One of the testimonials in The Gathering, a collection of observations and analysis at the close of conversations and ceremonies that spanned thirty years between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous peoples living along the coastline of Maine, caught my attention. One Anglo woman confessed that before participating in the bi-annual "gatherings," she often felt physically displaced and disconnected from the land. An elder from the Wampanoag nation suggested that if it was at all possible, she visit the land of her ancestors before trying to settle into partnership with her "new" homeland. In time, this resulted in a sojourn to Ireland where she sensed a spiritual solidarity with the landscape and its caretakers: it felt like "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Within the parameters of her privilege, she finally relocated to Cape Cod, where her North American people first settled, and began to make a new life for herself at peace with the land - and in relationship with the Wampanoag people of Mashpee.
This is one of the varied gifts to be found in The Gathering: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relationships (ed. Shirley Hager/Mawopiyane, University of Toronto Press, 2021.) Serendipitously, while also reading John O'Donohue's posthumous anthology, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World, his insights about landscape shared something similar. He, too, recognized that all of us were born into a landscape that eternally feels like home. We can always leave it - for wayfaring or pilgrimage - but the physicality of a place will always be a part of our souls, too.
These two wildly different texts from geographically distant places and people clarified why I have long felt at home here in the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts. I was literally conceived in these parts as my newlywed parents honeymooned beside Lake Char-goggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Webster, MA. My paternal grandparents purchased lake front property there in the 1930's so that my father's father could serve local Unitarian congregations each summer. His Stamford, CT church would close every year between Memorial Day and Labor Day resulting in an extended down time with no income. My father, and then his children and his children's children, spent decades by this lake every summer - and sometimes in the fall and winter as well. Even as a small child I remember feeling a sense of ease wash over me as we made our way over the Berkshires on the way to "the Lake." Di and I spent a month there after our wedding ceremony, we've regularly vacationed there over five decades, and the cremains of my parents and late sister Beth still grace the waters of that hallowed place.
Following the lead of both the Gathering folk and O'Donohue, I first began to connect these emotional/spiritual/physical dots when Di and I journeyed to Iona. There was something about the west coast of Scotland in general - and Iona in particular - that evoked "home" to me. It was uncanny how an inchoate calm bubbled up from within as we settled down in this new/old place. The more we wandered Scotland, the more profound this resonance became. And I nearly wept when we stumbled up from a North Sea beach in Aberdeen into a small Indian restaurant where the owner asked my name: Lumsden, James Lumsden. "Well, welcome, then brother. I know the Lumsden clan well..." An unanticipated home coming of sorts to some of the best Indian food I've eaten followed along with copious amounts of the local brew. I felt that same growing inner warmth and rest when, driving out of NYC in February to interview for a post in the Berkshires, I saw the frozen browns and greys along the highway. "Lord," I thought to myself, "this looks and feels like home." And it was - and has become even more so over the past fifteen years. O'Donohue writes:
Landscape has a huge, pre-human memory. It precedes everything that we know. I often think that you could talk almost of a "clay-ography": the whole biography of the earth. Everything depends of course on whether you think landscape is dead matter or whether you thing it is a living presence.
The Indigenous participants in "the gatherings" made it clear to the settlers - and they are equally clear that this is the name that best describes those of us who arrived as colonizers - that they were welcome to live in harmony upon the land of their ancestors. But they must learn to live as a part of the land rather than as owners. There is a sacred partnership necessary so that everyone, the land included, can thrive. Only now, some 400+ years later, are we settlers starting to grasp what this means for ourselves, our families, for the First Nations people of this land, for sisters and brothers throughout creation, and for the land itself. I know this is true for me. Perhaps it is true as well for those finally awakened by the recent UN Report on Climate Change. As I head outside now, I'm moved by O'Donohue's poetic insights: In Praise of the Earth.
Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth,
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.
And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.
When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.
Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.
Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.
The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed’s self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.
The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.
The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.
Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.
Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.
That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.
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