Perfection of the Morning (9 page)

My first novel had been about eight pages long, and when I showed it to my mother she’d been very excited and pleased, too, and had helped me make a construction paper cover for it and had found a length of bright red wool in her knitting basket with which we tied it together. I will always be grateful to her for her help and especially for her enthusiasm, which even as a child I could see was genuine. I am sorry to say that my little book was lost years ago. I even have a vague but not too trustworthy memory of throwing it away myself in disappointment and frustration because what I had thought was so wonderful, magical almost, and laden with meaning meant nothing to anyone else but my mother, and neither of us knew exactly what it meant or what to do about it.

The day as an adult I thought of writing a novel was hardly different emotionally from that day in great excitement as a child I had first made that decision. Now, thirty years later, I was beginning to believe that the person inside me had always been a writer, more specifically a novelist, that I would never consider myself a writer until I had written a novel.

Although I grew more serious about it with every piece I wrote, for the time being writing was still a hobby. My stories were about
the agricultural people and agricultural life around me. I wasn’t yet using writing as an instrument of self-knowledge, although I had already begun that first, surprising probing into what really makes the world go round: people’s motivations, their secret, even unconscious desires, what they must surely love or hate, revealed not by what they declared but teased out from the way they moved their bodies, or blinked or looked away, by their actions, or by small, half-heard asides.

At the same time as, with such delight and wonder, I was taking my first tottering steps as a writer, it is surprising to look back on the record in my journals of my loneliness and unhappiness. That is, as fascinating as writing was from the very beginning, and as fulfilling as it came to be, it was no magic elixir to cure whatever seemed to be ailing me. My dramatic change in lifestyle, compounded by the joint decision to allow my son Sean to go to high school in the city, had precipitated a profound personal and spiritual crisis. The record in my journals of this psychic struggle, mixed with my learning to be a writer, is confused and convoluted, its many parts so intertwined that they can’t be extricated and set in a neat row: first this, then this, then this.

I had set out on one life as a young woman of twenty-one; I had struggled down that path for fourteen years when suddenly I had come to a gaping hole, an impassable, black abyss into which the path had broken off and disappeared. I looked back, but the path I had walked on for so long was now filled with cracks and obstacles and places where it was obliterated. I could not go back; I could not go forward. I had closed my eyes and leaped, and when I opened them again I found myself in another country where I didn’t speak the language or know the customs, where I was an outsider, an intruder, an alien, where I was alone.

I became more and more meditative, examining encounters over and over again from every direction, sometimes blaming others, sometimes blaming myself for what seemed clear to me was my failure to fit in. I questioned my own motivations and my behavior and my true desires. Was I argumentative? Was I unkind? Was I difficult? Was I peculiar? Yes, I answered to all four, and a lot more besides. But if I was self-critical, bewildered, saddened, sometimes belligerent, the more profound effect on me was to make me write in my journal in the spring of 1980, four years after my arrival,
I feel invisible here and dead.
At the very moment I was sensing my artistic power, I was facing a spiritual crisis of profound proportions.

Peter never changed. I often thought how well named he was, a rock, and how fortunate I was to have his calm, stability and strength beside me during such a time. He went about his daily round of work year after year, altering the pattern of it if he grew bored, keeping an eye on the markets and on the weather and on flow of events in the world of agriculture, considering himself to be one of the blessed in that he had his place in which to live out his life doing what he loved. He went about his business and I went about mine, and we took comfort in each other’s presence. Every morning he got up and went out to work in the fields cutting and baling and hauling hay, chasing cows or rounding them up, doctoring or feeding them, calving, branding, weaning. He was often gone from first light to last. I never told him of the anguish I was going through. I never told anyone.

