Insight from a torch-bearer
My computer is bound to freeze any moment now, as it has done 3 times in the last 45 minutes or so. That might be fine, if the rest of the world’s computers did the same, simultaneously. Such thoughts course through my mind as I read Sharon Butala’s “The Perfection of the Morning.”
So much to write. And such baffling evaporation of ideas as I sit down to actually write it. Butala’s book is full of insights, and I’ll share just a few of them here, after briefly introducing her and the situation she writes from.
Butala, a woman whose worldly experience was largely urban and academic with the exception of the formative years of her childhood, abandoned much – a position as a university professor, nearly completed Master’s degree, her house, and her circle of friends and family to marry Peter Butala, a lifetime rancher and 41 year old bachelor content to reside in the same place where he had grown up, earning an honest, if challenging, living from the ranch.
She writes: “In the years since the summer I turned thirteen and we moved into the city, I had become so urbanized that I knew nothing about farming, or about the daily life led by people who made their living in agriculture. I thought of myself proudly as a sophisticated city woman, but even that first weekend with Peter, strangely, I kept having flashes of deja vu. They were incomplete, vague and unformed, and yet carried with them a puzzling tug of recognition, of memories that were more visceral even than images or fragments of conversations. Bewilderingly, I felt comfortable when I should have felt ill at ease; I felt at home when I should have felt lost…..I felt transported to a familiar way of being and to a familiar place. Yes, I thought, and then, but how do I know this?”
“By the time I was twenty I had developed contempt for those who wanted to return to Nature, believing they were all romantic dreamers, nitwits from the city, people raised in the lap of luxury who did not know about Nature’s nasty side, who had never done a real day’s work in their lives and thus had no idea of the grinding labor a life in Nature demanded for mere survival. “
Of her struggle to adapt to her new life: “Through that struggle to fit – to become congruent – I became not the painter I once was but a writer, and I discovered that the writer I’ve become is the Self I’ve been in search of for so many years..it has been the act of writing that created and continues to create that Self I’ve at last found, and that acts as the instrument of integration between myself and my environment….”
On men and leaving behind her old life: “I saw nobody in my city life doing anything more physically dangerous than walking to work, and in Saskatoon that wasn’t much of a risk. I’d had enough of my windowless office at the university and the endless maneuvering for advantage, not to mention the incredibly hard work people of my lowly rank had to do for distressingly low pay; I’d had enough of the men I was meeting, each one of whom seemed to be more insecure, convoluted and uncertain than the last one; I couldn’t wait to put it all behind me.”
And her Coyote Dream; which perhaps I’ll write about another time.
Such writing inspires self-reflection, of course. Could I be a Peter Butala? A capable rancher, content to live a simple, yet physically demanding lifestyle? To accept and revel in it? How long (yes Papa, he’s a Chinaman 
) will I be content to float in much the same vein as Sharon Butala, in the ’soft’ yet grueling world of academics? Could I leave this abstract world of ideas and theory where I seem to spend so much time, replacing it with a life where the primary focus is the day’s physical work – a life stripped bare of all the frivolousness and frenzied efforts to accomplish…..what? What exactly am I trying to accomplish?
On the surface, it seems a horrendously unsatisfying life – it seems there must be more to life than living on the land, living with the land, working on it and relying on it for survival, romantic as the idea is. Although from where Peter Butala is, it’s only a step up to be a Percy Schmeiser – internationally renowned canola (among other crops) farmer from the Saskatchewan prairies, renowned for his struggle against biotech giant Monsanto Corp., former town mayor, and acclaimed public speaker. Perhaps it’s the participatory element, the element of democracy which I would most miss. One might expect to miss the social experience that, as I gather from Butala’s writing, is unique to the urban lifestyle. I’m not sure if I would however – I’ve never been one to go overboard in that regard, preferring to remain on the sidelines, waiting in the wings, greatly favoring a long ramble in the woods over a night at a club. Although as I’m learning, both have their place.
A Peter Butala seems so…well, grounded. So rooted to the spot, so impossibly content. I wouldn’t be content if I was content – I’d need something more. There’s an incessant need for a deeper understanding, which perhaps drives my inclination to need to write everything down, to digest it, which, by all appearances, Peter doesn’t feel. Perhaps because that deeper understanding isn’t lacking, having been gained from a lifetime spent in Nature, in touch with it’s (her?) rhythms, patterns, and mysterious yet comforting ways. I suppose what I’m saying is that the academic in me, the writer in me, would want out, no matter what I did.
Because I really have to go do my finances and get up early tomorrow I’ll close here, with a final quote from S. Butala:
“I was learning to be a different kind of woman from the one who’d danced all night in clubs to rock ‘n’ roll, competed with men at a job, borrowed money at the bank, bought a house, had a manicure, and set her cap for men and fended off others, who faced an urban, modern world on her own. As I lived this new way part of me was beginning to to feel all that – the life of the modern, urban woman – had been a mistake, and maybe not the great improvement on my mother’s life I thought it had been.”
