Panorama’s Edge

A family is a landscape of its own, as granted as the earth and trees: a wild ecology of feelings, unique in balance, particular of circulation. Each person, each event becomes environment, familiar and dear and scary.

Each element’s essential in a landscape: none moved, removed without a subtle or a drastic change. No force shies from the landscape—all times and changes carried off by elemental forces which transform the hardest substances to soft.

Patterns marked in rock, in soil, in surface of the sea give a landscape its identity. Emotion is the weather of the family, patterning the faces, the voices, and the hearts.

•••

Questions move us through a landscape.

What happened to us?

My brother who cut himself out of the family scrapbook intermittently repastes himself, aligning with some of us, not with others.

My brother who was hamstrung in hierarchy freed himself, runs a business he enjoys, tends his health and family with loving care.

My brother who was committed and released is now released from life.

My brother crippled by pain endures it still, but travels even to the wilderness, loving his family, loving his God.

My sister who suffered and drank put down the glass some forty years ago, now wanders the path my mother, Aunt Irene, and Gobby took.

My sister who trembled in fear now grounds herself in Spirit, family, creativity.

I, who ate and ate, healed my compulsion, lovingly tend body and husband, and am a sometime freelance mother to children, friends, strangers, animals, plants, objects.

•••

Questions move us through a landscape.

What are the movies? What is TV? Dolls, not babies. Mirrors, not faces. They trick us when we’re young, but we outgrow them. Their finest insights aren’t our own. Go out and feel it for yourself, I say.

What is America? Landscape of millions of landscapes.

And Earth? Family dissolves its borders, for every human shares its intimate intensity and personal eternity.

•••

As it is being’s purpose to cause and fathom meaning, and nature’s purpose to cause and fathom creatures, it’s human’s purpose to cause and fathom feeling. Family plunges us into our purpose.

•••

Can we forgive each other for the damage that we suffered and inflicted?

Questions move us through a landscape. Naturally our viewpoint changes as we move.

Kin, clan, folk, family, unite in space, in time, in face and body. The sap in my veins is yours. Its rush of growth we shared. In us nine immediate hearts were mixed, nine daily urgencies in bare unconsciousness expressed; nine ways of wanting and behavior. Nine flavors, nine textures, nine beings now expanded into fourteen more. Thank you all and all the ones to come.

One day you see a landscape and you ask about the light. Light makes a landscape visible, lends it harmony, shines impartially.

Love is the light on the family landscape.

Love is not, however, what I thought it was.

It is not a set of reflexes: agreement, pity, gratitude jerking in all circumstances. Love’s what is appropriate this moment.

Any act but violence can be an act of love: to listen or to turn away, to dispense or to withhold, to agree, to disagree, to laugh or not to laugh, to be silent or to speak. Love is the attentive ear awaiting the next direction. Love is the next expression of itself.

In that changing light, I view our landscape in a hundred styles, a thousand colors: impeccably Dutch days, clear, precise, and orderly, the light of reason illuminating the domestic scenery; us rosy-cheeked in the light of Rembrandt, gathered at the dining room table, breathless with intellectual wrestling, Dad’s pipe glowing; writhing with growth like Van Gogh, pushing each other, defining our vibrating spaces; furious Kandinsky; the illness and despair of Munch. Norman Rockwell does us at the Lake, golden weather on us, high June skies, tether ball and minnow buckets, salted nut rolls. We are sketching, catching frogs, etching scars on ladies in the magazines. Hopper casts his long light through our kitchen. And just now Remington has swept his brush across Montana.

The frontier is right beyond the frame.