Pop 89: The Subtle World

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

When looking for solace in the subtle land.

We all have the earth in common. The land called the settlers to her, away from the noisy industrialized cities, writes Sheri Mitchell in Sacred Instructions. “The newcomers believed it as manifest destiny. But they were mistaken. It was something much deeper calling them to these lands, an ancient impulse was guiding them back to what they had lost.” The settler was not meant to conquer but to “seek healing” from the deeply entrenched “illusion of separation. They had lost their connection to the impulse of life and their understanding of the web that ties all life together.”

North Americans, from the beginning and all the way back beyond the smokes stacks of the early American Empire to the rusty chassis of Michigan to the crusty alkaline sloughs of Saskatchewan, had a chance to live a life of harmony with all creation. They were shown early, through the example of the Iroquois Confederacy, the ways of democracy. But it decided to go solo.

Today we think the web that ties all life together is the worldwide web, the internet. Writers like Robert Macfarlane (Underland) and Richard Powers (Overstory) prefer the term Wood Wide Web to redirect us into our longing for a connection to nature. The term was coined by Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, leader of the Mother Tree Project. She’s helping the world understand how trees communicate and cooperate through a subterranean network of fungi. She’s shifted the way we understand the web that literally, not virtually, ties us together.

The glacial pace of sunset as I stare down into the valley is another way to get back to subtlety. People who call the prairie bleak and bald have never spent time here. They speed through Manitoba and Saskatchewan and don’t slow down until they get to the Rockies. They are oblivious to the clouds that dominate nine-tenths of the view, in their constant state of change, now a whale, now a continent, now a feather headdress, now a feather boa. Clouds are an ongoing Rorschach test.

A friend visiting says it’s all fine, but he prefers the ocean. But this is the ocean, I say, you’re looking at it. Just without the water. It’s the bottom of the Bear Paw Sea.

A child, let loose out a car, under this sky, will make a break for it. That’s what happened to my neighbour who moved here from Ontario as soon as she left home. As a kid, on holiday from Toronto with her family, she demanded her father stop the car somewhere after Regina, and she bolted. She laughed as she recounted the story. I ran laughing and laughing, she said. Until my parents laughed too.

The blues singer Colin James was born out here. In an interview I did with him about a song that was derived from a bus trip with his mom across the Prairies, in the days when cross-country trips on buses still were a thing. If you’re not moved by a prairie sky, you have no soul, he said.

It’s misleading and dangerous to think there is nothing going on out here. Once, heading south, on my way home from Swift Current, passing through Cadillac, a big dog lumbered onto the road from behind the Husky station. He stood in front of my car and would not budge. He didn’t bark. He didn’t wag his tail. He just looked at me, like a tired doorman at a club. I smiled at him. I’m in no hurry, either, I thought. A tumbleweed blew by. Then another gust of wind blew dust around the car.

Ok, pal, time to move, I decided after a few minutes. That’s when, out of nowhere, came a train. Out of nowhere, I say, because there are no lights, no lowered barrier in Cadillac. And in my eight years here, it’s the first time anything ever came down that track. So I never look. I would never have noticed it edging along.

The train passes through Cadillac. The dog lumbers back home. Not only have I never seen the dog since. The old guys around here are not prone to believing in supernatural occurrences. They believe all pets are meant to live outdoors, in the extremes of prairie weather, minus 51 or plus 42. But they all say: Yep, that dog was looking out for you. Animals have their ear to the ground. They pick up on subtle cues.

People come here to time travel back into the silence and the darkness. People learn to take forever to tell a story. Of course, the silence is not total silence - it’s the silence that courts owls and coyotes and deafening thunder and howling wind and the dam racket of birds at 3 am in the summer. And the darkness is not darkness but a sky full of a frightening eternity of stars and a giant rising moon.

Slow is doing things with attention so that it doesn’t have to be done over and over and so that you don’t have to turn back and get the things you forgot. Slowest is fastest, in the end. We used to sell a -shirt at the museum that said: We may not have wifi, but we guarantee an even better connection. Won’t be re-ordering any more of those, I mumbled when hi-speed internet hit the village.

With all that’s happening in the world I spend too much time on the internet. But with Spring finally here and the birds starting to form another seasonal choir and the owls calling back and forth, I spend more time in the golden light of the longer days. Because I’m not helping anyone by watching hour after hour of damage done by bombing raids. My measured steps, one foot after the other landing on the ground, reciting repeated prayers may be subtle, but surely it’s better than adding to all the fear in the world.

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