Th.
Nephi Anderson (via Th.’s gravelly voice)
Mark Bennion
Tyler Chadwick
greenfrog
green mormon architect
Elizabeth R.

And, of course, many thanks to WIZ’s loyal readers and commenters.

I appreciate each writer’s help keeping People Month on WIZ interesting and fun.  We’ll do it again next year (maybe earlier), so start drawing up your People Month writing plans now.

At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the green.  Their colors—kite colors—catch at me.  I cross the field whispering, I’ve always wanted to try this!  An attendant helps me strap into the hang-glider.  I snap helmet and goggles in place and cast myself to the wind.

Well, it turns out I’m a natural.  Within me wakes the Aufklarung of flight, of orientation with the horizon and fearlessness in the face of movement ungrounded.  I spin course by stars I cannot see and trust in winds I do not control.  Over the green I soar, in accord with a finely drawn yet constantly changing map in my blood.  I both follow and make the map as I go.

Suddenly, there’s a wall!  I wheel to the right, only to find another, rising hundreds of feet into the air.  I turn on a wingtip and circle, but—another wall!  What do they mean?

Looking up, I realize that the odd tint to the sky is the shadow of a vast ceiling.  Skylights bubble outward, permitting glimpses of free air, yet it is a ceiling all the same.

I fly within these confines, skillfully using the space, but my condition has been reduced to that of a swallow trapped in a barn.  Looking at the skylights, I think, I must get my wings into that blue.

                                                                               * * * * *

The MRI shows that some conflagration has laid waste to more than a third of Mattea’s brain.  Water-filled cysts, like giant blisters, remain where portions of right and left lobes once were.  Genetic tests come back normal, and close scrutiny of birth records leads to the conclusion that, while the birth was precipitous, nothing about it could have resulted in destruction of such magnitude. 

Antibody screening, however, reveals an abnormally high count of anti-bodies in Mattea’s bloodstream and in mine for cytomegalovirus.  I’ve never heard of it; but as it turns out, it’s a common pathogen, found everywhere—one of the few able to cross the placenta and attack a fetus whose immune system has not yet armed to repel marauders.  The reality is staggering: Mattea suffered terrible damage from this organism while in my womb, and I hadn’t a clue.  I failed to protect her from something I didn’t even know existed.  The doctors’ assertions are severe: “blind and deaf,” “quadriplegic,” “no hope for self-reliance,” “needing a host of interventions.”  Some of these I know to be untrue, but the business of sorting through it all to figure out what is or what might be is maddening.  Where do we go from here?

                                                                               * * * * * 

Deeper into the canyon.  Like a tonic, the pollen dispels hesitation.  The world rushes through my seven-year fog of diffidence, nearly to the point of overwhelming me, yet my senses, wildly aroused, strive forward.    

Ravens’ voices rattle in the cliffs.  From time to time, I see a single black bird dip into the wind and sway from rim to rim.  Its lazy skimming across a cliff face provokes me.

A canyon wren calls, its song dropping like a pebble down the smooth face of silence.  These pebble-notes drop into my soul as if into a pool; ripples of pleasure spread out, then roll back on themselves.

As I walk, a phrase I’ve heard recently leaps to my mind: wilderness interface.  This term refers to areas where urban development has crept onto the rough ground of wilderness.  Craving relationships with Nature that has receded to areas no longer located near work or shopping, people build among the nearest native wildlife, then commute.  Such developments appeal to me, as they do to many others.  I mentioned my admiration for one to a friend who works for the U. S. Forest Service.

“A nice area,” she said.  “But as a Forest Service employee, I must point out it’s a wilderness interface.  The fire hazard is high there and the residents have just one path to safety so far.”  She spoke of the fact that the development is thickly wooded, with a single road leading into and out of this tinderbox.

Every year it happens somewhere in the West: wildfire, destroyer of the status quo.  Forest, meadow, human flesh, animal flesh, cabin, million-dollar home—it doesn’t matter.  Property rights go up in firestorms, resorts and last resorts reduce to ash.  Sometimes we fight such fires, trying to save that to which we feel we have a right—home.  At other times, it’s just too big.  We surrender all, risking to trust the new green sparking beneath ashes of incinerated old growth, new green often dependent, in fact, upon these very fires to prepare the ground for burgeoning.

What I feel as I hike through the canyon is like the chemical and muscular fires of childbirth.  It happens not because I will it—though conscious human will leads to points of ignition—but because, I think, the soul has its own wilderness interface area.  There the domesticated new brain meshes with the ancient wild one, and sudden fires ignited by lightning bolts of circumstance—vicissitudes—sweep through, burning everything to the ground.  Yet always, lying beneath the obvious and expected, old forms stir, ready to lift life to the next level.

