“And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention.”
(Miller)
“The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (‘But you are home,’ cries the Witch of the North. ‘All you have to do is wake up!’) The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ‘ideas,’ of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions.” (Matthiessen 43)
“It is always lurking there, this emptiness, at the threshold of a journey that will start something. […] Most certainly of all, it obliterates your ambitions, cancels the very reasons for your journey. You know that before long you will once more feel and understand and hope. But at the time there is only emptiness.” (Fletcher 15)
This then, is the story of that sunrise, of that essence, and of journey. And so we begin.
“This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke,
(the opening quote of The Snow Leopard)
In the beginning of the journey is the first awakening. 5:30AM. I awoke to the white ceiling, threw off the blankets, and rolled off the top bunk. Pants. Shirt. Jacket. Grab keys. Stumble out the door to the air. Then eyes open to the predawn air that is fresh, clear, and full of an anticipation of morning, an anticipation shared by myself as I walked, groggily, across the parking lot to my car, but paused to note the graying in the east, and the stars above.
That’s how the journey begins, isn’t it? An awakening of sorts. Thoreau said “the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour,” and, with that, awakening is much more than a physical awakening from sleep, for “to be awake is to be alive” (Thoreau 133-134). And that is what I wanted on that morning, to be alive—that’s why I was going to the firetower with Jane to find the sunrise. Later that day, I would write, “Lately, the daylight has wanted me, so I chased it this morning,” and that was about being alive, the same sort of life that Thoreau sought when he left for the woods (Watson 2009.II, 25 October 2009):
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…” (Thoreau 135)
That desire for life, for feeling alive, is something I have been after for a long time, a quest of sorts that is overwhelming at times, because of the gravity of that desire. To some that desire is an inconsequential and frivolous one, for why seek to be alive when you are alive? Biologically, yes, my cells are reproducing constantly and my body is alive, but what I wanted was to LIVE, which seemed like something so far beyond a biological definition of life.
I had felt alive before, and in waking on that October morning, I remembered those times of feeling alive that had driven me out of bed that morning, for this journey to the firetower to chase the daylight was but a chasing of that feeling of being ALIVE that I had felt before. There was the night in Canada when the sun set over a moose and her baby as they swam across the lake in front of me as the Canadian sunset gave way to the million points of light that characterize the night sky of the deep north woods. There were the northern lights outside of Calgary. There was the night when I watched the lights of the Massachusetts coastline give way to the blackness of the Atlantic on the day I left home for Kenya. There were the sunset piki (dirt bike) rides in the Great Rift Valley among herds of zebra and impala with the wind on my face and the cool air filling my lungs. There was the bus ride across the plains of Tanzania at the foot of Kilimanjaro and that first view of Congo from across Lake Tanganyika. There were the lights of Kigali at night and the feeling of the Rwandan air rushing through our hair on the motorcycles ridden just because we could. There were the stories told and the love exchanged and the songs played to orphans. And then there was Lake Bunyonyi, where I think I truly felt the wind for the first time and stood and watched as the darkness of the storm clouds gathered and came across the mountains and the rain pelted our faces and we sang and prayed and believed that we could be, that we were, ALIVE. I had felt it before, and I was seeking it again in a semester filled with clutter and noise, that awful noise that drives out all true life. The same noise Wendell Berry writes of when he says, “We must turn back into the peopled dark/ Of our unraveling century, the grief/ Of waste, the agony of haste and noise” (Berry, 1979.VII, 14). On that morning, I sought to leave the noise to find life again, and I awoke, and began the journey to look for it in the sunrise.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to LIVE, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”
-Jack Kerouac (emphasis added)
Sewanee, in all its goodness, had become jaded for me. Again, there was a moment of awakening in the journey. No longer only an onlooker in the community, I had become a member of that community, and I was no longer able to turn a blind eye or run away from the darkness I felt and saw. Berry wrestles with this in his essay, “A Native Hill,” as he describes his move from New York City back to his family farm in Kentucky:
“In this awakening there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places I looked on their evils with the curious eye of a traveler; I was not responsible for them; it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long, and I did not feel that I would stay. But here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history.” (Berry, 178)
A first semester sophomore, I had realized that I was here to stay, that Sewanee was now becoming as much a part of me as my other homes have been. On the one hand, I wanted to run and hide in the woods amongst the coves and hollows and ignore the suffering of my classmates and the systemic destructive cycles that are as much a part of the traditions of the place as are those of the Order of the Gownsmen and the Sewanee Angels. I understood and felt in my heart what William Wilberforce said in the awakening that began his journey to end the slave trade in the British Empire:
“I have 10,000 engagements of state today but I would prefer to spend the day out here getting a wet ass, studying dandelions and marveling at… bloody spider’s webs. […] I think God found me. You have any idea how inconvenient that is? How idiotic it will sound? I have a political career glittering ahead of me, and in my heart I want spider’s webs.” (Wilberforce, Amazing Grace).
