From this one place I would explore the entire north and all life, including my own. I could look to the stars and feel that here was a focal point of great celestial triangles, a point as important as any one on the planet. For me it would be a listening-post from which I might even hear the music of the spheres.
—SIGURD F. OLSON, LISTENING POINT (1958)
The best flights come in from the west, sometimes circling around the city beforehand, and pass over ground I know well. My parents’ house, the elementary school I attended, the golf course where Luna and I would walk on winter nights accompanied by owls, deer, and coyote. I always try to be seated next to a window on the plane’s left side, so that I can find these and the others: stadiums for the Twins and the Gophers, streets lined with maple, ash, pine, and elm, and the lakes in a chain heading south—Cedar, Isles, Calhoun, and Harriet. Sometimes, at dusk in autumn, a moon will rise behind the city with its beams atop the river, the Mississippi a silent wild current curving through a million or more lives. And then Lake Nokomis, just blocks from the house, and the parkway leading to my steps, where if this year is as it was last a finch will soon live in the eave above the front door. I am forever grateful for the opportunity to travel, forever in awe of airplanes in flight (I’ve had it explained to me plenty, and still…), but I am always happy to be returned to these grounds where I grew up, where my family lives, and where the rest of my life is now taking root.
Back in Minneapolis to stay for a while, I decide to visit a man who, as an artist and art historian, has spent much of his life engaged with the sacred. Opening the door to his basement studio, Wayne Roosa assures me that “whatever I think of the sacred is just cheek and jowl next to the quotidian.” I see it immediately in his current project, a series of small wood shapes that evoke tombstones or monuments and yet are made with hacksaws and scrap pegboard. The sacred and the everyday together.
When I ask him first about landscape painting, thinking that this might be a particular form in which artists have explored the relationships between humans and nature and the sacred, he nods and mentions John Constable, the English Romantic painter from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “His landscapes, you could almost walk by them, they’re just countryside scenes. But if you stop you realize he’s given you little paths that lead you deeper and deeper in.” And then, Roosa explains, you notice there are all these patterns of light and shadow on the ground. “That’s because he’s painted the sky, the clouds, in movement. And what you’re really seeing down here is the light breaking through from the shadow of the clouds. So even though the ground is a stable element that’s apparently fixed, and the sky is the transient element that’s in motion, he’s playing those two off each other, and he’s using light and shadow to make you realize that this is somewhat ephemeral.” On one hand, Roosa tells me, Constable’s landscapes can seem like little more than a stroll through the woods. “But at the same time, the way he paints reminds you that while the ground may seem like a static place, ultimately you’re temporary here.”
Thinking about our lives in relation to nature and how this might push us toward an understanding of the sacred has long made sense to Roosa. A trim man in his sixties with salt-and-pepper hair, in blue jeans and a brown T-shirt, he grew up in Wyoming, a place of “big land and small houses,” where his deepest impressions were of “land that goes on and on, and then this huge sky.” He describes a childhood and youth in which he had “a deep immediate relationship with nature” that became the background from which he then moved into culture and art. Of his generation he says, “We were deeply imprinted by nature. And then we moved into culture and human construction of artifacts and artworks. But the grounding was in nature, and even our sensibility of what metaphor is and how it works harken back to this existential grounding in nature in our childhoods.” As his career progressed, he began working with younger artists in New York City who told him they couldn’t relate to his experience. Instead, he says, “They talked in terms of simulacra, that their relationship with ‘what you call nature’ is mediated through culture and kitsch and cities and urban experience.” Roosa leans back in his chair and grins. “I would say, ‘Let’s go to the Boundary Waters together.’ And they’d say, ‘Yes, I would like to visit nature.’ And they weren’t being irreverent. It’s just that nature was not a primary reference or grounding for them. It was something you went outside New York City and visited.”
Still, Roosa talks about his younger peers with admiration. “The whole local movement has arisen from that,” he says. “People looking for something that feels authentic, when the whole world seems like a fabrication of layers of politics and power plays. They can’t affect that, but they can plug in locally. They’re growing a garden on a rooftop. And their diet is really focused on what they eat and where it came from.” Roosa tells me there’s a movement among contemporary artists they’re calling “social practice.” That’s what they’re after, he says, trying to infuse the local, the daily, the ordinary to make us realize that it has an aesthetic component. And while some of them would see that as sacred, others would be far more materialistic. “But the point being,” he says, “to make us value what we’re doing immediately, now, here. Because otherwise, we’re ruining the world.”
