Good Ride, Cowboy, Good Ride

My adventure in Lander was about discovering the state that I have called home for 18 years, and finding some way to say goodbye. As I bid the purple mountain majesties adieu and begin my year abroad, I tried to understand what I meant to me to come here.

Last night we watched the movie Promiseland (highly recommended) and Matt Damon has a great line where he is talking about rural, small-town life, and he says “You and I both know this way of life is dying or damn near dead.” My immediate reaction was, good thing we came on this trip to see the proverbial polar bear before its gone. But on second thought, I wondered, if this whole way of life that was never really that great (economically at least) is fading, then why are people still fighting for it? What is it that we’re suppose to feel about small towns, about green pastures, amber waves of grain, and untouched wildernesses? What’s out there, and what does it mean?

I’ve sat on the porch and stared out at the prairie at sunset for four days now, and though I was initially struck by its beauty, a practical voice in my head wondered if the same effect could be achieved with a poster or on the Discovery Channel. I was trying to permit a spiritual metamorphosis, to transcend from the mundane to the sublime, to understand the mystery of what brought the American pioneers from everything they knew to this dangerous frontier, but the answer eluded me.

Tonight I sat on the porch and thought about tomorrow when I’ll leave here and maybe never come back. And suddenly I got my answer as something in the silence asked me to stay.

See, once I had taken all the big, fancy words off the table, when the biggest word I was using was goodbye, I started to fall. I was falling off all the stilts and pedestals and columns that lift me up into the civilized world, and away from the philosophical tools I used to stay there, and suddenly I was alone, crouching, toes in the dirt.

It was less of an emotional change than a genetic one, I suddenly realized the idea and the desire to walk off into the wilderness, past all the fences and roads, and make for myself a life apart. A life of physical struggle and starvation, but abundant in divine nourishment for which we otherwise spend our lives searching. I wanted to give the beautiful landscape before me a parting gift, but the only thing it wanted was me.

Looking out at the darkening hills, I realize how whole it is. That’s what I found out here, not quite answers but simply that the questions that haunt me have disappeared. There is no “why?” here, no “reason” or “meaning” or “purpose” to the trees and the sagebrush and the rocks. Or maybe they themselves are both the answer and the question, a circular argument creating an echo that beckons us to join in.

And that’s what I will take away from here. An invitation. An invitation  to go into the wild and ceaseto exist as myself and begin existing as a part of something bigger and infinitely more perfect. An invitation to be part of a place where time is not still, but instead it kaleidoscopes in and out continuously so you can see all of time at once. It defies everything we think we understand, and at once it is knowing and being and changing everything we have spent our time learning, the time since humans first stepped out of nature and began to conquer it.

Like a software update, there is no “No” or “Close” option on this invitation. There is only “Yes” and “Remind Me Later”. So the offer still stands, as long as there is a forest or a mountain somewhere where you can get out of sight of fences and roads, we can always go. I wondered if it was a cop out, to imagine living apart rather than struggle with the questions and people that populate our lives. But eventually, whether we’re under a manicured lawn with a rock over our head or floating as ash on the wind, Nature will get us back, and answer those questions, and we will become part of the world we left behind.

There is timeless peace here, one that I didn’t understand a few short days ago, that I still don’t really understand, and in that way I never have to say goodbye. I’ve been issued an invitation that promises a place here to belong to, some day, as a nameless cowgirl or as a simple grain of red-brown earth that no matter where it wanders, is always home.