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Dear readers,<br><br>
For the first time, I'm using italics in the SB. If this causes you any
problems, please let me know. <br><br>
Molly<br>
back from the Faith and the Media conference, which is why this is a day
late<br>
*********************<br><br>
Mountains<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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>I know you. I've
never forgotten you</i>. <br><br>
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, <i>hmm,
what can I make of this?</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
******************<br><br>
I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T. </body>
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