My heart is full! It tends to be leaky, so getting a fill-up is always a good thing. Thanks to a dear friend, I was treated to a night of wildly diverse piano music, played on 10 grand pianos by up to a dozen musicians at once! One piece jumped out and grabbed me, resonating with memories of visits to northeastern Arizona. It was written by Navajo pianist and composer Connor Chee.
There is other music that can do this to me. For me. Uilleann pipes evoke Ireland’s hilly pastures, woods and streams. Bluegrass banjo takes me right up into an Appalachian forest and sets me down by a creek. Or maybe on someone’s porch, with a couple of friends.
The first time I noticed this meld of landscape and music was on a drive across the layered buttes and red washes of Utah and Wyoming listening to Native American flute: “A wet finger of flute on the crystal rim of sky,” I later described it.
Landscape exerts a powerful force in me. Recently, I rode the train from Portland to Seattle with my notebook and a few other writers.
The windows revealed the landscape we were passing through even as they separated us from it. The breeze in the trees was visible, but I could neither smell nor feel it. Rain wet their limbs, not mine.
Winter marsh: ice gone, mud abundant. Pale washes of color hint at buds swelling on trees adapted to the seasonal ponds they took root in. Though spring had arrived on the calendar, it was but a rumor along these western reaches of the Columbia River.
Planning for the daylong excursion, I’d dithered: Use the time start exploring a new essay? Or try to find inspiration for a new Mama Ephemera’s Muddy Feet post? What would come of the hours? (Would anything come?)
I decided, in a rare departure from my usual style, to simply open to the experience and not drive my pen so determinedly. To breathe.
A river as large as the Columbia—its mouth is six miles wide—bestows abundant backwaters upon the land along its lower reaches. Bays and side channels, sloughs and ponds. Wetlands of every shape and depth—not to mention rate of flushing. Some of this water never moves, reflecting saplings and sky till summer’s drought cracks the muddy bottom. Some water never stops moving, like in the main channel where ancient white sturgeon hunt the current’s bounty.
As I relaxed into the rhythm of the rails carrying us through this riparian zone, I noticed a physical sensation that I can only describe as a settling within myself. Like something that had filled my interstitial spaces, holding different parts of self away from each other, was filtering up and out, and those parts were connecting with each other. (I kept thinking of cereal boxes: “Some settling of contents may occur during handling and shipping.”)
What is it that fills my sloughs, holding my banks apart from themselves? As the train picks up speed it becomes easier to let go of expectations: for writing this or that composition. For writing anything. I release them to the waters.
Expectations take up a lot of space inside the container of a self, as it turns out, and letting go of them reduces the pressure they exert, so parts of myself can knock into each other (so it felt), sparking a frisson of delight.
We cross enough bridges to reveal that they, too, have a rhythm: No matter how short a bridge, upon reaching the far shore, the air in my next breath seems to effervesce with fresh energy. Maybe even anticipation.
But wait: Both anticipation and expectation look forward. Are they parallel tracks, like these rails? Or can one strengthen and override the other?
I conclude that anticipation looks forward to taking in encounter or experience, free from expectation’s burden of putting out a level of performance or achievement. Inhale. Exhale. Breathe.
At Longview/Kelso, the Columbia turns back to the west, its merge with the Pacific Ocean delayed long enough. We continue northbound, though not riverless for long: just out of the station, exiting a brief tunnel, the Cowlitz River greets us. Its banks sprout piles of gray ash, from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens (see my last post, “Wildnesses”). The Cowlitz and Toutle Rivers, even the Columbia, choked on pulverized mountain. Opening their channels, freeing their flow, meant hauling away blasted trees and bulldozing piles of silty ash from the river bed
Beyond the riverbanks, cattle and ponies graze in pastures whose scars have long since grown over. Fire, windstorm, flood and draught have continued shaping and coloring the land. Here and there an ash pile is bare of colonizing grasses, suggesting more recent dredging of a shifting channel.
These lower-elevation trees—cottonwood, bigleaf maple, alder, birch and ash—remain bare of leaves, revealing their ominous freight of lichen and moss. Many groves are so thoroughly colonized their skeletal forms are a ghostly gray-green.
The history written on this landscape is so absorbing I can hardly look away to catch my thoughts in the net of the page before they are gone—like the Toutle, which has curved eastward toward its origin on the slopes of a volcano.
I open a book of poetry: Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved, by Gregory Orr (mentioned earlier in “One if by Lyric, Two if by Tree”). It is both profound and magical, and I’m grateful it hopped into my bag. The poems throughout the book hold hands with one another to make one mighty poem (every poet’s aspiration).
When Sappho wrote: “Whatever one loves most Is beautiful,” she began The poems of heart’s praise That comprise the Book Of the body of the beloved Which is the world. Everything in the Book Flows from that single poem Or the countless others That say the same thing In other words, other ways.
“Whatever one loves most / Is beautiful,”1 recalls to me Barry Lopez’s charge2 (quoted in “A Silver Box of a Planet”):
“It is more important now to be in love than to be in power … to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.”
Just a few pages further along in Orr’s book, still pondering his poem, I discover what I am doing here (if I can add “prose” after “poems”). He names river, tree, bird and heart, each with their songs, but:
…It’s still up to us. We’re supposed to bring Them into the Book, Make a place for them in our poems
This3 is followed by (all are untitled):4
The world comes into the poem, The poem comes into the world. Reciprocity—it all comes down To that. As with lovers: When it’s right you can’t say Who is kissing whom
That’s so worth repeating: “As with lovers: / When it’s right you can’t say / Who is kissing whom.”
Such reciprocity with the landscapes I love is a lofty goal. Till now I’ve imagined it to involve physically caring for a specific plot. Orr suggests another way: bringing that world into what one writes.
Read on a northbound train, this passage answered a question I’ve struggled to articulate. I will love this Earth and write about it, gatekeepers be damned. I won’t await their deliberations, worry whether they’ll open their doors. Lovingly, I can write about living among the many surprising lives of this Earth. Because, as Mount St. Helens showed us, even minerals have origin, history, destiny.
I’d love to read your response to the above. Here are a few questions you might consider:
How do you respond to familiar landscapes? Or new ones?
Is there a kind of music, or a musician, that evokes a specific landscape for you?
Do you agree with Sappho that “whatever one loves most is beautiful”?
Have you ever found an answer before you fully formulated the question?
Gregory Orr. Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 2005. p. 25.
"Barry Lopez Love in a Time of Terror" Literary Hub, Aug 7, 2020. https://lithub.com/barry-lopez-love-in-a-time-of-terror/.
Orr. Op cit. p. 28.
Ibid. p. 29.
In one of your earlier newsletters you say you lost your poetry. Well, this piece shows you haven't. I'm at home wherever there is water, hills and trees. And yes, I think Sappho had it right.