Beauty, Mystery and Community - Gary Ferguson's "Carry Home" Bridge

By
When my sister and I told our beautiful Hungarian stepmother that we would honor her request to wait to scatter our father's ashes until she also passed away, we didn't realize "Dad" would be sitting on the bookshelf for 17 years.  We also didn't realize that when she passed, the sense of grief would be twofold.

Over the years I consoled myself, joking that Dad wouldn't mind being nestled between the books he had written, and his presence had surely comforted our bereft and beloved stepmother.  And now, on the wake of casting both their ashes into the salty sea air of San Francisco, I think back to scattering our mother's ashes among the Ponderosa pines nine years ago. 

A few weeks ago, Gary Ferguson and his wife, consultant Mary Clare, stayed with us while Gary was on book tour for his new book The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness. The book is about Gary's remote journeys into the wilderness to honor a promise to his wife Jane before she died - that if anything happened to her, he would scatter her ashes in the wild locations she loved the most.

Over dinner and red wine, Gary, Mary and John and I talked about the complexity of life and love, and of death and grieving.  "I learned the importance of community," Gary said, "and of the need to honor the mystery of it all. Beauty, Joseph Campbell reminds us, is what nudges us toward a new vision of ourselves as we come out the other side of grief. Community, mystery, and beauty - these three things formed the bridge for me."

I found beauty in the seagulls wailing over the soft wash of waves on the seashore, just as I found beauty today in the snow layering the boughs of the Ponderosas, the way their trunks bend to the wind without breaking, the way the earth holds their roots, and my mother's ashes. 

But perhaps the most mysterious beauty of all is found in the way the human heart can choose to heal by choosing to love again, and again, and again.

Wishing you beauty, community, and a New Year imbued with the mysteries of the heart.

Note: Gary Ferguson and Mary Clare have begun a new venture, The Carry Home: Life Changes and Here You Are, offering retreats and programs designed to help people traverse life's changes with vision and integrity.

An advisor for the Rocky Mountain Land Library and member of the International League of Conservation Writers, Page Lambert has been writing about the western landscape and leading nature retreats in the West for twenty years. Founding member of Women Writing the West, member of Wyoming Writers and Colorado Authors’ League, Lambert’s writing can be found inside monumental sculptures at the Denver Art Museum, online at Huffington Post, and inside the pages of dozens of anthologies. Page designs and teaches graduate writing courses for the University of Denver’s University College. Recent published works include “Not for Sale” (Langscape Magazine and “The Rural West,” included in Fulcrum’s new book, The Light Shines from the West. Forthcoming are 3 poems in DoveTails: Writing for Peace. Page writes All Things Literary/All Things Natural from her mountain home west of Denver.

Comments

Linda said…
You have a lovely and fascinating blog. Happy New Year. :)
January 1, 2015 at 6:44 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Celtic Blood, Cherokee Blood, and Nature's Earthly Spirits

By
Image
Helen Terry Dunton c. 1912 When I asked my redheaded Great Aunt Violet, who died many years ago but in whose western saddle I still ride, to tell me what she remembered about my paternal grandmother, she said, "Well, besides being a crack shot with a rifle, Helen was part Irish, and part Cherokee , and that wasn't a very good thing to be back then."   Auntie Vi was from the Dunton clan, my father's clan. "We have Scots blood," was the pronouncement, and I took it to mean that Scots blood was somehow superior to the Irish blood my grandfather had married into.  The Cherokee blood was rarely mentioned, and never with "princess" lineage claims. I continue to research this claim but have found no direct lineage tying me to enrolled ancestors, only the names of distant cousins and ties to Cherokee communities in Oklahoma such as Wauhillau and Stillwell. Beyond the American Pale In David M. Emmons book, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in t
READ MORE »

The Moral Dilemma of My Mother's Mink: Earning Our Place in the World

By
Image
My mother’s mink stole and two fur collars, one sable, one white, have been hanging in the back of my closet since she died five years ago.  I remember how beautiful she looked to me as a child when she wore her mink—how the soft fur graced her bare sloping shoulders and showed off her own mother’s strand of pearls—how proud my father looked as he offered my mother his arm. The mink stole symbolized to my father his ability and desire to provide for my mother (not unlike what his grandfather must have felt when he dragged a deer back to his waiting wife). Old Fugate Sawmill, Stringtown, OK read essay My grandmother never wore a mink stole, though.  She had been born in Indian Territory—the child of a laboring, mixed-blood family that logged for the railroad companies as they laid track from Arkansas and Kentucky and Oklahoma west to Washington.  Judging from old family photos, they ate a lot of deer meat—and rabbit.  Members of the weasel family, no doubt, provided food and fur an
READ MORE »

The Crows Who Knew the Fox Who Knew My Mother

By
Image
Always, in the month of May, I feel my mother's presence in the untamed view outside our windows (which was once her view), in the mountain neighbors who once knew her, even in the noisy crows who congregate in the gangly ponderosas in our yard. The elders of this crow family might have been youngsters when Mom was alive, growing as she aged, recognizing her just as they recognized the mother fox and each new set of kits who denned below the house. Mom loved nature, and walks in the woods, but she also loved Japanese art, exotic travels, world-class museums, good books, classical music, Darjeeling tea, and French food. She never had these things growing up, which is perhaps why, later in life, she loved them so much. She loved Van Gogh, but not as much as she loved Claude Monet. A print of Monet's Japanese Bridge  found its way onto every bedroom wall I had as a child.   I've been re-reading my old journal entries from 2004, when my mother's valient struggles with cance
READ MORE »