Through Empty Branches

Life's Outpouring, Changing Seasons

Dear Friends and Family,

I send this letter to you from eastern Manitoba on the southern shores of Lake Winnipeg, this area called New Iceland. It is cold and rainy and windy, the lake the color of mud-washed slate, an oceanic horizon extending without end. I galloped across the northern Great Plains from Banff National Park since I last wrote you, not stopping for images, not stopping much at all, just driving, my eyes entranced across undulations of prairie.

You could say I have been chasing the change of seasons. And you would not be wrong. But the changes seem to be outpacing me. . . .

Where go I?

I have imagined exploring the Northern reaches of the Great Lakes as I continue to move east. I may need to turn south. The days ahead will tell.

Inspired.

Your reflections on September’s theme about mine-ing and what you shared of last week’s images have brought new meaning to Beyond the Comfort Zone. I look forward to your words and I reflect on them, at times at some length before I respond. Know that I will respond.

. . .

I leave you now with today’s reflections, a weave of fragments I wrote in Banff, and I wonder already where your reflections will take us. . . .

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

Final morning in Banff. I would have lingered.

The greatest difficulty in understanding comes from our long-established habit of seeing things in isolation from each other.¹

It was summer, 1987 that I was last here in Banff, and it was shortly after in December that I sat on Row 4 in Old Cabell Hall—with David in the early days of twenty years and in time a family. No light but one that night, that one light casting the wide hips of the raven-black piano into relief, George Winston entering from a void, wearing jeans the color of jet, his t-shirt white, his feet bare and silent on the wood he walked to reach the piano, bench moving not an inch as he took his seat and, offering neither nod nor word our way, began to play. For an eternal duration all too short, he caressed this body of finely sculpted sound, beguiling melody through the ecstasy of his touch. And when they had given to one another all they had, he lifted his hands, piano silent now, and came to stand just as silently. Retreating from the light, he turned and looked upon the piano still aglow; the room and we emptied of sound but emptied not at all.

. . . present absence brings to life the absent presence.²

It was a much younger season of life that I was last here, most of those moments now a blend, like a bouquet, petaling my mind with memories as one that touches another and another, no season distinct in its pouring out and pouring over—the circling out of this journey now a circling back. Could I have known in the spring of my life that I would return in my autumn and that more seasons than summer would have poured through me and that these mountains charged with the memories of eons of seasons could recall more of me than my mind could ever fashion?

What it has is what is not.³

But these mountains usher me out once more. One by one this campground empties, last night the last night to stay before the gates close today, those white clouds overhead pouring out onto every mountaintop in view now thickening with layer upon layer of snow—one season giving to another, whether of autumn into winter here or spring into summer the other side of here where you who see again the longer light of day, see again the gush of green, tree limbs clothing themselves once more, giving you the air they breathe and you to them, the same.

A young boy, not more than three or four, does not want to go. He weeps, then wails, as his parents pack up—emptying himself of every tear his body can lend. No amount of consolation, however tender, is consolation enough to quiet this outpouring. He has not yet learned how not to cry.

And a raven, wings polished with daylight, dives in on a bag drifting with the wind, the bag emptied already of chips. The bird plucks anyway. And for all its worth. And to no avail. Picking up empty bag with beak and claw gives nothing. Dancing round it gives nothing. Looking at me gives nothing. Lifting it into the wood for a private dinner is further futility. Giving up, the raven leaves the bag no less empty than the emptiness found.

. . . the ‘bottomless’ opens abysmally at the beginning.”⁴

Trees, all of these deciduous, have no hesitation pouring out all their color in a matter of days, giving every last drop of sugar from their roots to leaves soon fallen. And for what is this outpouring? Surely not to save the leaves from their photosynthetic hunger. Surely not to keep them on stem. Could beauty be reason enough to give all they’ve got? And what is beauty if not affection emptying endlessly without restraint?

Through the empty branches the sky remains. ⁵

And empty soon will be the air of this sound of summer-tough leaves clapping in the breeze, replaced by a whisper barely heard through limbs winter bare. But it’s not only here in the Northern Hemisphere that root and limb and stem empty without hesitation. What of the seed just sown by you who live south of that imaginary line—this one round world spiraling two seasons at a time? Will that seed not empty, too? And of what? Toward what? And why?

What is the bottom of empty?

It is said that deep calls unto deep,⁶ that the endless beginning is no beginning at all but the endless empty that yearns to be known, and the yearning is the presence in the absence always churning . . . one season into another, one flower into fruit and seed and shoot. . . .

1. Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Hudson, New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1996), p. 290.

2. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (New York: Schocken, 2009), p. xix.

3. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, cf. Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1995), p. xv.

4. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 10.

5. Ranier Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead, 2005), p. 135.

6. Zornberg, Murmuring Deep, cf. Psalms, 42:8, epigraph, p. ix.