How can we sing the LORD’s song on foreign soil? – Psalm 137:4On Monday I did something I had been meaning to do all summer. I got the ramps out, loaded my ATV in the back of the truck, strapped it down and drove over to my nephew’s house. I unloaded the 4-wheeler, and my wife and I took it down to the old home place. We rode around a little. I showed her where Dad had bought moonshine as a seventeen-year-old during Prohibition, the foundation of the shack where my youngest sister was born, a fallen-in cellar lined with big, flat rocks, and our ‘tater patch.
The land is a like a museum for me. As I go over that ground, I travel time as well. I see the land as it is now – and it has changed a little in the half-century my memory covers – but, sometimes more clearly, I see it as it was. I see things, too, that are beyond my memory – the rail fences, the burned-over woodlands, the simple little cabins of rough lumber on stacked stone foundations, the ‘dug’ wells, the shocks of wheat, the haystacks, and, yes, the stills. I see chestnut sorrel horses both ridden and worked by small, wiry men with broad shoulders and big, hard hands.
I cannot imagine living without the roots of place and time, without a connection in soil and rock and water. Body and soul, we are cast into a mold -- be it formed of stones or concrete, soil or asphalt, trees or steel. The place where I grew up is mine. I’m sure a person who grew up in Brooklyn can feel something like the same sense walking down an avenue, seeing it as it is and as it was.
It is more than nostalgia, more than the longings of an old man for his lost youth, more, even, than the remembrance of all the loved ones of several species that have crossed that dark, foggy river and reached the bright shore. It is an expansion. Cast back into the mold, I am like a piece in a multi-dimensional puzzle. Alone and apart, I simply seem odd and awkward. In place, the picture is complete and comes alive.
So, too, it is in the Land of Promise. Some speak of a God-shaped void in the heart of man. I tell you there is a man-shaped void in the heart of God. There is a place where each of us fits as a living stone in the Temple.
Take your harp from the willow and sing; you are home.
5 comments:
This ties in remarkably well with today's installment of The War.
I noticed that. After I posted, I went over and read The War, and it made me wonder if somebody wasn't trying to tell me something.
Expansion. Multi-dimensional. Definitely a refined way of looking at roots. It's never a going back, is it? Instead, in going back, I feel a loosening as if it were only my shadow that passed through the past. Meanwhile here I am casting yet another shadow on a more corporeal future.
That makes no sense, except it does.
This was just lovely.
Yes, Joan, it is lovely. Beautifully written, Mushroom. It almost makes me want to go back to Sioux City, Iowa, where I spent the first seventeen years of my life.
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