I felt this tension, and I remember feeling trapped in between the two desires: to look at spiderwebs and to work to effect change with as much love as possible. Berry felt the same tension after returning to live and work in Kentucky, saying, “And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place” (Berry 179). In this tension, I had filled my life with doing, and had forgotten the necessity of being in the place in which I was seeking to be a part of effecting change. Thus, there was the noise, the clutter, and the suffocating feeling that I was losing that life which I had so tirelessly sought.
So we sought the sunrise. I picked Jane up at her dorm, and we drove to the firetower. Later, I wrote about the drive, “This morning the mists hovered above the ground, making the roadway a tunnel as we drove to the firetower for the sunrise” (Watson, I, 19 January 2010). Oftentimes, the awakening, and thereafter the beginning of the journey must be accompanied by the sort of courage that Rilke depicts in the opening quote of The Snow Leopard, courage to re-embrace the senses that have atrophied because of the noise of life—the senses that are necessary to love, to know God, to be ALIVE.
In Walden, Thoreau proposes that the problem with humankind—the problem choking out life—is that “men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and I see that this life of quiet desperation in pursuit of security, comfort, and wealth atrophies the senses so much so that the true “marrow of life” can no longer be seen (Thoreau 50). In order to find the “truth” that he wants more “than love, than money, than fame,” one must live a life of simplicity (Thoreau 379). “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness” (Thoreau 372). Simplicity then, is necessary to get outside the noise and the clutter to see that which is real and good.
And simplicity is what we sought—the simplicity of that first beam of light that pierces the subtle pre-dawn light with the force of a thousand sunrises, infinitely happening every instant around the world, continuously chasing away the shadows with light. Jane and I reached the firetower in the pre-dawn light, and began to climb. The climb, too, is just as much a part of the journey as the awakening, and in the climb is found all the “thorns and thickets of ‘ideas,’ of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions” that prevent us from reaching “the secret place where we have always been”—home (Matthiessen 41).
So we climbed the 10 stories to the top of the firetower, and in the climb between the awakenings at the start and at the end of the journey, before the unbearable beauty at the end of the journey, there is much toil and pain.
“You can feel the muscle knots tightening in your legs
And now and then you reach down to test the hard lumpiness.
The passes get easier and finally you’re just laughing over them.
Every step and every strain and hard breath and heart pump is an investment in tomorrow morning’s strength.”
-Terry Russell in On the Loose
Silently, we completed the climb, and came to the top of the stairs, to the little observation post, where the wind resides as it whistles through the empty panes that were once filled with windows. Breathlessly, we looked out across that expanse of land, the coves, the forest, the ridges in the distance, and the carpet of clouds filling the valley below. We, above all of it, were alone in that space between the earth below and the heavens above waiting in anticipation of the advent of day.
That waiting is also a part of the journey, the waiting between the awakening that made one go, leave, get up and move out to seek life; and the next awakening, when the leaving and the journey come to their realization at the end of the one journey and the start of the other, in the grand journey we’ve called life. Sometimes brief, sometimes maddeningly long, this waiting is those moments in the stillness before the sun peeks over the horizon, in the interims between the awakenings, when the road is long and the traveler cannot be sure why he left home in the first place, or where he is going.
And then: LIGHT.
“My Guide and I crossed over and began to mount that little known and lightless road to ascend into the shining world again.
He first, I second, without thought of rest we climbed the dark until we reached the point where a round opening brought in sight the blest and beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars.
And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.”
-(Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXXIV.136-143)
The final moments of anticipation silenced us, as the rays of light came from behind the wall of clouds behind the ridge in the distance, and the coming sun painted that wall of clouds a deep red. Intuitively, we grew silent as we felt the moment of sunrise coming quickly. We felt something coming; we knew it would happen soon. “Why do we stare at beautiful things? […] We seem to be looking intently, stargazing at something further off and yet more kindred than the stars, but we are not using our physical eyes. […] We are listening. Nature is trying to tell us something; she is speaking to us on a long-distance wave” (Graham 210-211). All around us, within the entire earth there seemed to be a tension in the waiting for the sun which brings light and life and another day, and we felt it.
And then it happened. A pinpoint of white light, that seemed to pierce my soul, moving straight through me and silencing all the noise in that single instant. I, silent in wonder and breathless in this moment that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck heard Jane cry out across the expanse of trees in front of us—a cry of thanks filled with joy and hope. And as the cry echoed across the ridges, it seemed as if the earth was screaming back at us, “You’re welcome!”
There is an unbearable pain in those moments of unbridled beauty. It hurts to see and then feel that sort of beauty, the piercing kind, right through our center. And it hurts because we hear Nature screaming with all her might that there is goodness and light and it is coming, but I think we know it is not here yet, and that we must be a part of its coming. We know that we have yet to find what we feel could be inside of us, that for which we are looking. And these moments of that sort of pain often come with awakenings, when there is a remembrance, or a moment of newfound awareness that will set a new course, or reaffirm an old one—the beginnings of a new journey, or a reminder to return to ones left unfinished.
Later, I would write:
“Love wins. Death and darkness are conquered again. Another day begins as the sun rises.
