Of My Three Hearts
While my physical heart is tasked with rearranging oxygen in my cells, I have another heart that lives in wild and rocky places. Great sweeping landscapes of highlands and dales, swathed in a velvet green robe decorated with sheep and sacred neolithic arrangements. It is the kind of place I know in my bones, in the bones of my ancestors that are buried throughout the Appalachians and the moorlands of northern England. When I was a child, my family paid a visit to the counties in the narrow part of the United Kingdom. We rode horses. We wandered and ostensibly, got lost. But I knew what I had found, even if I did not know its name.
Then, when I was a young girl and we were briefly making a home in a conservative low country, I was without many friends, struggling to understand where I belonged and overwhelmed with homesickness for a place I’d only seen once. I wept in the car on the way to school, feeling caged in by closed-minded folks who seemed to have never imagined that there was a world beyond the county line. I wept in the school counselor’s office, waiting for my mother to come and pick me back up a few hours later, unable to say anything more than “I don’t belong here.”
I knew where I needed to be: someplace wild. Someplace often equally described as bleak and boundless, desolate and magnificent. It is a place where magic comes easily to those who seek it; the magic has been there so long it seeps out of the soil. How many authors have tried to conjure for us the character of the moorlands? How many Eliots and Bröntes, how many Shakespeares and Tolkiens have made the wild (wild, always “wild!”) highlands the stage for their stories? And yet they are more mercurial and unknowable than their meteorology. The howling winds that come rushing through the valleys would hunt you down and lacerate any exposed skin with icy teeth, but the heather and bracken would easily welcome you to rest from your wounds.
This wicked and rugged landscape is an ancestral homeland for me, but I have found her sisters in Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Montana, California, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, and Iceland. In every unmappable green landscape with scrubby firs, sudden hollows, and house-sized boulders there is a cunning kindness. To live there, to make such a place your home requires stamina and fortitude. You have to be prepared for the unimaginable, and welcome it as if you knew she was coming. She may bring you hail or floods or snow so deep you lose your flock, or she may just as quickly reach out with a spring breeze and caress your cheek. She may not make it easy for you to survive, but she does offer you the chance to try. She tests you because she loves you, in her way, and if you wait long enough, if you have the endurance to withstand her capricious nature season after season, she will welcome your bones into her soil at the end of it.
My third heart I’ve only met recently. This other face of Janus is also described as desolate and bleak by those who know her, fear her, love her nonetheless. I struggle most to write about the depth of my love for desert places. Maybe because there are so many other words that I can point to and say, “Yes! Yes, just like that.” Baudrillard, Abbey, Lopez - they knew this landscape long before I did, and wove a basket of words around her to try and encompass what is unfathomable. They are valiant efforts, but even the great essays about American deserts at some point throw their hands up and say, “Either you know or you don’t.” These places in the southwestern corner of the stolen land we call the United States is and has been home to people who respect her in ways we colonizers can only barely comprehend. Maybe it is not within the scope of our broken English language to begin to grasp its breadth.
I come from green-place people who are comforted when the horizon ends at the treetops, so when the car turned off the highway and began to descend into the red heart of Southern Utah, I did not understand the force of my tears. Why did this feel like coming home? Why do these rocks seem so familiar? A few nights later, I crossed Arizona in the night, stirring from a passenger’s sleep to watch strange plants materialize and disappear in the headlights. I remember dozily wishing I knew their names, even as a passing friendship. Some friendships are like that, just a moment in a crowd of other moments. Others change your entire life. Some years after that, I heard the desert calling loudly, in the summer, in the blanketing heat, and I folded myself naked into the crevice of a roadside wash. I lay with sand in my hair between mesquite and creosote (see! my language can’t even begin to compare to the specific flavors of the names of her plants!) and let her hold me up for a while. I had been running, fighting, striving for so long, but here, in this barren, interminable landscape, the desert asked me to surrender it all.
In the Bible, when they say “wilderness” they mean desert.
“I called her out into the wilderness and I spoke tenderly to her.”
“I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild beasts from the land, so that they may dwell securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods.”
“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
“The Spirit drove him immediately into the wilderness.”
Joshua, John, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha, Moses, Jesus of Nazareth - the desert is where you go to get closer to greater understanding. It’s where you have visions, hear voices, convene with spirits, and battle demons. We are not intended to stay here any more than we are on mountaintops. These are liminal experiences - time outside of time. Those who would give their life to the desert will empty their accounts in full.
To become a disciple of the desert is to know one thing: you can enjoy your life because you have it, for now. The desert strips life back to the sun-bleached bone. It asks you who you think you are, why you think you’re here. The desert is waiting for you to die. She will offer you no succor on your way down that road, but she will walk with you the whole way. She is a careless deity who lets you hang around because she is fascinated by your infatuation, intrigued by your insistence and persistence in existing. For now. She may signal a reflection of your affection in cactus flowers and the curl of a lizard’s tail, but do not mistake this for reciprocality. No, do not forget that she was here before you, and she will make use of every drop of water your corpse will leave behind. You are cottonwood fluff on the breeze. She is the heat that compels the air into motion. Because she doesn’t ask you to commit to a long term relationship, you are free to love her fully, wildly, with your whole unbroken heart.
When you give your heart to a landscape, it does not bring the security of immortality, but rather a rest that no mausoleum can offer. When the heart in my chest stops beating, I am comforted to know that my other hearts will carry on just as they always have. One harried along hillsides in the shadows of wind-herded clouds, and one lanced on the spines of a yucca.
