Unearthing a life.....

The following is a quote from NoApology's April 12th blog posting titled 'Rivers and Rocks'.

"Early this morning, as we waited to board our flight back home we met a woman from Australia. She had spent time in Santa Fe not exploring the wilderness, but taking classes in what she vaguely described as "energy work." In her late sixties, perhaps even early seventies, she talked with great animation about energy's memory, how we carry with us all of time. "Your vibration or your aura, as it were," she explained with her hands flowing through curves of air, "is specific to a place and time. Actually, it's specific to the place and time of your mother at least two months before you born. When you arrive back to this place, you are perfectly aligned with the energy of the earth, the vibration of the place. You are, in every sense of the word, home."

I am not a desert dweller. While the high desert is one of my favorite locations to vacation, I could not live with the dust and sand, the wind and the thunder clouds, the cacti or the snakes. While I was born in Iowa, I have lived most of my 48 years here in the Pacific Northwest. As we flew over the mountains today and ascended over Puget Sound, I was reminded of a drive my brother and I made from a small airport in Iowa northwest to the birthplace of my mother years ago. As much as the Pacific Northwest feels like home, I remember carving our way through the cornfields of Iowa and knowing I'd been there before, not just as a small child, but always. As if the corn and the sky and the dairy cows and the puffy clouds were as much a part of me as the rain and evergreens and salt water of Seattle."
.........NoApologies


When I first read this, the concept of 'home' as the place my mother was two or so months before my birth sounded downright silly. When I got to the part where NoApologies wrote of her Iowa cornfield experience, I thought how similar to my own experiences when traveling back to my birthplace in Eastern Washington.

I was born a resident of Othello, WA, in 1934. My father was born three miles northwest of Othello. My grandfather was born forty miles east of Othello. And while I was actually born in the Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, Othello would have to qualify as my hometown. I moved to Puget Sound in 1952 and for the next 48 years made many trips back to central Washington to visit my parents and siblings. I always experienced these trips as follows:
From Bremerton, over Snoqualmie Pass, and down to the area of Cle Elum, I always felt antsy and/or stressed out .... to the point of developing chest pains. Near Cle Elum you pass a collapsing house and outbuildings (on the right) in a field dotted with a few evergreens. At this point I would feel a wave of relief ... "I'm going home" .... and any physical discomfort would melt away. Ellensburg brought even stronger feelings of ease. Ellensburg is where my folks did their monthly grocery shopping and where I had my tonsils out. Then over the sage covered mountains to Vantage on the Columbia River ... and crossing the bridge at Vantage was the final step. When I hit dirt on the east side of the river there was a total feeling of "I am home."

So the pregnant mother concept struck me as far too specific. Until I began to wonder Where do I feel most purely home? Definitely not in Othello or Royal City or even Smyrna. The place I feel most perfectly centered at 'home' is the spot pictured above. After I die, I would like to have my ashes put to the wind from this spot .... on the bluff looking east down on Morgan Lake and the stretch of shoreline that once held my great uncle Simon's homestead cabin -- where my Dad was born in 1909.

And here is how the silly pregnant mother concept holds true for me. During her pregnancy with me, my mother drove all the primitive roads in this immediate area, 'running' Dad's trap lines. Several times a week. This picture is Ground Zero of my whole body reaction to the word 'home'.

As to the "energy of the earth, the vibration of the place", I'm not so sure .... seems like New Age claptrap to me. BUT! I could be wrong. I have been wrong before. Is there some unique vibration or harmonic or frequency that emanates from the earth from discrete spot to discrete spot and leaves its 'fingerprint' on a developing embryo. Would this fall into the same catagory of inner radar that guides birds on their migrations or salmon on their run to spawn? Whatever is going on here, it is something that creates a strong feeling of being naturally linked to a specific place. NoApologie to the Iowa cornfields and FossilGuy to the Washington scablands. And these feelings are individual specific and not interchangeable.

Now the pregnant mother idea does not seem so silly.