Why We Left Paradise

Once in a blue supermoon you have to entertain an experiment.

You can lose yourself in the expectations of your community. You can dissolve into a role. You can identify with whatever social requirements offer status, recognition, survival, hope. You can refuse to see that the mind is impersonal, doing its thing, passing along the same intergenerational patterns and habits that made your ancestors. You can lose yourself in colonialism without even recognizing that it’s happening.

But then, you can wake up to the awareness that what you are is this vibrant beingness.

All of it.

Photo by Neil Rosenstech on Unsplash

What’s leading us into a nomadic existence is a desire to follow an experience of aliveness. We are giving up former notions of home—we have given up half of our belongings and sold our house in Banff—and we are surrendering association with a particular land. This is part of an experiment that feels necessary.

My partner, Richard, is going on this journey to understand those who live in ways he doesn’t know. My intention in becoming more nomadic is to see what life is like without home. To quit former notions and habitual responses to community. Instead, I want to center wilderness and art. I want to know who we are when we’re not obligated to routine and domesticity and civilization.

This means that I’m dropping any expectations for myself to relate to other people. I’m suspending clients. For the rest of the year, I’m not teaching. I might not exist in my friend’s lives, or in any social media interactions. (I also might choose to interact, but not addictively or from duty. I’m leaving any choice to the moment.) I may quit my writing unless I want to do it. In many ways, my partner and I are ending our former relationship, and opening to tracking who we are becoming as we’re on the road, seeing where this wandering takes us. Living without loans, promises or status might be an anarchist’s dream, a refusal of the power-mongering that keeps us in time/money debt. I don’t know. There is just a sketch of a plan. Few things are clear.

I could look back to my past and say this experiment is a reaction to being a lifelong responsible one, an eldest daughter, a caregiver to a partner with cancer and a brain injury, a woman with 25 years of recovery, a mother to two resilient and creative adult children, a former manager, and a late-blooming artist, however, I think this experiment is bigger than my history.

I re-entered Banff seven years ago¹ with a mysterious request from a particular mountain range who asked for a reciprocal relationship. Then, I didn’t know what reciprocal meant. Over time, I discovered that Banff was not a commodity to be taken by tourists and capitalists, but that these mountains were offering gifts with an implicit responsibility placed upon the receiver. This means that humans are responsible to return the favor of the wilderness by offering the earth an equal measure of respect and care. As I hiked Banff’s trails, followed its light, gave in to its wind patterns, learned its weather, walked down its avalanche-cleared paths, navigated its rivers, witnessed the ways of its animals, let it take my illness, I began to see that mountains were training me to embody them. I gave back to them my protection. I remained an activist for a move away from business interests dominating the town’s perspectives. I argued for more mental health services and boundaries for the young and transient people increasingly addicted to substances. I talked to leaders about the dangers of fossil fuel reliance.

And there were riskier, tougher decisions.

Living in a tourist town, even in seemingly benevolent Canada,² means that we sometimes hide the truth from ourselves. Because we want to see ourselves as visitors see us—a place and people that have preserved a striking wildness and beauty—we don’t reckon with the harm we are causing in arrogant uses of the land. A consideration of reciprocity meant that we would not leave our home vacant while we traveled. Even if we could afford it, we would not take homes in other places. We had to make way for a community that needed more spaces to live for its resident workers. Living in Banff National Park, we could see reductionist and materialist agendas that brought more visitors in cars every day (breaking park attendance records this summer.) Our job was to be honest with ourselves about what was happening, and to reckon with our choices. For us, choosing to leave our home aligned with the alchemy of giving back to the mountains.

“A gift comes to you,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”

We want to move toward creating a life aligned with a gift economy. In doing so, we have to be willing to ask the questions that encompass both scientific knowledge and a kind of loving devotion to the earth. Wandering is a way to situate oneself, to learn to be nimble and flexible, to read the landscape quickly, to see what happens when we relinquish the trade of freedom for security. We don’t know what we’ll discover. We have to enter into the questions and see what’s revealed. I hope to write about it from the road.

Shortly after arrival in Banff for the first time, around 1986 with the littles. Photo by Alec Pytlowany.

This is what I want you to know—every one of my hikes these past years was a gratitude walk. The mountains taught me how to do this.

And then there are gifts that are so enormous you can scarcely speak of them. Like what happens when you become the thing that you believed was separate from you.

The week I left my former home I dreamed I was a giant mountain birthing stones. I wondered if the mountain was also dreaming me.

Writing in the Canadian Rockies, shortly after arrival in 2016. Photo by Richard Bandy.

Today, we fly to Dublin to eat some fish and chips and hang with the Irish and the world at the Fringe Festival. Then Greece, Italy, Portugal, France and the UK. These are journeys I’ve been dreaming of for a long time. We will be wandering through 2023, maybe beyond.

If you’d like to support my writing with a paid subscription, I’d be grateful.

In September, I’ll be sending along experiences from the journey, including food, arts, events, interviews and more. Please invite your friends to join me.

More Wanderings:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.” This essay on writing from Annie Dillard.

“Disavowing politics in art, to me, is often a sign of not acknowledging how one’s self and one’s art is privileged, normative, and invested invisibly in dominant ways of power, inequality, and amnesia.” Get this in your body, from Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Book Abundance. I swear, I gave away boxes of books to my town’s library and friends, and I still ended up moving a dozen boxes to a storage unit. Dealing with your growing book collection.

Happy autumn friends,

Sonya

You can find Sonya at~

My Instagram.

My Website.

The podcast I did with my kid.

1. The first time we lived in Banff it was 1983-1990. The second time was 2016-2023.

2. Only 13 of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action promised in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been completed. You can follow more here at Beyond 94, and here at the Yellowhead Institute.