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  • Journey to the Great Mountain
  • A. James Wohlpart (bio)

In her collection of essays entitled Dwellings, Linda Hogan criticizes what she calls the “far-heartedness” of our contemporary culture and offers an alternative way of being and knowing. She describes the voices that surround us, that speak a forgotten language, that offer a forgotten knowledge of healing and wholeness, of stillness and peace, a knowledge of relation and connection. Hogan juxtaposes two particular essays in Dwellings, “A Different Yield” and “What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light,” in order to critique our culture and to describe this new way of being. In “A Different Yield,” Hogan emphasizes our need for a deep listening that reaches beneath the chatter of our culture and allows us to hear the hum of creation. She writes:

A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I’ve envisioned that woman’s silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf.

(47)

In this passage, Hogan offers a way of being that is founded on a stillness and silence that opens the listener to the stories of the world. The attitude of deep listening draws the natural world to her, as if it has created a vacuum that must be filled. And yet the listening is not a void or an emptiness; it is described as being “full and [End Page 111] open” as if there is a reciprocity between the listener and the landscape. In this way, this deep listening, this alternative way of being, is founded on relationship and interconnection, a sharing between the human and the natural worlds.

Yet Hogan also critiques our culture as one unable or unwilling to accept the gifts that our landscape offers. In “What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light,” she describes several incidents, starting with Cortés’s burning of Iztapalapa and its amazing aviaries to looters dynamiting two burial mounds in Oklahoma when they could no longer extract artifacts for themselves, and concludes:

It seems, looking back, that these invasions amounted to a hatred of life itself, of fertility and generation. The conquerors and looters refused to participate in a reciprocal and balanced exchange with life. They were unable to receive the best gifts of land, not gold or pearls or ownership, but a welcome acceptance of what is offered. They did not understand that the earth is generous and that encounters with the land might have been sustaining, or that their meetings with other humans could have led to an enriched confluence of ways.

(44)

Hogan’s concern is with a way of being that dominates the other, that is not based on reciprocity and openness. She explains that because of our limited worldview we have forgotten the intimate and integral relations that exist unseen around us, like thin strands of an elaborate spiderweb that connect plants and animals and humans. Hogan continues:

As one of our Indian elders has said, there are laws beyond our human laws, and ways above ours. We have no words for this in our language, or even for our experience of being there. Ours is a language of commerce and trade, of laws that can be bent in order that treaties might be broken, land wounded beyond healing. It is a language that is limited, emotionally and spiritually, as if it can’t accommodate such magical strength and power. The ears of this language do not often hear the songs of the white egrets, the rain falling into stone bowls.

(45–46) [End Page 112]

It is this way of being in the world, of living a life too fast and too loud and too shallow, of consuming too much, sleeping too little, and dancing rarely at all, that brought me to the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 2002. In the spring, summer, and fall of 2001, my father, then sixty-four, hiked the Appalachian...

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