But not only was my new life starting to change the way I felt, it was starting to change the way I perceived the world. Sitting on horseback I would watch the thousand-pound, horned range cows as they plodded past me with their calves on the way to water and I would be thinking about the sheer mystery of them, studying them
to feel their consciousness, what it was they saw and smelled and knew. Once I asked, a little tentatively, “They really aren’t very smart, are they?” and Peter replied after a moment, sounding a bit surprised, but too polite to simply disagree and having his own problems with articulating what he knew, “They know what they need to know.” “Smart,” as I was using the word, I came to understand in time, was simply a wrong-headed way to think about animals.

Living in the midst of distance, in a world where distance was an entity and not a mere dimension, the vast, omnipresent sky beginning to feel more like a creature than mere space, although I wasn’t consciously aware of it, were all working away inside me, beginning to enact profound changes in my city-dweller’s psyche. If I merely felt twinges of something beyond awe and pleasure in the beauty around me, I didn’t ponder what those twinges were, or even clearly conceptualize them.

I had begun to dream my strange, powerful, beautiful dreams more frequently. I would awake in the morning and recall them clearly and in every detail. They stunned me and filled me with awe. I knew I could not simply forget them; I felt certain that each one meant something and that it was imperative to find out what it was. Perhaps they held the key to my growing despair.

Immediately after the owl-eagle dream I bought a simple dream book, but its entries seemed silly and quixotic. I didn’t know what it was I was looking for, but I knew this wasn’t it. I grabbed at clues wherever I found them; in my reading I followed up references that looked pertinent, and from the references I followed further ones. I haunted bookstores when I was in the city, searching the shelves, I did not know precisely for what. As I grew more and more compulsive about this, certain books began to seem to jump off the shelf at
me, books I hadn’t heard of and knew nothing about. If, on a crowded shelf, I saw a book grow bright and separate before my eyes, I bought it, took it home and read it with total absorption.

I have no explanation for the way in which certain books which I knew nothing about, in a way rather like magical objects in fairy tales, or the cakes that in
Alice in Wonderland
bore labels that said “Eat me” would call my attention to them. I felt I was being helped in my quest for Self; I didn’t try to discover by whom. If nothing else, I’d been raised to believe in guardian angels; it didn’t, therefore, seem impossible to me that one who was truly, honestly searching might find help.

One of these books was Robert Monroe’s
Journeys Out of the Body
, which I was embarrassed to be seen buying and read with skepticism. In a different class was Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Denial of Death
, which I had never heard of till the day in a bookstore when it seemed to order me to buy it. I regard it now as one of the most important books I’ve read because it clarified and put into perspective a nebulous world of ideas about the nature of humanity I had never even attempted to articulate in my life, much less strung together into a coherent whole, but which now had become the issues I was grappling with.

One day early on in this quest, in the university bookstore in Saskatoon, I came across three massive hardcover books in a sale bin:
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
,
The Golden Bough
, and a peculiar work called
Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths.
I could hardly believe my eyes. I would never have been able to afford them if they hadn’t been on sale, and that they were at that moment in my life seemed no accident at all but something akin to divine intervention. I bought all three and carried them home as if they were a king’s treasure. I keep remembering—I think it’s a Sufi belief—the
saying that when the pupil is ready, the teacher will come. My teacher was to be books.

I devoured them: from Jung to Joseph Campbell to the Bible and
Bullfinch’s Mythology
, from William James and Evelyn Underhill to Thomas Merton. My experiences out on the prairie with their mystical nature and my dream-life, together with my ruminations coming out of all that reading, were working to take me into books about mysticism itself. Then, in what seemed to me a natural progression, I began to read about Buddhism, Sufism, Taoism.

I could hardly believe I’d spent nine years on a university campus without ever dipping into any of these thinkers, could hardly believe I had thought myself educated, or that I knew anything at all about the world. I went about my household tasks, went riding with Peter, socialized with the neighbors, went for long daily walks, while all the while in outer silence, a whole new intellectual life was blooming inside me. With no one to talk about these things, appalled in any case at the very thought of telling anyone of the tremendous, life-threatening journey on which I had been launched, I turned to my journals to record my journey.

