Montana Night

         

I arrived in Missoula afraid of the ghosts of last year. "This time last year," my mind chanted, I had mourned with my family the passing of a loved one. At the same time I had laid to rest parts of myself, and in their burial they made room for a new tide of uncertainty, fear, and sorrow.

I battled with this memory, even as I breathed in the Montana night. I didn't want to be back where I had been, and I frantically rifled through the past ten months; the shattered start, the sanctuary tucked in the blue hills, the salvation I found in dirt between my fingers, a garden in my belly, and the southern sun overhead.

I held them up, like evidence.

Don't these matter?! I yelled.

The Montana night only chuckled, and pulled me closer.

Now I stand on the other side of this perplexing orbit, knowing that my concerns were not unfounded. In some uncanny ways I have repeated this time last year. Every season is very alike its twins on the other side of the bulk that lies between, though we may try to make it different by clinging to this bulk, by waving around the linear narratives of our personal progress.

A book has come to me recently that helps put this conflict in context. The author, Paul Shepard, comforts me when he points out our "timeless instinctual compulsion to repeat" - and he doesn't just mean what it feels like to be a puppet in the hands of the holiday season.

He means that we as humans - who we are on a physical and psychological level, who we are before the modern environment confuses us with history and civilization - are beings with an innate sense of the cycles of nature.

This means that we are not just vibrantly aware of death returning, of winter descending, of our own inescapable habits. We are also aware of birth returning, of redemption and renewal. We have the patience to await it, the forgiveness to see ourselves through, and the joy to celebrate when it happens, as we knew it would.

That is what this Montana night has taught me.

In the midst of a cycle I felt helpless to stop, I found assertions of change and growth that are real and redemptive. Each new truth discovered has enough weight to tilt the balance and send my wheel of time spiraling on.

Speaking of wheels, my next bicycle adventure is arriving! This one promises Spanish moss, ocean breezes, and a happily anticipated stop at the Florida Earth Skills Gathering. More on this later...

And, lastly, to the tune of said holiday season, check out these earrings I made from that greasy old bike chain:

And pendants from my derailler:

That book I mentioned:

Shepard, Paul. 1998. Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Ed. Florence Shepard. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.