There is little room for science in intuition: Intuition admits of no explanation. But it also allows your self-awareness to come forward. And it can mollify grief.

  What I listen for is not the music of birds, not the susurration of leaves, or the wind in the branches; I am listening for spirit. Mostly I don’t hear it. What it is is a returning attention to me, not a sound, never anything I can see, not a voice. It is, simply, Attention. With it is a waiting, as if whatever is attending to me and my desire to connect with it is waiting for me to speak in some meaningful way, although I never have anything to say. I suppose I could ask, Who are you? But I wouldn’t expect an answer, and I’m sure I wouldn’t get one anyway. Yesterday, walking, I thought that it is almost enough just to know it is sometimes there; that its mere presence is reassuring.

  But an understanding that I had been mulling over for years came flooding through me, as if that very spirit had been waiting for the right moment to let me know: I understood, finally, that indeed a life in nature is the better one, the more natural one, the one that allows us more easily to be fully human, and to find our humanity. It was a clear and irrevocable understanding. Yet in the next instant, I saw again the theatres, the concert halls, the cathedrals, the universities, the va
st possibilities for the companionship of, conversations with, like-minded people. This time, the urban values fell into their rightful place. They became secondary to the force of a life lived mindfully in nature. And yet, I and most of the world remain in cities; for most of us there isn’t a choice. And a life lived in nature is always, at some time, a lonely one. Humans also need companionship of their own kind, just as they need cultural activities to help the soul grow.

  One sunny quiet September day in Calgary as I walked on a path just above the water’s edge, I came to a place where a thin screen of trees between me and the reservoir had opened so that I was looking out at the sun-dazzled water as if through a picture frame made of yellow and green cottonwood leaves. I was filled with sheer pleasure at the beauty I was looking at. I walked on two or three steps, and in one of those moments of lightness when intuition takes over and the brain loses control, without even hesitating I stopped and backed up those same two or three steps, not taking my eyes off the water, and then, in the middle of the leafy frame, a fish jumped. A large fish, spraying an arc of brilliant water and vanishing soundlessly in less than a second.

  Never in five years of almost daily gazing out at the reservoir had I ever seen a fish jump. I didn’t really believe there were fish in it, even though I often passed fishermen. I kept on walking, thinking that as soon as I saw a fisherman I would ask him what kind of a fish that was. But all the fishermen were busy, or were behind a thicker stand of trees, or too far down at the water’s edge. Finally, on a bend where I had never before seen anyone fishing, a tall, slender, youngish man stood reeling in his line. I stopped, excused myself for disturbing him, and asked him what kind of a fish would jump.