Now I run toward the beauty of this place like a beggar to a table spread with shining delights.  But what’s here at hand or within sight isn’t enough.  And I don’t desire to devour it, but to get across it.  

How can I explain this?  At this moment I feel the ground I walk spinning with unnamed and uncounted bodies and forces through wide fields of possibilities.  The world I have lived in—a world of senses atrophied by focus upon domestic crises—falls away.  Perspective opens.  Stretching into blinding blue, I orient by stars I know are there.  And there.  And there.  In the stirring and shifting of lights I taste momentum and position as if on the tongue but can’t taste both at once.  It’s heady, like flying.  Well, it is flying—life rising to its next level.  Yes, I remember now: life craves living.  This trip is no longer about escaping captivity.  Now it’s about getting out.

__________________________________________________________

First published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Spring 2005): 119-129.

One of my hobbies is collecting words carrying the meaning of “understanding” and whose root words are bound up in the metaphorical pairing of perceiving and grasping—of aligning the focus of attention on something and the physical act of laying hold upon or seizing.  The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definition for “understand”: To perceive or comprehend the nature and significance of; grasp. See synonyms at apprehend.”  There follow three more definitions relying upon the words “comprehend” and “grasp.”  At the heart of both “apprehend” and “comprehend” lies the Latin root prehendere, “to seize.”

Here is a partial list of other words and phrases conveying the concept of understanding that contain root words set in the act of grasping or seizing:

apprehend
comprehend
comprehensive
prehend
apprehensive
grasp
get
prehension
seize
have hold of (an idea)
take hold of (an idea)
get hold of (an idea)
prehensile

The list goes on.  Interesting to know: the root of prehendere, “ghend,” meaning “seize,” “take,” runs deep into words like get, also formed from “ghend.”  The word beget means, at its depths, “acquire.”  Words like forget mean “lose one’s hold.”  The fun word guess means, at its playful roots, “try to get.”

Also related:

apprentice (formed from the past participle of apprehendere, “to seize”)
apprise (also from apprehendere)
comprise (from comprehendere)
reprehend (from prehendere)
prize (as in “something worth gaining,” from prehendere)

And so forth.

The root “ghend” likewise figures into words like predatory and prey.  Well, naturally.

I wonder what it means that so many of our words for knowing or learning rely so heavily on the physical fact of the structure of the human hand and its ability to close over or upon objects—on the act of manipulating or acquiring.  I’ve wondered how deeply this metaphoric take on knowing has affected the way we understand, form our worldviews, and otherwise approach being-in-the-world. 

What, I’ve mused, is knowing or understanding to creatures who don’t have hands or whose hand-like structures have become adapted for other purposes—you know, like birds’ wings are for flight?  In his book The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs notes that if you inspect the bones of bird wings, they will “anatomically correspond exactly to each human bone from the arm to the longest finger.  But in birds, the forelimb is compacted and simplified so that the wrist, hand, and fingers are fused into a single elongated bone.”  He concludes, “one of the more structurally advanced animals of the planet is the bird” (p. 101).

What is knowing to birds, whose tipmost wing feathers are able to spread on the moving, changing air like open fingers of an ungrasping hand?  If so many of our words for learning and knowing are based upon our all-important opposing thumbs and the mechanics of grasping, are birds’ conceptions of their being-in-the-world based upon the physical structure of the wing and its ability to gain lift?  Having watched swallows, swifts, and golden eagles as they work with wind flow and gravity, high above any perspective I can gain from my place on the cliff they zip by or wheel past, I’ve begun to think their language and being rides, so to speak, on the wing.

Personally, I think humans missed out when they chose opposing thumbs over wings.  This, though our ability to grasp and hold in part made it possible for us to conceive of and build airplanes.  And, using our hands, some of us can swim, something only a few birds can do.  It might be said we’ve got the best of all possible worlds, but I wonder if, at times, we might rely too heavily upon the this very basic action of grasping in defining ourselves in relation to the world around us.  At times, does knowing as a form of grasping lead us astray and cause us to miss that which cannot be seized upon?

Another thing—why do so many of us limb-grasping, ladder-climbing, hand-over-fist human beings dream of flying after we close our eyes at night?  Is this some yearning or understanding that exceeds our grasp-sense, maybe even carrying us beyond its reach?

When the mind opens to new awareness, is it actually “grasping” a new concept or is it letting go of  a favorite perch?  What is flying to humans, that we should dream of it when we let go of the day?

____________________________________________________________

Childs, Craig.  The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.