Learning from The Land: Genius
Perspective. This lesson begins with perspective. After two weeks in Iowa followed by three days in Colorado, I’ve traveled back to Iowa to continue living with my dad for now. It is good to be with Dad. It is good to be here on my home soil, near my home water. I had planned a long reconnecting-to-this-land pilgrimage for last May-June. The pandemic happened instead. Somehow, my dad’s health decline has sharpened my yearning for getting re-grounded here, where he was raised and where he and Mom raised us.
Perspective. Now that I’m not able to visit The Land when I want to, I miss it. What I really, truly miss is the earthy, mysterious essence of her—her enigmatic face, her many voices, her legions of inhabitants, her subtle shifts in appearance and mood— in other words, all the stuff of her lessons.
And I’ve had time to ponder the mystery and reality of just how closely we are related to our ten acre slice of the Holy, and how much even more I am connected to this Iowa mud that I crawled out of. And what has emerged is a memory is a piece by the great contemporary poet/philosopher and marine biologist David Whyte. Now emerges genius. Yes. Genius. In his outstanding book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, Whyte’s essay on the word Genius offers some eloquent hints about the connective tissue between the utterly unique genius of each particular landscape and the unique landscape of each human soul.
Here are Whyte’s first two paragraphs about the word “genius.” As you listen, imagine The Land. Then imagine yourself, your own genius.
Genius
is something we already possess. Genius is best understood in its original and ancient sense: describing the specific underlying quality of a given place as in the Latin Genius Loci, the spirit of a place, it describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream, or a bridge across a river. It is the conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself. It is the breeze on our skin, the particular freshness and odors of the water or of the mountain or the sky in a given, actual geographical realm. You could go to many other places in the world with a cliff edge, a stream, a bridge, but it would not have the particular spirit or characteristic, the ambiance nor the climate of this particular meeting place. By virtues of its latitudes and longitudes, its prevailing winds, the aroma and color of its vegetation and the way a certain angle of the sun catches it in the cool early morning, it is a unique confluence, existing nowhere else on Earth. Human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.
The human body constitutes a live geography, as does the spirit and the identity that abides within it. To live one’s genius is to dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting. We might think of our selves as each like a created geography, a confluence of inherited flows. Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and beneath it a half-hidden geology of existence: memories, hurts, triumphs, and stories in our lineage that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.
And now finally imagine the sacred conversation, the convergence of your genius with the surpassing, ancient genius of The Land. Pretty cool, huh. Yes. Amen