Interlude of Images: Straight & Narrow

Dear Friends & Family,

I write to you from Vermont where the Green Mountains, covered in snow, frame the horizon to the east. I have fond memories of this place, and so, it gave a good doorway for my return to the United States on Thursday. It was a threshold crossed on the eve of the one-year anniversary of this circle around North America. It was a threshold crossed with feeling.

It signaled a return home—to loved ones, to family—and it stirred a quickening that enlivened my spirit through the rest of the day. It still does. Still, I would tell a lie if I did not say what I do not want to say, that for a few moments then and still scattered through, I did not want this land to be my land.

I did not delight in returning to the always now ongoing lived-in-the-cells underneath-all-thought-that-this-is-so heightened sensing and vigilance to vigilantes carrying assault rifles in the land of the not so free, me entering the pastoral landscape of the farms that feed us, a landscape not so different from the one I had just enjoyed in Quebec, albeit not the same. The bodily felt sense here and that of being there cannot be compared.

And I did not delight in returning to walking circles around how to be in a world so polarized by perspective and so politicized that our shared humanity is obscured. I did not want to come home to a land where we can no longer see one another as human beings but the image of a collection of beliefs we deem right or wrong depending on which side of the fence we stand on. I did not desire to come to home to hate.

When GPS said “Welcome to the United States of America,” I did not want to mock the welcome. But somewhere inside something did. I wish this were not so. I wanted to be home, and I did not.

Last week, Susie, from the beautiful publication

Susie Mawhinney - A hill and I

, wondered in a comment about the experience of returning home, and her question prompted me to share more perhaps in these coming weeks about this leg of the journey. I thought to begin imagistically, offering you in this month’s Interlude of Images the pastoral landscape of southern Quebec, which is surely serene in its own right and at the same time wholly unwild. My eye was drawn to the contrasts between lines drawn and lines refused by what cannot be made linear: a cloud, undulating hills, a puddle of water, scattered leaves, branches of trees.

As I reflect on what drew the camera to my eye, I wonder if perhaps in the sulci of my mind, I was drawn unconsciously to how I would soon sense the need to be when I crossed the border:

Walk the straight and narrow.

We do that to each other. Don’t we? Require one another to be this way or that. We don’t have to. There is another way, and we come to that way by setting free our own inner humanity. Inner humanity is a loving humanity, a humanity in each of us that sees in each other an unmarred, unbroken innocence. I freely admit I’m not always so good at recalling my own inner humanity. Even so, I’m disinclined to abandon hope.

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

---

On Friday, I published a new CURA post: Let Us First Ask: What Is a Body? I encountered a technical glitch that I’m still trying to figure out. . . . If this post did not arrive in your in-box or on your app, you may click the text below to be taken to the page.