I didn’t see it clearly at the time, but I was undergoing psychoanalysis, with myself as therapist to my own soul, for reading Jung to the extent I did and with such intensity I couldn’t help but examine my own history, the story of my own life, which I began to mentally write, and sometimes put in my journal, for the first time. I began to comprehend that until I understood my own life I would not understand anything at all, and that I could not go on trying to found a new life for myself, trying to make myself into a new person, till I had some clarity about my old life.

While I had never thought of my childhood as idyllic, my conscious memories had been of being a family, of the constant, if sometimes
reluctant, companionship of my four sisters, of aunts and uncles and cousins by the dozen, of family picnics, Christmas gatherings, summer holidays, evenings at home reading books and listening to the radio, and in later years watching television. Now I began to ponder about the parts that I had always dismissed as unimportant incidents in a field of family warmth and closeness.

I began to examine my assumptions about myself, my place in my family, how my family had acted on me to make me into whatever it was I had become. I dredged up significant events I’d completely forgotten or had buried because they were too painful to think about. I began to understand, as a trivial example, the reasons why certain people in my childhood had been especially kind to me, something I’d always been greatful for, but had never considered before as needing an explanation. I examined over and over again my never very satisfactory relationship with my mother. I set myself exercises: what is the earliest thing I can remember?

I remembered, in answer to this, being in the northern part of the province where I’d been raised, on a gloomy, windy, cold day, either spring or fall. The memory begins with an adult who had been carrying me, setting me down to play in the roots of an old willow tree. I was bundled up in warm clothing and I had toys beside me. Across the way from me my older sister sat in the roots of another willow with her toys. I recall the scene from inside that two- or three-year-old’s psyche: everything grayed and colorless, myself crying hard and loud, but most of all I remember how the world seemed utterly without hope or joy or love. I feel only absolute hopelessness; it is not coherent enough to call despair, but it is totally encompassing.

The next earliest childhood memory is much the same: I’m not crying, but the room in which I stand with my father and mother
and sister seems so cold, not physically but emotionally, that the scene might be carved out of ice.

I have no idea what was happening in either scene and there is no one I can ask. In any case, there are no clues to place either event in the family history. They belong to an emotional history only, and to nobody else’s but my own. I record them only to illustrate what I began to believe is an emotional bent I have toward despair; that is, that in my psyche the possiblity for despair, having been there from my infancy, is always closest to the surface, I suspect more so than in most people. Now, deeply, irreparably wounded by the breakdown of my first, fourteen-year marriage, I didn’t need many bad experiences in my new life to bring it back to the surface.

I had begun to search my own soul for some grounding, some
thing
that was
me
, truly me, so that I might build on it and make myself into a person again. I began to see that I had never been my Self in the first place, that I had spent my life being what others had wanted me to be and as a result, never having rebelled, never having said
no
to anybody, I had no Self, or the self I was using, not being the true one, was thoroughly unstable, easily shaken, even destroyed. I was thrashing about in the ways I knew—reading, writing stories, thinking while out walking on the prairie by myself—for clues as to how one did this monumental work of self-creation.

I kept reading, searching for a point of view about life and ideas about a way to live that would be an anchor to cling to, or a beacon to guide me. I read St. John of the Cross—he of the dark night of the soul—till, appalled and angered, I threw him across the room. His ideas were fine if you were a monk—and who would be ill-advised enough to want to be a monk?—but I was daughter, sister, wife and mother. My world was grounded in my body; to deny my body, as he said, was tantamount to dying, and
while that might make sense to men, it emphatically made none to me—worse, seemed downright sinful—for what had God given us this earthly life and such infinite beauty in which to live if he did not want us to use it and to enjoy it? The Christian mystics, the women, seemed utterly deluded to me; the sexuality of the language in which they wrote about their love of God embarrassed me.