A few years ago, Roosa helped coordinate a show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts simply titled Sacred. Ten different curators were each given a small gallery and told to put together their own exhibits. Some curators chose costumes or medieval manuscripts, Roosa says, while another put together a show arguing that “the little knickknacks that we all have on our shelves, like your kid’s third grade baseball trophy, are sacred.” For Roosa, the gallery that connected most was the one on walking. In this gallery, the curator had featured everything from the classical—Chinese landscape paintings where “you’d see the landscape in all its mystery, and there’s always a little guy with a walking stick, and he’s the old man on a spiritual pilgrimage walking through nature”—to the work of a contemporary artist using an entirely modern medium. Conceptual and performance artist Stan Shellabarger took a twelve-by-twenty-five-foot roll of red rosin construction paper, stretched it over diamond-plate metal, put on a roofer’s work shoes, and walked in a labyrinth pattern until the little diamond plates wore through. “So on one hand it was nothing but cheap construction material that had been walked on by a worker, the mundane,” says Roosa. “But at the same time it was a labyrinth, and he was gearing it off prayer meditation paths. He was trying to say these go together. And part of his premise is that our whole life, we are doing this. Unconsciously we’re walking a labyrinth whether we’re meditating or just trying to make money.”
Then, says Roosa, there’s Francis Alys, another artist who in several performance pieces has opened a can of paint, tipped it upside down, and let it drip as he walked—through the streets of Paris, Jerusalem, São Paulo, and elsewhere. “He’s saying it matters where you walk and why you’re walking, so I’m leaving a trace,” explains Roosa. “Something as mundane as where you walk in life, if you pay attention to it, you realize there’s meaning there. It makes us aware of how we’re here, and how we behave while we’re here.”
“Meaning” and “sacred” are not synonymous, Roosa adds, “but they are inseparable.”
And so, I’m thinking of walking, of this book’s first pages in Manhattan and all the walks since, of how walking brings together the sacred and the mundane. And I am thinking of my friend Derek, who may never walk again.
Before I moved to Reno for graduate school, we were housemates in Albuquerque. To my dog Luna, he was “Uncle Derek,” and Luna’s big sister was Derek’s Bailey, a wiry golden retriever. For three years the four of us shared the house at 2428 Pueblo Bonito: Pudge Brothers pizzas with pepperoni and green chile, the fire pit out back with Scorpio in the southwestern twilit sky, Derek’s candy-colored climbing ropes above the back room’s Saltillo tiles, the sliding glass door with two dirty dogs waiting to come back inside.
Derek left New Mexico first, moving to Seattle, where he met Amanda, his perfect match. They were constantly camping, climbing, and biking, constantly outside. I have never known anyone as positive as Derek, and Amanda’s the same. Stepping into their house, I had to raise my level of gratitude. Then the terrible news arrived on Facebook, the most efficient way for Amanda to reach Derek’s many friends. “This is a very difficult message to write,” she began. On a snowy February Friday, skiing in northern New Mexico, Derek had crashed in a way that made it almost certain he would never again feel the ground, whether rock or grass or forest soil.
Nearly three years later, I write to him, asking what that’s like. Within hours, he replies. The subject of the e-mail: “Stuff I don’t feel.”
The funny thing is that now that I’m in a wheelchair I crave the polished smooth surfaces of the hospital hallways and dread the woodchip riddled path at one of my local dog parks, as it’s like riding over the bumpiest path ever, sending shock waves to my neck. I fantasize about the tactile feel of texture beneath my feet; stepping on lightly frozen puddles in the street and feeling the crunch and tinkle of the thin ice breaking. As a kid I simply couldn’t walk past those lightly frozen puddles. I couldn’t stop until every piece of thin ice was broken. Sand and grass are big ones that I miss. As a super avid skier I miss the whomp of landing on my butt in deep snow. I wrote a damn poem about the tactile memories I had of going from the basement changing room out to the lake at our cabin. I realized, only in retrospect, that I was fondly and bittersweetly recalling all the different feelings that took place underfoot; from the cold, smooth tiles in the bathroom, to the tightly woven comfort of the carpeted indoor stairs, to the sandy grit at the entryway, to the remote potential of slivers on the deck, to the smooth slide of the worn wood outdoor stairs, to the narrow gaps of the slotted wood deck boards, to the welcoming sandy bottom of the lake. It absolutely brings a tear to my eye when I think about how much sensory input, and ultimately emotion, passed through my feet in that short walk.
