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CONNEMARA When will men know what birdsknow? CARL SANDBURG ^turning to these mountains three years ago, I immedi- 'ately took up the literature that was created here and marks the place: Horace Kephart (OurSouthern Highlanders), William Bartram (Travels), James Mooney (Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again). In Kephart one passage in particular spoke to me and my new life here in the woods: I came to dwell in the wilderness, not as one fleeing or hiding, but that I might realize, in a mature age,a dream of youth. Here, in the wild wood, I have found peace, cleanliness, health of body and mind. Here I can live the natural life, unfettered and unindebted. Here duty itself is pliant to any breath of fancy that may stir the buds and foliage of thought. While these words have given me courage and something of a challenge , the words of Thomas Wolfe have had a slightly different effect. Reading Wolfe's sequel to Look Homeward, Angel and hearing his anguished cry that "youcan't go home again," I found myself reacting instinctively and vocally: "youmust go home again!" This impulsive utterance reflects abioregional ethic that I can trace back to my years in California and my work with what was referred to as the "Bioregional Movement" there, and it represents mypersonal conviction. It also presents a tangible philosophical problem for those who are not living, as I do, deep in place. Collectively Americans these days are hunter-gatherers of sorts and are a mobile, migratory people. Only the game we hunt is different. Instead of moving with the seasons, with the herds, as did the original inhabitants of thiscontinent , we now hunt for material goods, for jobs, for more comfortable and economically advanced lifestyles. In this sense "home" is a relative term used to describe migration routes along which we have spent little time in any one place. But even migrating animals come 119 //Vet R back to familiar territory—to the range that defines the borders of their home and habitat. Sincethis story of migration has become our modern mythos (except for those rare souls who have remained in one place over the course of a lifetime),we are forced to identify with places where we have become transplants and where we try to live consciously and with empathy I'm thinking specifically of Carl Sandburg, who, had I come here fifteen years earlier, would have been my neighbor. Not literally, as his adopted home in Flat Rock is some ten miles from here, but close enough for me to imagine time and distance to be only a minor impediment to such a notion. Sandburg's relationship with Connemara, as his farm isnamed, and the western North Carolinamountains was such that one might easily imagine him having lived there his whole life. His soulful embrassade of place was complete. It included the necessary surrender, the deep grounding, and the rest and serenity that is indicative of how one, ideally, evolves after "returning home." From 1945, when he moved to Flat Rock, until he died in 1967, this was truly Sandburg's home. The farm had everything he and hisfamily needed—plenty of pasture for his wife's goat breeding operation and plenty of seclusion for Carl, including the four things that he said were allhe needed in life: "to be out of jail, to eat regular, to get what I write printed, and a little love at home and a little outside." The 24o-acre Connemara (named by Sandburg for County Connemara on the west coast of Ireland, a landscape reminiscent of the rolling green hills of western North Carolina) was then and is now divided roughly into half woodlands and half cleared pasture. The balance between woodlands and open space couldn't have been better for Sandburg's poetic soul, and here his soul took root while his farm and family flourished, giving rise to one of my favorite of his poems, "Instructions to Whatever Gardens"—a song in praise of beauty, nature, being, and staying in place. In recent days the Sandburg place and its former owner and I have become more than alittlefriendly,asmy connection with Connemara goes deep. At least as deep as the sixinches of sawdust and goat droppings that form the floor of the goat barns. Once a month I've been 120 I ZORO'S FIELD [3.138.174.174] Project...

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