Snow Leopards, Comets & Fireweed

Listening to Mathieson read The Snow Leopard, his voice tremulous with age but sounding the syllables with a kind of charged fondness for what they conjure, that flash of discovery pinpointed in time strikes me. A kind of boulder cleaving the river’s flow, the waters of which burgeon & swell, carrying us further from it, further still, until we cannot see the stone & it drifts into the sheer commonness of memory. Isn’t it peculiar to think on those moments of our lives we would announce as definitive, instances that carved out our sense of self against the enshrouding fog of time? What we would single out for its wondrous import shares the stage with the lunch we ate yesterday, or when we sang the alphabet to our daughter for the one thousandth time, or had a phone call from a friend. I possess the same will I ever did, but presently my mind leapfrogs the ordinary in my remembrance to find whatever it would deem especially brave or declarative, my own snow leopards. My hands raise in the eddy before I am caught again in the current. Me, look at me, I say to myself, & then I am gone again in the riptide. 

I think it is enough for me to live on the limn of a wonder, to be its quiet audience anymore. In our youth we think the comet tearing across the stars singular in its transcendence. But then it’s perihelion that commits the tail to its incandescence after all-- it is never the thing itself, but its trajectory through space, its relation to the sun, against the patterned constellations behind. It is the distance yawning between the earth & that incalculable void. It is our yearning for something to burn that brief & bright & to color all the skyscape in its exhalation. Dust & ice that fell from orbit-- the ordinary exploding into the numinous. 

I’m thinking about the measure of wonder against the backdrop of dailiness often lately, likely because what has become in this iteration of my life quotidian has shifted so dramatically from what it once was. I am proud of & made full by fatherhood & its promise, but off-kilter nonetheless, not because I demand of my days the charged animus of a comet, but because I know that animus depends on a relationship to place that I am lacking. A relationship to place that rooted me for those long years, even when it was my place that pinned me indoors with a broken heater or buried me in feet of snow, that sent me weak-kneed for a cutbank while a grizzly loomed on its hind legs, that tried to carry my dogs & I from a mountain top on a crushing gale. My relationship with the world around me was brutally honest, devoid of sentiment, absent of florid palaver & contemptuous of platitudes. I loved it. But we moved, & we left it behind. 

We will go back to Alaska, but when we do, I must remind myself that I will not go back to who I was, nor to how I was. But I will go back to the place that permits me definition, to the skyscape backdropping whatever trajectory I might seek. I moved too much, in my life, & I thought where I was, I would be permitted to fully be. I know now how absurd that notion is, how much my life’s vital core wants to tendril into the earth & soften with the cloud & feel an incomprehensibility of scale wash me over & dare me to matter. I think less of a comet & more of a single stalk of fireweed, burdened yearly with its burial in snow, its hibernation through the bitterest of cold, & then, always, on its thin & reedy stalk, how it persists & comes to flower & flames rigid into the pale sky before relenting again with fall. It is a small life, written against a backdrop of deep time in the ordinary tumult of the world. It doesn’t need the burnishment of the blueing coma, or to rend the heavens with its brief declarations. It just needs to be, struggles to be, against all of the antagonisms the world offers it, in spite of them, because of them. It roots itself in that ongoingness of its place & then, only then, can breathe & be. 

We are always ordinary, in that our days balance our sanguine hopes with the pushback of a hard-eyed world. Our tasks are daily reinventions, predicated against backdrops mostly of our choosing. Our priorities, too, spelled out by necessities & currents shifting through channels charged by graces & circumstances we cannot discern. We aren’t our own, not really, but then neither is anything. What advantage we have is in our capacity to trade one backdrop for the next, to gauge ourselves one day against the quiet relief of commonness, & the next against the dizzying, dimensionless swirl of sky & star, passing punctures of swift light glancing through & disappearing over time.