Wandering Lesser-Known Worlds

This gallivanting will eventually end for all of us.

Lake bed and autumn leaves, Banff, 2021

Many nights it’s difficult for me to sleep through until morning. I wake at hour four, or about halfway, the ancient sleep cycle of a break in the middle to snack, play, and make love. Being awake in the middle of the night is common now, and not upsetting. In this quiet space I find myself imagining a story I’m writing, or listening to a talk on nondual philosophy, or offering up gratitude to the beings who live around me. I usually fall asleep within an hour or so, and then wake again before dawn.

I’m writing this on Day 14 of Covid, which I’ve luckily avoided until now. Some of these nights of being sick have been tumultuous, and for a time, included isolating myself from my partner. We’re good at taking care of each other. I learned how to be a caretaker as the eldest of four children, and too, during his cancer surgeries and brain injury, which I have written about.

In the last few years, my partner had the experience of nursing me back to health, after I was diagnosed with a rare disorder and treatments kept failing. We know what the other needs during illness and recovery, and also, we know what the other will resist. (He dislikes sleeping alone, and I am impatient to get back to my walks and work.) These past two weeks we tried to settle into a contained life. He made me miso-chocolate cookies, and this cottage version of spanakopita. Once I could get out of bed, I made us jambalaya, with a rich, spicy broth and perfect rice. The most I wandered these past two weeks has been from our sunny bedroom to the hot tub in the clouds of snow in our backyard.

There’s misnomers about wandering. One is that wandering always means you’re seeking something outside yourself. Another is that we need space and distance for wandering. Pilgrimages, pathfinding, adventuring, journeying, walking, circuiting—even the root of wandering is from the aerobic wandern, to hike. But when one experiences disability due to any kind of condition, there’s often little possibility of trekking over distance. The wandering turns smaller in scale, or inward, where it must be located. The body may not be in movement in any conventional way, but slighter doesn’t indicate a trivial meaning or a lesser territory.

In this pandemic, when I was sick and often had to quarantine due to an immune suppressing treatment, I became more aware of the great impact that illness, disability, and death have had on so many of us. Some of my friends were already reckoning with bodies limited in their ability to perambulate or ascend or peripatetically roam. This gallivanting will eventually end for all of us. But being sometimes bedridden and needing to move slowly these past years has shown me that significance doesn’t necessarily lie in the great sojourn, the powerful expedition, or as some say without self-awareness where I live in Banff National Park, the ability to ‘bag six mountains in a day.’ How capitalistic and colonial is that notion? What is the Instagrammed excursion used for anyway, if not to bolster status, deify identity?

Instead, there’s the possibility of a metamorphosing shift when one is stuck in bed. Of the wandering into intimate, less known worlds. I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from Sophie Strand, from “A Year of Otherness:”

“The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.”

I was never so intrigued by the exquisite magic of observing what we might overlook as when I first saw the photorealistic work of forest floors and tidal pools in the paintings of Dulcie Foo Fat. A young mum, working at the Whyte Museum (the first time we lived in Banff,) I remember her canvases making it seem like my nose was pressed into the ground, inhaling the lichen. The landscape was microscopic, but not minor, certainly no less complicated and rich than towering vistas. The more I let myself gaze here, the more that I could sense that this was an enormous pulse of life. Foo Fat’s work recharacterized my experience of hiking and exploring, she brought me down to where I could register another reality, one I had not yet related to as an adult. Today, I photograph the details of the forest because of her. The intimate scale of her work does not limit; it is a necessary transmitter of what couldn’t be observed at a larger, vaster plane. Of course, the seeing of mystical small ones came when I was engaged with being with a baby and a toddler, crawling into their worlds.

This week, while I was up in the middle of the night, nerves frayed, throat sore, pulling a sweat-soaked nightgown from my body, an image of one afternoon in my life kept coming back to me. One autumn day, I’d returned from another hospital where I’d experienced an intense allergic reaction to an intravenous drug and had gone into anaphylactic shock. Four treatments over the same number of years had failed, leaving me with a limited number of lifesaving measures to intervene in case of a brain bleed, or other kind of accident. The doctors had asked me to stop going into the backcountry because it was too far from a hospital. I was asked to cancel planned adventures and even bike rides, where a fall might imperil me. I’d been in too many cancer wards during the pandemic where our kin were not allowed into the room. We-the-confined asked for the smallest things in those places—ice, blankets, our chair to be placed in the beam of sunlight.

My partner had waited in the parking lot until the nurses called him in when they expected to transport me to the emergency room for a dose of adrenaline. Instead, they shot me full of antihistamines, and I’d rallied. On this afternoon, he’d brought me home, given me soft pillows and a cup of tea. I was weak, and morose, wondering how I was going to sustain enough energy to get to a mountain, or finish a book. The sicker that I was, the more silent I had become. I felt as if I was disappearing from my own view, and that my voice was tenuous, restrained. I sat on the bed looking out to the twilight cascading across the lawn. And then I felt him carry me toward a chair on the grass, and he placed me there facing a golden tree shimmering ecstatic leaves.

We were trembling together, she and I, white poplar at the end of her season. I’d known this one all year, watched her bud and green. I knew that these populus tremuloides were dying in this territory, led by declining frost days, a drier climate, little regeneration, a forest turning to a prairie. She cast her last shining days over my torso, those gilt turns in the wind cascading shadows. The sun moved through the veins of the leaves and the veins in my skin. We called her a quaking aspen, but she was tremulous and free, a sign to me that unsteady needn’t be missing anything. There wasn’t a sense of other here as much as of one self, with no desire to seek. No need to bolster personality, recognition, restitution, reward. We were, all of us, moving, wandering in the same stillness.

Elk crossing the river, Banff, 2020.

(Alas I can’t find an image of my trembling poplar, so you’ll have to imagine it.)

If you’d love to explore all kinds of wandering, including the beauty and quiet of a retreat in these mountains that I love, here’s a retreat that the brilliant Suzanne Morrison and I are planning this spring":

Writing in the Wild Retreat in Banff National Park.

April 28 - May 1, 2023.

• An eco-conscious hotel with magnificent views.

• Two mentors to guide you.

• Spacious time to write and think. Nourishing food.

• Days to explore the wilderness. Nights under a vast sky.

• We make a safe space for marginalized people.

• Rooms with a view booking now. Held at the exquisite Juniper Hotel in Banff.

• From $840 US.

“I’ve never known anyone to create an environment like this.” ~Natalia.

More information here.

“Thanks for helping me kick open a giant blocked cave entrance tightly shut since I was 18…You created a safe, resourced environment that supported me to share my story without expectations except as a process/experiment,” ~Lisa, Seattle.

“I’ve worked with Sonya in a group workshop, face to face, and online. These opportunities were enlightening and inspirational for me. Her considerate feedback, delivered in her soft spoken and confident way, assures her participants are learning and growing in their writing craft.” ~ Hon. Karen Sorensen, Senator, Alberta Rockies.