THE GHOSTS OF PLACE AND MEMORY

Today, in the unseasonably warm, dry and gusty sunshine of a late February afternoon—the kind of day that murmurs the veiled promise of future wildfire—I decide to go for a long, restless walk on a treeless plain, looking for whatever it is I’m always looking for out here under this withering ascetic sky.

Sometimes, in old places where time as it is experienced by modern humans is of less consequence, we still see glimpses of how the world used to be, and it reminds us that we, too, were once of that world.

So it is on the plains. I walk for miles across ruin and loneliness and wind keening through the bones of a long-ago dream, across ground that once held hope now buried and forgotten, slowly grown back into what it should remain, what it was before the hand and plow of man tried to shape it in his image and desire.

Now it is grass, and the light of my soul feels diffused out here, filtered through a lens of my own imagining, pulsing on a wavelength only I can see, watching as little pieces of myself scatter into the endless void.

In the fall I will follow the dogs across this same landscape, seeking the birds and solace that sustain me, but today, with the season now passed into memory, it is just myself and those things which always follow me, which always follow all of us.

So I walk. I walk slowly, without destination or purpose. But far, always far, because is always on my mind, these things; distance from them, or distance to them.

Trees are few, scattered, and solitary in this landscape, and the scarcity of their shade makes it sweeter when you find it.

Eventually I stop to rest, drink some water, and lean back against the rough bark of a gnarled old hackberry tree slowly dying in the feral yard of a long-abandoned, disintegrating house perched on the unyielding, implacable horizontal endlessness of the plains.

And there, under the stark, leafless shade of bare branches pointed like bones reaching into the sky, I sit and think, pondering the scene before me.

Sky trickles through the house’s sagging, partially collapsed roof. The stone foundation has splayed outward, causing the walls to cant inward at an angle. It stands, but precariously so, and sometime soon the prairie will reclaim this space that had long ago been taken from it.

Nothing beneath the sky lasts, of course. Even that which seems permanent eventually falls. The trick is to fall gracefully, and I wonder, as I sit there, if there will be anyone here but the ghosts, doomed to watch their dream collapse as it finally succumbs to the inevitability of time and gravity.

There is a rusty, ancient basketball hoop nailed above the garage door, and I wonder when - what year, or what decade - a ball was last tossed through it, whatever happened to the child who tossed it?

Where are they now? Still alive? Do they remember playing on this old goal, or ever think about it? What made them move away? Were they happy here? Do they miss it?

An old, cracked leather boot sits atop a weathered and broken windowsill. Beyond it, in a bedroom now open to wind and rain and sky, lies a mattress long since chewed down to the bedsprings and carted off to be made into nests by this old home’s new occupants. Plaster flakes off the walls, revealing the bones beneath.

Someone built this house all those years ago. Someone wanted a home here, once. Their hearts said yes. The land said otherwise. Such is the human condition, in most things of love, land, and life, and such it will always be.

Why? Why?

Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to lonely places; questions, always questions, for which there will never be answers.

Sitting there, I do not find any answers to questions perpetual or fleeting, pressing or idle, but I don’t mind. Answers usually only beget more questions, anyway.
Life is attrition. You lose things along the way. People. Purpose. Meaning.
The incessant din of existence and expectation, the rush of crowds and noise and busyness drowning out the soul music struggling to play in your head.

So you put your head down, grind it out, and dream of a walk through achingly beautiful and incredibly lonely country where there is nothing to distract but thought and sky and wind so you can hear that music again.

I will never be so at ease as when I am so exposed to the silent, searing judgement of space and sky.

It reminds me that we negotiate an endless stream of human relationships over the parabola of our lives, yet we genuinely connect with so few of them that we turn to other things as proxies for the human intimacy, human trust, human understanding, and human empathy we are all hard-wired to crave.

I am no different, and for as long as I’ve been able to feel, the opiate of space has been mine. Sky and solitude are the poultice for that which brings me pain and leaves me empty.

When I am burned by the inevitability of human betrayals and disappointments both petty and profound, fleeing into the void is my salve.

When I feel overwhelmed by the artificial constructs of life, one long walk through wind-bent grass waving endlessly across the slanting light and those constructs are lifted.

When I have troubled questions and no one in which to trust and confide, I sit atop a hill, whisper my questions to the wind, and the wind answers to me alone, without guile or duplicity.

So if you ever find yourself lost, or lonely, or seeking answers, get out of whatever suffocating place you are in, find a clean horizon, and start walking. And that’s about all I know in the way of life coaching.

My questions exhausted, my water gone, the sweat on my brow evaporated in the dry, ceaseless prairie wind, I get up from that old hackberry, shoulder my pack, pick up my walking stick, and leave the ghosts to the loneliness of their haunting and their waiting.

By the time I get back to the truck, I feel lighter, like I’ve left something behind.

But of course, I always feel that way after a long, silent walk in lonely, haunted places.

Wander the emptiness long enough, and all the extraneous will be scoured away and you will find the bones of yourself, somewhere out there in the grass.