Like so many people today, I have lived a transient life. I was born in Northern California amid the Giant Sequoias, from age 11 through my adolescence raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with its fog, sunshine and bridges, into adulthood up against the mountains that contain the greater Los Angeles basin with its sprawling suburbs and smog, and then New England, Massachusetts and Maine, for the 40-plus years since, interrupted by an eight-year ministry in Berkeley, Calif. I don’t feel rootless, but my roots are scattered and perhaps shallower than those of others.

Regarding the transiency and pace of modern life, Belden C. Lane in his book, “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes,” writes, “We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment. Modern Western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus (a way of living that draws meaning from its rootedness in place and environment). We have realized, in the end, the ‘free individual’ at the expense of a network of interrelated meaning.”

The Australian aboriginal people are the epitome of a grounded people. They have walked their desert lands for eons finding story, meaning and transcendence in every outcropping and arroyo. Walking gives one time to relate. What have we lost traveling by car and plane, moving often?

Bruce Chatwin, a British travel writer, tells of giving an Aborigine a ride in his car through the outback and noticing that at 25 miles an hour his rider was humming furiously and rapidly turning right and left as they traveled the road. He realized that his passenger was singing the landscape as they passed through it. Slowing to four miles an hour, closer to walking speed, the song was more clearly sung and peace settled into the car.

Often friends on the West Coast will write sympathetically when media tell them of winter in Maine. It is hard for them to understand that we transplanted Californians love the seasons, even winter with all of its inconvenience.

A large part of the seasons’ gift is their beauty. Another part is the life lessons they teach through the landscape’s birth, growth, decline, apparent death and rebirth. Seasons inform us that there are forces in life greater than our own and consequences to not honoring them. And we all go through them together, you and I, complaining, assisting, empathizing, playing, appreciating, slip-sliding along together. Seasons generate humility in us and community between us.

Seasons invite us to slow down, sometimes force us to stop. In slowing and stopping we are given opportunities to “sing” the landscape. Our souls are refreshed by the song.

I sing the coast of Maine and its inland hills and ponds and I sing Casco Bay as I pass over it every day to and from Cousins Island. And I sing the black ducks and eider ducks who live on the bay through the freeze and bluster of winter. Being bicoastal, I also sing the giant sequoias and the peaks and forests and streams and lakes of California’s Sierra Nevada range. And by the grace of God found in love. I sing my family and our church community and dear friends. This song is for those here and those too far away.

There is a price for transience. Joy and sadness are in the song for family and friends because our travels have carried us from many of them. Yet distance, as absence, does make the heart grow fonder even if a touch of sorrow accompanies the fondness. Still, we cannot imagine our lives without New England and the dear people we found here who are now permanently in our lives and hearts.

I suppose we are still Californians. The topography and history of the place where we grow up do shape us; but so do the topography, and culture of other places and people met along our transient ways.

Clearly we will always be “from away.”

But we are also from here and glad of it.

Bill Gregory is an author and retired minister. He can be reached at:

wgregor1@maine.rr.com

 

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