[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Dear readers,

For the first time, I'm using italics in the SB. If this causes you any 
problems, please let me know.

Molly
back from the Faith and the Media conference, which is why this is a day late
*********************

Mountains

There they were: right where I'd left them. As I drove through them on the 
old familiar journey between my girlhood home and our former summer house, 
I recognized them once again, my old friends: the massive bulk of Pownal 
ridge, Mt. Greylock, Whitcomb Mountain... many don't have names, or they 
have names I don't know them. It doesn't matter. What mattered was that 
(after all these years) I still have them all by heart.

I came to this landscape as a child and fell in love with it -- with the 
depths of the woods and majesty and mystery of these hills. They had (I 
felt) a steadiness about them, a trustworthiness; they had been there for a 
very, very long time and they'd be there forevermore, dependable, 
sheltering. I knew it was silly to see the rise of a slope as a sort of 
earth-breast upon which I could lay my head, if I wanted, but that's how it 
felt to me. Still feels that way, I found, as I whipped along the twisting 
roads.  These hills give you the feeling that you could lean up against 
them and be sustained and comforted.  A man I once knew, who was ordinarily 
about as imaginative as a plate of toast, called them "huggy". He had a point.

I vowed to myself all those years ago that I'd never take them for granted 
-- I'd never go past them without acknowledging each and every one of them, 
without registering each one's particular beauty.  I may not have kept that 
promise absolutely, but I kept it pretty well. I could whisper that to each 
hill as I drove past it. I know you. I've never forgotten you.

But if I was in one sense a child again, come joyously back to my home 
country, another part of me is a middle-aged woman struggling to understand 
and deal with the past, and yet another part of me is a writer who takes 
just about everything that comes in my way and says, hmm, what can I make 
of this?  I could accept and validate the importance of these hills to my 
well-being; they'd given me a sense of protection and stability that I'd 
badly needed at the time.  I hear the same thing from my younger 
sister.  No, we weren't being silly or anthropomorphizing inanimate 
objects; we were being wise, as practical children often are, finding in 
what surrounded us whatever would help fill our unmet needs. The hills 
promised us reliability, steadiness, care; they would be there whenever we 
needed them. We knew that.

The Godstuff writer in me looks back and sees in that process the Spirit at 
work in us, connecting us to that landscape and those woods -- that it was 
God reaching out to us, and we, trusting, reaching right back to God. 
Children can be (if we don't defeat them) quite strongly spiritual 
creatures and responsive to the holy, until they're convinced not to trust 
their intuitions. We were responding to the landscape as thirsty kids might 
respond to an offer of cold chocolate milk: we knew what we needed, and 
there it was, right in front of us. God's gifts to us: both the hills and 
the spirit to respond to them. They embodied God for us, and my God still 
has that steadiness, that age, that quality of being both massive and 
intimate, that beauty.

These mountains were my dwelling and my joy for eight crucial years. Moving 
away from them exacted a high price, although I did learn eventually that 
God dwells in just about every landscape, if you're willing to look. But 
driving through them once again, all these years later, I find I can 
reconnect as easily and happily as a child crawling up on its mother's 
lap.  I promise them and myself that I'll get back more often. The 
mountains absorb that promise. They mean me to keep it.

******************

I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.  
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