A Living Being, Feeling the Sun
Watercolour, graphite and inktense pencil of paper, by Rami Schandall ©2021.
I am working on a book that follows the lives of several families in the early 1900s, in a very rugged and remote part of the west coast. I have been reading widely many writers from that time period, to understand more deeply how that literature depicted it’s own time, to get a feel for how people understood the historical moment from within it. One of the writer’s I have come to read in this quest is Willa Cather, with her incisive observations of gender and class in A Lost Lady, and the story of an orphaned settler boy in My Antonia. She writes this 10-year-old character, Jim Burden, with great tenderness. A gentle, observant soul, the narrator and his brother have traveled from Virginia to live in Nebraska with their grandparents. The child is inspired by such an exquisite and different landscape, and in passages very early in the text, he delivers two profound teachings that sound buddhist to me. I do not know whether Cather was knowledgeable of eastern philosophy, or if she came to this observation naturally, in her own experience of that same landscape as a young child.
Here is Willa Cather, writing the voice of Jim Burden, in My Antonia (1918). First, traveling by wagon under the open, night sky:
The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.
And a little later, Jim asks his grandmother to leave him be alone a little while in the garden, a 1/4 mile from the house:
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers curried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
How beautifully this works as a guide to calm abiding: present moment remembering, in sensual detail, the depth of simply being a living thing, feeling the warmth of the sun.
In synchronicity, Anam Thubten writes this month:
Even outside of a spiritual context, we human beings can often enter a realm of mind where the ego’s typical mental chatter goes away for a time. We then drop into a pure moment where our internal neuroses are no longer operating. That can happen when we observe a wonder of nature, such as a waterfall cascading from the top of a tall mountain, or the sky at sunset turning bright red where it meets the sea.
