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How is it that certain earthly places have unearthly power to fill us with awe and spiritual contentment? The answers may be at the core of our chaotic being. – by NICHOLAS REGUSH
ON THOSE WHO STEP IN THE SAME RIVER, DIFFERENT AND AGAIN DIFFERENT WATERS FLOW. —Heraclitus
(On left side – Illustration: K. Ghiglione – Image: A.Craddock)
HIDDEN HARMONY
That spring day in New York City, where I would normally be focused on producing television for ABC News, I instead found myself preoccupied by the philosopher Heraclitus, whom the ancient Greeks appropriately nicknamed the Riddler.
In one of his most famous passages, part of a legacy passed down and preserved only in fragments, the visionary fifth-century B.C.E. aristocratic recluse spoke of stepping into the “river” of life and suggested in the form of a riddle that the world was constantly changing but still had an underlying orderliness.
I was grappling with this conundrum on a personal level, wondering what it would mean to revisit a mountainous area of Vermont that for me once held magic—a place where I had felt whole and in tune with the world.
It was no idle preoccupation. For many weeks I had been anguishing about whether I had blundered in choosing a career path that required me to live regularly in a city that both excites and paralyzes the senses and that alternately enlivens the spirit with variation and overwhelms with repeated eruptions of unhealthy tension.
My wife, Barbara, and I have lived an adventurous and complicated life. She is a singer and songwriter, and planning for two careers on an equal footing requires considerable imagination, resolve, and risktaking. First, we lived in Montreal and then, like many urbanites, began to pine for greener pastures. Four years passed before we dared to make the move, keeping the Montreal apartment as a base for our professional needs in Canada.
Several months before moving, we had rented a three-storey house in Vermont that surveyed high peaks and valleys. Built of timber from the immediate area, it blended into the surrounding forest like a child’s tree house. It was there that one evening, sipping wine on the deck, we agreed to settle in at a similar house about 100 metres away that had suddenly become available and had almost identical vistas. The lure for me then, besides the calming daily rhythm of a more serene writing life, the sky of seemingly millions of stars, the often vivid cycles of the moon and the virtuosity of songbirds, was the thrill of being absorbed into a new reality, of simply being and observing.
Often on warm, breezy clays, I would sit on the large, open deck, looking out at the great expanse of mountain terrain, feeling completely absorbed in the irregular tracing of craggy peaks and subtle patches of tree line that revealed the effects of periodic turbulence so common in the higher altitudes. Occasionally I would surrender to the entrancing power of those peaks, feeling self-awareness give way to heightened consciousness, a feeling of being engulfed in life’s flow. I felt I had found my true home.
On a more earthly level, I had made a new friend—the black-masked variety with a bushy, ringed tail—that we named Molly. She arrived the very first hour after we had set foot in the house. (“Barbara, there is a raccoon at the door.”) She appeared to be the same young raccoon that once had hung out for hours at our rental house up the road and had since grown to maturity. Later she scaled the roof, swung down to the deck, pressed her black nose to the screen, and appeared to be sizing us up with soft, gentle eyes as we stared back incredulously.
I was eventually able to hand-feed Molly, give her pats on the back, tap her gently on the nose, and even share some of my writing and television ideas as we sat side by side on the deck for hours at a stretch. On my birthday, two years running, she even brought kits to the deck, a sign of trust that I never imagined I would experience with a wild animal that could have ripped my face to shreds in an uncontrolled moment.
The day we quit the mountain, Molly turned up and climbed a tree to watch the final good-bye. We chose to leave after three years because by our careers required more of Montreal and, increasingly, New York City, the weekly four-hour sojourn to Montreal and then back felt longer and more exhausting by the month.
The compromise was a lakeside house in the Adirondack Mountains in northeastern New York State, more easily reached from Montreal and New York City. The renewed hope was to retain a large slice of country living balanced by a smaller slice of city living. But it turned out quite the opposite as work demands escalated.
It was only a matter of time before frustration began to overpower the usual rationalizations. Even though the intervals of life at the lake were restful and often sublime, it was the deep memories of the Vermont mountains that kept playing with my heartstrings. When friends invited us to spend several days on the mountain in the very same house we had rented for a month before making our move, we grabbed the opportunity. It wouldn’t be a complete return to the source, but close enough.
(Hidden Harmony – page 2 is here)