We have
never
been here
before, but we have arrived,
to be
mended in, whatever way we fit,
histories
like songs on a page, bones
like books
on a shelf. Hearts beat inside us,
on
highways, passing, slowing down, blinking
and bumping
through places all of a piece--
absurdly
distant, impossibly close.
"What's another term for a semi-truck full of codfish barreling across the country? [pause pause pause] Transmigration of the sole." I once loved a hippie who was also a truck driver. He loved this joke. He loved John Harford's music, too. And me, he loved me. My soles have transmigrated to Nebraska, for now, and my soul is finding its way.I think I shocked a Nebraskan colleague the other day when I confessed that my mate and I had researched emigrating to Canada in a serious way prior to this move in exactly the opposite direction we intended. We were aiming for Nova Scotia and wound up in whaaa? Nebraska?
I explained that the very ancestors who settled here in Nebraska [thus rendering this move a cosmic return of epically ironic proportion] had emigrated with fierce determination from Germany when the Kaiser was drafting folks into his army. They were having none of that and came to America. The flat middle of America. And they worked hard. My dad and his siblings got sent to the state university on my Grandma's chicken money. Tyson chicken factories don't raise enough chickens to send my sons to even a few classes at community college these days and I fully expect to die owing student loans.
Times change and so do peoples. This is a nation of invaders--the fleeing people from old lands where they no longer fit in. Even the "first peoples" inhabiting these plains were new to the land at some point. There were migrations and invasions and settlements and resettlements amongst those peoples as well. My mate has been watching a PBS special about the West and in one part a bunch of land was offerred to the American Indians/First Peoples in exchange for them all moving there and living in carefully platted sections to keep the peace between them The Crow refused to move there because they feared the Sioux; the Sioux when questioned if they would invade Crow territory replied, "Well, yes, conquest is our way; is it not yours?" Nevertheless, those beleaguered peoples made this mega-reservation work until a Caucasian settler's cow wandered in and a mind-numbingly stupid episode of oppression run amok mowed down an entire village, babies and all. Dwelling is a temporary condition. Home-making is something of a paradox--pointing to the extreme temporal qualities of our existence. Build it and they will come and dwell temporarily and then it falls down and they move along.
We watched a movie about a Tibetan Buddhist teacher with a scene where he is chatting with a grandchild. He teases her a bit saying "when you have goats, you have goat problems, when you have a house, you have house problems, when you have money, you have money problems...So what do you want to have?" The little girl replies "I don't want to have anything." He laughs shortly and says "But then what will you eat when you are hungry?" The little girl pauses only a beat and says "I just want to be normal then" and the teacher-grandfather chuckles and says "yes" with a wry smile. It was a middle path teaching. If we have food, we will have food problems but with no food, we have hunger problems. Tigers above, tigers below, dangling from a cliff with a berry growing from a crevasse nearby--that is another teaching about our basic situation in life.
So in an elaboration on that berry, I have relocated my home-making to a plains state. The state my father left to find his better path for his pacifist self and the state one set of great grandparents landed in as a better place than the old world building a dubious empire. It is the dubious empire of the U.S. that my husband and I are fatigued with. We have been conscripted into an army of over-consumers, burning through the last of the fossil fuels, melting glaciers in lands far away and bemoaning the rage of both weather and human trauma that trails in the wake of such mindless aggressions.
How did my ancestors know it was time to go? When the soldiers knocked on their doors? When their daughters were wooed (or worse) by men in boots? When their sympathies were questioned because of the faith they practiced? Or the slant of their eyes? Were their papers examined and found wanting? Their lands or their labor taxed to put buttons on uniforms that represented actions they did not believe in? Were they deprived of essential liberties in the name of national security?
Um.
That said, I'm still here. I even moved further to the middle of the empire--they call it the "heartland" around here. Nebraskans secretly love that term. A Tibetan teacher recently gave a talk here (a mild cultural jolt) and he kept calling Nebraska the "heartbeat." I suspect his Malaprop to be small tease of a lesson, changing the treasured nickname to be just a little off. What does it mean to shift from Heartland to heartbeat? Land to beat. The verb "beat" without the heart hurts. To beat is to hit, unless this is a heart; with the heart it is the contraction and expansion that keeps us alive. So Rimpoche moved ol' Big Red from being a thing to being an act. From matter to mind? He taught on that. Does the contraction and expansion of Empire move concentrically out from here, the geographic center of the states? What if it did?
The beginnings of vast movements--of rivers, glaciers, peoples--can be quite small, rather innocuous....maybe even hard enough to find that one needs special help, native eyes, for example
When I grew up in Minnesota, we all knew that the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi begin in a rather unassuming lake amongst the 10,000--Lake Itasca. The beginnings of something can be so very small, so embedded and so intertwined with tributaries and trickles as to be nearly unidentifiable. But Henry Schoolcraft of the late 1800's determined to find the headwaters. Lake Itasca (Elk Lake in Ojibwa) was Henry's best bet. He renamed it with shards of Latin (Ita from Truth) and sca (from Head) to sound Indian but not be Indian. There is additional pathos here in that his wife's heritage was solidly half Ojibwa and undoubtedly essential to his success. She, of late, has become of interest to scholars of the "margins": She wrote poetry and lived between and in both the Native and Caucasian worlds--writing and speaking languages from each throughout her life. She died in Canada visiting a sister, poetry unpublished. Henry is buried with his second wife in a D.C. cemetery having estranged himself from his children by marrying a southern woman who wrote pro-slavery literature and spoke loudly against the intermarrying of the races. To add insult to injury--her writings actually got published (with Henry's help) with even a bestseller in the mix. That is an American frontier story for us in the "heartbeat" to consider. Ah Jane Johnston Schoolcraft may you rest in peace now that we have found the heart to remember you.
One analysis of the most recent Presidential election notes the significant mobilization of American Indian peoples. It is no small irony this saw an African American to a second term as President of this particular U.S. empire.
The Tibetan teacher--someone part of a diaspora from that invaded land--spoke about mind and matter and how what matters in the end is the mind--that the work of ending abusive empires begins in our own little empire of the mind. I spent last summer treasuring the sweet specifics of Southern Indiana, suspecting but resisting an impending migration. Strangers in a strange land, forced to sing a new song by the rivers of Babylon....we all are essentially souls on the hoof. Migration is something that we do--in bodies, in minds...across time and space. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died unpublished but like the small blue waters of Lake Itasca, her poetry has been voiced, I think--in river of peoples claiming a vote.
Transmigration of the soul really need no trucks, nor ships, Prairie Schooners or Honda Hybrids. In the blink of an eye the planet spins and we are new people, singing an old, old song whose author we have forgotten but whose heartbreaks and line breaks still echo in our voices. I don't know where I'll go from here...but maybe I'll learn to always be home, nevertheless.
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| Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth |
Palm to
earth, thigh to earth, eyes unknown,
Christina’s
bones twist toward the home--
that pause
of distance, pause
of wind,
the wind that whispers
“But where
is home, your home?
Where is
home?
Your home?”Poetry by Julia Heimer Dadds all rights reserved
