Every Sunrise, Every Sunset

 

As I go through my books to see what I'm willing to part with in our book sale -- and that's hard because so often, I'll let a book go then need it for an article or sermon -- I'm realizing how many pages are dog-eared to mark important ideas or ideas that I liked.

I found this one in Sharon Butala's memoir of moving from the city to the country, in Saskatchewan: 

"In my reading and occasionally in conversation with urban visitors, I hear or read people either saying directly or implying indirectly that true rural people don't notice or appreciate the beauty in which they live. Although I don't say so, the arrogance and ignorance of such remarks always makes me angry, implying as it does that rural people lack humanity, are somehow an inferior branch of the human species, that beauty is beyond their ken. It is one thing to come from  the city and be overwhelmed by the beauty of Nature and to speak of it, and another thing entirely to have lived in it so long that it has seeped into your bones and your blood and is inseparable from your own being, so that it is part of you and requires no mention or hymns of praise."

~ The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature, (2004), page 89

Having moved from the city to rural Nova Scotia nearly twenty years ago, having lived here in rural Nova Scotia for almost 14 years, I know what Butala is writing about. I am still in awe of the huge sky and the sprawling fields and all the trees [that are left], by the deer and rabbit and coyote tracks, by the creaking of the ice on the river, by the eagles flying overhead.

There will never be a day when I don't notice, when I don't appreciate. Because I'm still delighted to realize I live here, under that big sky, alongside that winding river, beneath the wings of the eagle. 

But my husband, A TRUE RURAL PERSON, he understands this space, this place, these woods and fields and rivers in a way I never will. He doesn't notice or appreciate in the way I do - consciously, intentionally, vocally. His noticing, his appreciating is done in breath, in heart beat, in eye blink, in the subtle twitch of an ear. Woven into his genetic fabric, through several generations, he doesn't even know he's noticing, isn't even aware he's appreciating. 

With his chronic pain, and his frustration at not being able to do the things outside that he used to do and wants to do, I think Dwayne is even more in tune; grief has a way of honing the senses, of focusing on what is lost. Yet I can't help but hope the sky and fields and woods and river are healing, even if there is no cure for what ails him. 

The Butala book is staying on my bookshelf, I think.