The sun rises in the east. Beautiful. Clear sky everywhere except the sun rising, and clouds turning all colors. There are so many metaphors in the sunrise, all hopeful. This morning, I thought about the fact that there are infinite sunrises; the sun is always rising somewhere, and I know someone is always watching it somewhere. And it’s a like a reminder that God put here for us to be reminded that there is always light coming somewhere—always good somewhere.
But it’s interesting that it’s key that in order for the sun to always be rising, the sun has to be still, and the earth has to be moving around it. With the metaphor of there always being a sunrise, we can’t be the center. The earth can’t be the center. We are moving around, and there is always light coming somewhere.” (Watson I, April 4, 2010)
Thus, the journey around that sun is where I find myself, in constant flux, always trying, as Matthiessen says, to find my way home. In that sunrise, the search had begun again, the one with “the restless feeling” where “one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home” (Matthiessen 41). It is as Graham states at the end of The Gentle Art of Tramping:
“Even if in small measure the tramp is a pilgrim. His adventure is a spiritual adventure or it is nothing. […] The rude pencilings are erased and the main curve remains, and the curve of your adventure is a broken arc. […] But given the arc the center can be found. We revolve about the sun, but there are planets revolving around a sun invisible to us. Our souls, I suppose, revolve about some invisible spiritual sun which we are always thinking about—a center called God.” (Graham 214, emphasis added)
“But given the arc the center can be found.” The arc, then, allows the center to be seen, and then found; in the journey is the way home to be found. Einstein said “the pursuit of truth is more important than the possession of it,” and I am finding that the process found in the journey is indeed much more important than the ends and the beginnings. This process, however, has often been painful in the confusion of changing ideas, beliefs, and practices. There has always been the emptiness at the beginning of the journey. But the process requires both those changes and that emptiness. In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates says, “The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below.” And that process of changing, continuously moving away from that with which I was brought up has been painful, burning me at times. But in the same process of moving away, I have found that I am, at the same time, moving always backward to those things at the heart of that tradition—things such as love and grace and peace. Just as the forest must burn for new life to begin, so also must things in ourselves be burned away for new life to form.
“Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate: you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all of your life you had been led by the hand by a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and was gone for good.”
-Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago
That center, where we may see “life or truth or beauty” stays with us. “It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched” (Thoreau 264). It has stayed with me, an impression burned into my heart from each of those times I have glimpsed it, those times I have felt ALIVE. And, “the truth, once glimpsed, is always there, gnawing away” (Fletcher 26). The truth that I have seen, time and again, is the truth that in order for the old things in our hearts to be burned away, in order for us to “suck the marrow out of life,” in order for us to glimpse truth and beauty and hope and love, in order for us to be able to feel ALIVE, there must be FREEDOM. And therein lies the center of these broken arcs, and the arcs remain broken, because for so many, there is no FREEDOM, and thus I am not FREE to be fully ALIVE. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said so boldly, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (Letter from a Birmingham Jail). This truth that has been glimpsed stays, gnawing away.
“I believe in the kingdom come/ When all the colors will bleed into one/ Bleed into one, but yes I’m still running.” -U2 in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”
We stayed on that firetower until the last possible second, only allowing enough time to return to school and go straight to class. The drive home was one of exultation, excitement, the burning that comes after an awakening that serves to challenge one to begin anew, or remember the old truths that may have been forgotten in all the noise. For me it was a reminder of the truth in the quote that has led me for the past two years, an Australian aboriginal quote that says, “If you came to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you came because you believe your liberation bound to mine, then let us walk together.” That sunrise, away from all the noise—that sunrise of painful beauty and clarity was a gift from that firetower and the earth to us, for “when you give yourself to places, they give yourself back” (Solnit 13).
So, after giving ourselves to that sunrise, and being given ourselves back in return, we drove away from the rising sun, back to the noise and clutter which we would now approach differently. With the awakenings in our minds we listened as the singer sang, “The shadows prove the sunshine,” and we felt the truth of that deep within our souls. Return, and be ALIVE. FIGHT for the FREEDOM of those who have none, so that we all may be FREE to LIVE.
That then, was the first firetower sunrise.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Ciardi, John. New York: New American Library, 2003.
Amazing Grace. Dir. Michael Apted. Perfs. Ioan Gruffudd, Romola Garai. Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2006.
Berry, Wendell. “A Native Hill.” The Long-Legged House.
Berry, Wendell. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998.
Fletcher, Colin. The Man Who Walked Through Time. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Graham, Stephen. The Gentle Art of Tramping. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926.
Mattheissen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Miller, Donald. Through Painted Deserts: Life, God, and Beauty on the Open Road. Colorado Springs: Nelson, 2005.
Russell, Renny and Russell, Terry. On The Loose. New York: Sierra Club and Ballantine, 1971.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Watson, William B. I. Personal Journal. Easter Semester 2010.
Photographs
Watson, William B. Firetower Sunrise. October 25, 2009.
1 comment:
Beautiful, beautiful, with quotes from several of my favorite books. Well done, Will. Well experienced.
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