Vast and Wide

“Vast and wide”: beyond anything we can know or understand completely, yet including within it all that we know and understand. We don’t need to look past them (our lives) for some big metaphysical insights. If we could just actually be our lives rather than try to control them, maybe we could appreciate them.

~Norman Fischer

 

Next Monday I head to Alaska for the first time, which has long held an allure for me. The wildlife, the wilderness, the mountains and the sheer size. Vast and wide, undomesticated and wild, rugged and rough are words that describe the place and the people, at least in my mind. I will be traveling with five students, aged 9-12, and one other adult, a friend. We are heading to the Arctic, to a small community nestled on the north side of the Brooks Range, the great Arctic mountain range of the north. “Flying over all the ugly stuff,” so said a friend who grew up in Homer. Only an Alaskan would say that flying over so much vast space and beauty would be the “ugly stuff.”

We will stay in the Nanumiut village of Anaktuvuk Pass, where a great people and animal intertwine – the Nanumiut, a semi-nomadic tribe, and the migratory caribou. We head up there with adventurous spirits, open eyes and excited hearts for we know not what we will encounter nor what we will experience. How is the climate changing there? How is that affecting the caribou and other beings there and how does that all impact a people and a culture? These are some of the questions that we are taking with us.

Vast and wide is how I think it will be, if I let it be so and if my mind reflects that. Can I let it be beyond anything I have read about Alaska, beyond anything that I can know and conceptualize? Will I get sucked into trying to make some metaphysical conclusions or will I simply let be the lives of the people we will meet, the animals we may see, and the snow and cold and mountains that are every bit as alive as you and me?

As I sit here in the Valley I now call home, a place we have lived not even a year yet, I wonder about home and what it means to be “rich.” Barry Lopez pondered the same question in his book Arctic Dreams, which will be traveling with me to Alaska. He wrote:

 “What does it mean to grow rich? 

 Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a ‘fortune,’ which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north?

Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond’s Bay wealth was? 

Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?” 

My hope for my life is to cultivate an intimate knowledge of this place, this Valley, one that is vast and boundless. That my wealth may be marked in relationships, to both place and her inhabitants, in joy and love, peace and harmony, and in friendship and communion. I go to the Arctic to see what dreams I may not yet be able to imagine and to come back with an imagination more vast and wide than I knew was possible.