Viewpoint

The difference between narcissus
and sunflower
is a point of view: the first
stares at his image in water
and says, there is no I but I
and the second looks
at the sun and says I am
what I worship.
And at night, difference shrinks
and interpretation widens.
--Mahmoud Darwish

    Nature, now, is how I ease the ache not only for awe, but for a sense of place. Even after 15 years of living in the Finger Lakes region of New York, I don't consider it home. My nostalgia, my "pain to return home" seeks its relief in nature.

Awe was first given to me by my ex-husband, who, having grown up in a family in which hiking and camping were regular events, wanted me to see the things that he had seen. One of our first trips was up to the Brothers, in the Olympic National Forest. The trail took us into the Valley of Silent Men, and it was there that I found myself on the road to Damascus.

    The Valley of Silent Men stripped me of language. After a blizzard has dumped a couple feet of snow and you first venture out into the aftermath, or when you step from the Mediterranean heat into a stone cathedral, you encounter a silence so profound and so deep that things are turned inside out. Something has swallowed up all the sound waves, and left alone with the muffled whoosh of your blood pumping, epiphanies can be born. Not the bullshit epiphany of a two-hour movie where suddenly everything irrevocably changes—and always for the better—but rather those tiny instants where you think, "hmmm?" and know that simply asking the question has changed the future. Walking into the Valley of Silent Men for me was one of those moments.

As we followed a trail through a forest floor so lush, and moved from hundreds-foot tall tree to hundreds-foot tall tree, sound disappeared and my other senses heightened. Light streamed through the trees in multiple Jesus rays. Sunshine was broken and refracted by the branches much the same way stained glass paints the floor of a cathedral with a holy prism. I touched the light as it fell to the forest floor. I didn't know what anything was called, could only stare at the various ferns that grew among the pine needles. A stream trickled through the boulders that some ancient geological event had thrown up. It was easy to imagine that I was inside some form of sanctuary.

    Although I have not ventured into the Valley of Silent Men in 21 years, still it is a synecdoche for the home for which I long, Persephone desiring to be above ground mid-February, knowing that the bargain she has struck denies to her that place.

    Temporary irrevocable decisions prevent me from getting to the Valley. But I am not unaware that I have mythologized a locus that no longer exists. How could it? I have been among some of the loveliest natural tableaux this continent has to offer. I have seen grander, more breath-catching sights. So how on earth could I expect to return to the place I first found awe and expect from it the same reaction?

    Isn't that the nature of nostalgia? It is the pain to return home, but all too often, there is no there there.

    Ironically, I live in Ithaca, the place Odysseus spent 20 years away from, and ten years trying to get home to. It's not that I dislike Ithaca—I don't—but nothing huge exists here (except for an idiot car dealer's promises about how you'll feel after you buy one of his cars). Unlike the Cascades or the Olympics, the foothills of the Adirondacks barely rise.

Their slopes are covered with deciduous trees and I have learned to mark the seasons by the color of the trees: in late autumn and winter, they are brown, spindly multiple-fingered beings against a frequently grey sky, a fresh snowfall transforms them into fairy homes; in mid-April, the trees glow pink as buds and shoots first emerge; late spring and summer greenery gives way to the trees' spectacular flaming finish, which is over by the end of October. I have only to look at the wildflowers that are blooming and the state of the trees to know what month it is. Seattle has few seasons, and despite living there most of my life, I never did learn it the way I know the Finger Lakes.

And yet. And yet. The ache of return to Doug Firs and Sitka Spruce that scrape the sky clenches something inside of me. It is hard to feel right-sized when the trees are only dozens of feet over your head. True proportion is found, for me, in measuring myself against mountain and evergreen forest.

So, am I Narcissus, clicking my ruby red slippers together and looking for a reflection of home in every hike I take? Or am I the sunflower who has opened herself up the sky and worships what she can? The wilderness is silent. There is no echo here.