Slowing down away from it all

Story by Terry Tempest Williams/Special to the Spokesman-Review, Photography by Brian Plonka
The Spokesman-Review

Brian Plonka - The Spokesman-Review Fall comes to a forest in north-central Washington filled with evergreens and larch. "O'er all the hilltops is quiet now. In all the treetops hearest thou hardly a breath." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet

Of course, this would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind, where each dialect was not only heard but understood.

Can we imagine such a livelihood?

I now live in a village in the desert. I have left the city, the hum, the rant, the hive. And it has taken my body months to slow down, to recover a rhythm in my heart that moves my body first and my mind second. I am learning that there is no such thing as wasting time, as whole days pass inside the simple tasks of making a home, meeting new neighbors, watching the ways of deer. My ears have just now stopped ringing as they adjust, accommodate this quiet, this calm in the landscape of time.

I am reading again. Poetry. Lines seem to dangle from my hair and I wear them as adornments through the sage flats, each sentence a gift. The poets are my companions here, alongside meadowlarks, yellow flashes of joy.

Meadowlarks once lived all along the Wasatch Front. My grandmother taught us as children that they sang, "Salt Lake City is a pretty little place." We thought so too. With development, the open fields and grasslands that supported these birds are now suburbs and industrial parks. The meadowlarks have vanished. Hearing their voices now calling to one another in the sage, I realize how lonely I had become in the city, how much I had missed their music, the music of my childhood.

The speed of my life in Salt Lake City was its own form of pathology: Drive here, meet there, talk, eat, talk, listen, look at my watch, run to work, teach, more meetings, talk, listen, talk, listen, run to the health club, run some errands, shop, buy, load the car, drive the car, car in traffic, almost home, pick up mail, time for dinner, go out for dinner, eat, talk, drive, return home, bathe, read, sleep, wake, eat, dress, drive to work -- and the next day moved right on schedule.

If you had asked, I would have told you I was happy. My husband, Brooke, and I were comfortable in our urban routine, but one night over dinner, he said, "What if we are only living half-lives? What if there is something more?"

We wanted more.

We wanted less.

We wanted more time, less distraction. We wanted more time together, time to write, to breathe, to be more aware of our lives. We wanted to be closer to wild places where we could walk and witness the seasonal changes, even the changing constellations. And so we banked on the idea of a simpler life -- away from the city -- near the slickrock country we love. We figured what we would lose in income we would gain in sanity.

We moved. We moved from the city where we had lived forever. We moved into a smaller house with a bigger view. Slowly, we are adjusting. We saunter more and drive less. We rarely eat out. We go to bed earlier and rise with first light. The closest town is 25 miles away. Some friends call this a sacrifice, a lark, a momentary stay of madness. We call it home, finally.

What do we miss?

Right now, nothing.

The distractions and excitement of urban life are replaced by the intensity of living in an episodic landscape where thunderstorms, flash floods, and wind break any threat of monotony. Just the other day, a dust devil carried a favorite black shawl of mine up into the air, unraveled its weave, and sent it flying toward the mesa, where it was met by ravens. And at night I am learning to see the sky as a map, the stars as thoughts, places of possibilities, kept from me by city lights.

In the vastness of the desert, I want to create my days as a ceremony around slowness, an homage to tortoises and snakes, reptilian monks who understand what it means to move thoughtfully, deliberately, who allow the heat of sand to create currents in their blood, which massages their bones inside their leather skins.

Slowly, so slowly these creatures crawl and wind and slither across the desert measured in shadows of geologic time. This is not to say they know nothing of the wisdom of speed or hissing and hiding. They do, but only in times of danger.

Speed is a response to both danger and desire.

In our human world, we worship speed and desire money. We assign money to time. What is it worth? Your time. My time. Our time. Talk fast. Work fast. Drive fast. Walk fast. Run. Who ever told us to wear jogging shoes to work? Don't saunter. Don't look. Speed-walk. Speed-dial. Federal Express will fly our thoughts around the world.

We do not trust slowness, silence, or stillness.

Last month, a few miles from our home, thousands of human beings were running in the desert next to the Colorado River. The river was red. It was a race. They ran shoulder to shoulder, faster and faster, bodies behind and bodies in front, inhaling, exhaling, fat-free hearts pumping oxygen into every living cell, the body a machine, sighing, groaning, moaning like one large organism running faster and faster, sweating, puking, wheezing. They outran the river, faster and faster, every one of them, two feet times thousands tapping, drumming, beating the pavement, faster and faster, running until they reached the end of the race, where they slowly began to collapse in one another's arms, so proud, so pleased, so very, very tired. Time. What was my time? What was your time? They are handed their time. For better or for worse, their trophy is their time. Where the runners stop, the river continues, a slow, strong current that now meanders through willows.

I want to make my life a ceremony around slowness.

Time and space. Open space. In the desert there is space. Space is the twin sister of time. If we have open space, then we have open time to breathe, to dream, to dare, to play, to move freely, so freely, in a world our minds have forgotten but our bodies remember. Time and space. This partnership is holy. In these redrock canyons, time creates space -- an arch, an eye, this blue eye of sky. We remember why we love the desert; it is our tactile response to light, silence, and stillness.

Hand on stone -- patience.

Hand on water -- music.

Hand raised to the wind -- is this the birthplace of inspiration?

A few days ago, my father came to visit. When we moved from the city, he did not say goodbye. He felt abandoned, hurt and alone. We anticipated his arrival not knowing what he would think. He arrived just as the sun was setting behind Porcupine Rim and the deer were beginning to move down from the LaSals. He entered our house whispering, "Look, the deer, the deer . . . ."

Each of us stood at the windows and watched hundreds of deer move through the sage, their halting prance, one leg raised, then another. They would stop, look directly at us with their large brown eyes, and then continue to browse.

They appeared fearless, yet alert. We slowly opened the door and stood outside while more does and yearlings surrounded us. It was all so quiet.

Suddenly, my father raised two fingers from both hands above his head, then pointed. We understood. Yes, a buck, two bucks coming out of the wash.

"A five-point," he said as he watched the animal move toward the others. He put his glasses down. "That's one of the finest racks I've ever seen."

Twilight was wrapping itself around us. We moved indoors. I lit some candles. The deer continued moving down the valley through the dark.

Brooke built a fire. I began fixing dinner. I noticed that our guest from the city took off his boots and stretched out on the couch with a book he had brought.

As we sat down to eat, the candles burning on the table, I said to my father, "Can you understand why we left?"

He raised his glass and smiled.

The next day we hiked to a particular panel of pictographs. Before us, etched into the sandstone, were three curious figures: a caterpillarlike creature, an oval with squiggles inside, and a winged being.

Metamorphosis, I thought, gazing at this rock art created by the Anasazi hundreds of years ago. Caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly.

Both my husband and father disagreed.

Who can know? But as I contemplated these images in the desert, I recognized my own metamorphosis toward slowness. I am not so easily seduced by speed as I once was. I find I have lost the desire to move that quickly in the world. To see how much I can get done in a day doesn't impress me anymore. I don't think it's about getting older. It feels more like honoring the gravity of my own body in both time and space. Open space. Survival. A rattlesnake coils; its tail shakes; the dryness of the desert is evoked. Let me be still and listen to the emptiness that inspires art.

The shadow my hand creates across the page as I write is the fleeting proof of spirit. In the sand, I see the script of snakes. Once here, now they are gone. What remains is the play of light on surfaces.

On top of the ridge, I can see for miles. Mesas, buttes, spires. Inside this erosional landscape where all colors eventually bleed into the river, I want to make my life a ceremony around slowness.

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