A few minutes later, a second e-mail shows up, titled “Stuff I feel.” It reads,
I can’t feel the earth underfoot per se, only the relative smoothness or roughness of the surface under my wheels as it translates to my neck and head, where I still have real feeling.
If I think of walking, I think of the four years Luna and I shared a house in Reno, where the foothill trails were a quick ten-minute drive away. At least once a day, we would head into these hills and hike for an hour or more, Luna running free, checking in from time to time as I walked in a kind of meditation, loop paths again and again, lost in thought but never lost. At dusk and after, we usually walked alone except for owls, or coyotes, or hawks that sometimes left bright red hunting tales in trailside snow. For Luna, these foothills were dog heaven. With rabbits to chase, water holes to swim, canyon walls to scale, she would come back to me with her feet mud-caked, coat smelling of sage, contented. On the drive home she would sit in the backseat, gazing out the window as though she had done everything she had come here to do.
I believe that intimacy can be learned and practiced. That we have a history that need not define us. That we have the opportunity—and maybe more important, the instinct—to cultivate our connections with the life around us.
These repeated walks became part of me. Each time we reached a familiar trailhead and set out again, I would sigh—I am back, returned to ground I have grown to know and love. Watching my friend charging up canyon walls or racing after rabbits? Taking in the delight she experienced while exploring? I could have lived like that forever.
On a gray Saturday noon, street wet from morning rain, I decide to take a walk. I start in my best orange-laced boots, but at block’s end I take them off and head into the park toward the most beautiful maple, half its rich red leaves lying under its limbs. Wet grass, soft ground. The leaves cling to my skin in browns and brick reds, yellow-greens and burnt orange, my feet soon plastered. Lying under the maple, I see birds racing across the sky, the black wet trunk and branches backed by gray morning clouds. From heels and thighs to back and shoulder blades, I press against bare ground—thinking how comfortable it feels, my lower back relaxing—and close my eyes. I think of what Luna would be doing if she were here now. I think how, a century ago, a Dakota Sioux named Red Bird wrote, “My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand.”
One hundred fifty years ago, Henry David Thoreau asked, “Where are we?” and “Who are we?” Hasn’t the answer always been the same? Rockets into space, the deepest ocean, we may visit these places but they will never be where we belong.
The word of Thoreau’s I like best is this: “daily,” as in “Daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it.” Sacred ground is not beyond our reach, not somewhere else. While some grounds make the sacred more accessible, and in some grounds we are more clearly invited to connect, if the sacred is anywhere, it is at our feet. We are in contact with it every time we walk out the door.
When I walk outside today and look at the ground, I see a concrete sidewalk and a Kentucky bluegrass lawn, but that is only the beginning. I see the prairie that once filled the skies with wild birds, the fields of battle full of sacrifice, and those who have known those grounds all their life. I see six-foot-tall, dark-green corn, deep beds of black soil, and the tundra berries above the thawing Alaskan permafrost. I see the forest clearing where centimeters below parklike grass lie the bones and ashes of so many who loved this world and each other every bit as deeply as we try to. And I see, every time and always, the northern Minnesota woods where Luna lies buried and where, as I set her body into the ground that is more sacred to me than any other, the idea for this book began.
What I have seen since then is this: that while the paved and the hallowed are often so because of decisions made before we came along, the choice between hell or sacred is ours to make. Much of what I have seen tells me that by not making this choice—or not even being aware of it—we contribute to our world’s slow drift toward a time of real hell. And if that’s what we want, let’s at least be honest. But if we want instead a world where our existence is based on the truth of knowing the connections that keep us alive—the bonds between us and others, between us and the natural world—then let us choose now. Let us walk out our door, look down, and find the sacred underfoot, wherever we are. Let us look to the ground, and know we are once and always home.