The Carry Home by Gary Ferguson

Author:Gary Ferguson [Ferguson, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024021
Publisher: Counterpoint

THANKSGIVING

Twenty years before our disaster on the Kopka, I’d been asked by a publisher in New York to gather a collection of nature myths from around the world—small, bite-sized stories about the making of earth’s wonders. I talked to storytellers. Listened to old recordings by anthropologists. I went again and again into the stacks of major university folklore collections, combing through more than a thousand tales from every continent. Three months into the research it dawned on me that without fail, every story was holding up one or more of three qualities essential to living well in the world.

The first of those qualities was a relationship with beauty. The sort of relationship that grows out of quiet, intensely focused moments. Not shutting out the rest of the world; instead, being present enough to see the world through the shine of whatever beautiful thing is in front of you. The stories suggest that, while beauty may be fleeting, there is great reliability to it—a reliability so unerring, in fact, that it can pull the imagination to higher callings, to the outer edges of the eternal. Beauty is the moon Neruda wrote about, “living in the lining of your skin.”

The second quality showing up in those stories was community—not just among humans, but with every aspect of creation. A sense of deep belonging—one that carries us out of the little room where loneliness lives into a wide world of ever-present embrace. Of sunlight in our bones and rivers in our blood.

The third had to do with the need to cultivate an appreciation for mystery, welcoming places or situations where the world seems utterly unfathomable. Not as some first step in figuring things out, but as the first step in giving up trying. It’s a call to accept the fact that a great many curiosities about this life will never be answered, and further, that real peace is reserved for those happy to live day after day in the questions.

In that first winter after Jane died, I started rereading those tales I’d found: Butterflies Teach Children to Walk, given to me by an old Ojibwa woman; an ancient tale from Java called The Forest and the Tiger; and from West Africa, The Birds Find Their Homes. In recalling those three essential qualities needed to live well in the world, by making them what I thought about when I woke up and again when I went to sleep at night, I started to understand just what it was I’d lost touch with in the underworld of grief.

“Our stories hold life’s lessons,” said the Ojibwa elder who’d given me the butterfly story. “Bad things always get worse when you forget the lessons.”

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