In the depths of winter, I found that within me there lay an invincible summer. (Camus)
No one but you can build the bridge upon which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. (Nietzsche)
As I write, the view from the window beside me reveals a winter’s dawn creeping over the valley, light just beginning to spread over the still darkened mountain. A nor’easter is supposed to head up the East Coast today, only rain, no snow here in the valley, so no white Christmas. Yet.
My sister and I will be heading out soon on our usual Sunday morning ride, our search for the ultimate back road, our time to talk of “of shoes snd ships and sealing wax— of cabbages and kings — and why the sea is boiling hot — and whether pigs have wings,” our time to wander and wonder and connect. To remember. Our church service. Usually we have no plans and just let the wind take us, but today we are going back into the mountains, “up home,” to lay Christmas greenery and berries on my grandparents’ graves.
Usually it’s a very quiet and solitary time, and we often don’t see another soul, just invisible ones. The small country churches we pass have fewer than a half dozen cars out front; the numbers of the faithful are diminishing.
Perhaps this morning we will collect more river rocks from the spring that runs past the now deserted and derelict rocky mountain land on which my grandparents eked out a living and raised a family. My sister and I have often wondered why these people, our ancestors, chose such an inhospitable place to homestead, why they went so far back into the mountains on their long trek from the Old Country, why they didn’t settle in the richer farm lands of the valleys. Were they forced into that? Why did they want to be so far away from others? Fertile ground for the imagination, especially when stories abound of bootlegging and white witches and the spirits that haunt those old mountain hollows . . .
With the river rocks we’ve already collected, I’ve built cairns about our own land — heaps of stones, prayer altars, places of gratitude and remembrance, symbols that point the way — Indicators of a sacred journey . . .
Today is a week before Christmas Eve, a time when we will honor and remember another Journey. Regardless of your spiritual orientation, the Christmas story is a myth of wonder — not the sanitized version we so causally accept, but one of poverty and pain and raw fear, dirt and disaster . . .
Much like the ones our ancestors must have faced as they beat their way through the forests and mountain thickets to settle into these isolated and deserted hollows, driven by what forces, what fears, what dreams . . .