Forever Starving

Insatiable for the entrancement of the human spirit

The Fool, Brady Tarot

The other morning I sat at my window and watched the rising sun move his miraculous light across the ridgeline to reach the face of the cliffs I speak of so frequently, then down their craggy features, until the entire mountain was lit up. I've pored over maps trying to determine if this rocky promontory has a name but I haven't found one. Perhaps I need to come up with my own, given the time I've spent watching it in all kinds of weather. It struck me how every day I sat in Crested Butte and watched the same phenomenon out the window of the room I inhabited. A different mountain, with different features ... but the same event, at the same time of day, at the same angle from the same sun. Only 1000 miles distant. Somehow this seems to matter to me but I haven't figured out why and I keep thinking about it. I tried to describe the phenomenon, the experience, to a friend. She just gave me A Look. Probably filed the whole exchange away in my dossier of Weird Behaviors. Maybe it’s further indication I’m just completely losing it, I don’t know.

This is the beginning of the season where my melancholy rises up at the stirrings of dread inside me and seeks to overrun my sensibilities. An atypical SADS that I know I am not alone in feeling. It is the looming heat, the anticipation of vicious fires that are inevitable now. The overrunning of everything I love with tourists who fail to respect both land and locals. This year, for a couple dreadful reasons, it is particularly acute and I'm trying to plot a path through it. It's hard to admit to that on a morning like this. It is cool and damp outside. Birds are chirping and slowly arriving at the feeder just yonder. I have an eye out for the female red crossbills I've been observing. I love them. There are drifts of white cotton piled up in the tall grass at the edge of the street from where it fluttered to the ground these last few evenings, when the trees shivered it all free to float across the community like some kind of faery snow. I love that too. These are moments of joy seized from the depths of sorrow. After all, one can still feel love while cowering under the blankets against a recurring nightmare. One clings to this love. Clings to the idea someone will come along and turn the lights on. Or, better yet, open the shades so that the moon and stars might set things right.

I referenced this little video with Martin Shaw recently. At the 4:24 mark he talks of nostalgia. He says, "I like old things, I do. I'm given to nostalgia. I knew that as a kid, it was the strangest thing. I'm nostalgic about what we had for breakfast. It's not necessarily an impressive trait but it's true."

I feel this hard. I'm sure many of us do. The way certain songs and places have memories attached to them. Some of us can shrug them off. I find it excruciating. It was a long time before I could visit Council Grove again after my little dog Darla died, four years ago now as of June 2nd. She still joins me there whenever I visit. Sometimes I speak to her as I shuffle along.

I can't drive by the remains of the mill where my dad worked without feeling his spirit. Or the blank space on Mullan Road where my friend Bubba's trailer was, and was the last place I saw him before he died. The list is endless.

There are spaces in Missoula once occupied by establishments that I enjoyed visiting during happier times, and they are gone. Restaurants, mostly. My favorite diner is now an art gallery. My favorite pizza joint is a different pizza joint that I just don't like as much and it's been remodeled to be, I don't know, too damn fancy. It’s all bright and chrome and I miss the shadowy dumpiness of the old place. This is a sorrow we all face if we live in a place long enough though, isn't it? Stuff changes. And so much has changed over the last year because of COVID, so much loss, how are we to face it all? Some of us will do better than others.

Some people are bursting to get back out in the world, to leave behind the familiar that became tiresome under lockdown in search of new experiences. I'm not one of them. I’m exhausted by the emotional drain of being present through hardship and difficulties and I’d prefer to rest awhile rather than be trampled by the emerging throngs and that isn’t going to happen. So fuck it. I'm adding to the list more places in Missoula that I won't visit again for a long time, if at all, because of the ghosts that linger. It's just how my mind works, and as Martin Shaw says, "it isn't necessarily an impressive trait."

In his new book, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass, Shaw writes about dark forces who inhabit stories, often from the mountains, and he names it the "Hostile Mountain Spirit." This is a spirit that is "forever starving, insatiable for the entrancement of the human spirit. First Nations have sometimes called this presence wetiko, the Sufis the nafs." He goes on to describe how it exists in the world, in our modern world:

There's just something mean and cannibalistic out there. It moves in and out of communities as well as individuals. Some of us create better homes for it than others, lay down rotting meat and open bottles of cheap vodka so it feels comfy. Play death metal day and night, have internet porn on endless rotation. Very few Indigenous cultures I know of would claim these beings as completely contained within us, rather moving through us. It's an odd type of egotism to claim evil as entirely of a human's own making, any more than stating we created love, power or the gods.

Where do we see this spirit at work? Certainly in our propensity to harm each other with violence. To hate each other for the tiniest variations in how we choose to identify ourselves and live our lives. To take each other for granted. The spirit lives in addictive technology. Alcohol. Even food, for crissakes. How do we defend against this darkness in the wider world when we are all tormented to varying degrees within ourselves? I often despair. Which is what the Hostile Mountain Spirit wants me to do, how it works within me. Other days I stand defiant, even if I have no clue which direction to face when I do.

Mostly though I just feel terribly lonely and constantly at odds with the world and the choices and failures I’ve made in trying to survive it all. He, that cursed spirit, is always there, at my shoulder. It can be exhausting, can't it?

The other morning, chastising myself for my ridiculous melodrama as rain poured down and my feeder swarmed with birds, I jotted down this little poem:

no one cares

about our tiny dramas

brown-headed cowbird

What are my bullshit sorrows compared to the bigger picture? Consider the brown-headed cowbird, of which many frequent this area. They are called "brood parasite" birds because the female lays her eggs in the nests of other birds, then they are raised instead of the host bird's chicks. This can have a negative effect on songbird populations in areas where cowbirds frequent. It's not malice on their part. They evolved to do this because they traveled with the buffalo herds, always moving, and didn't have nests of their own because they never remained in one place. Now there aren't any buffalo left (and declining songbird populations too) and it has all happened so fast that the birds haven't evolved alongside the decimation and they don’t know how to act. Like the Ents of Tolkien lore looking for the long-lost Entwives I imagine them searching for a place where the plain is an endless herd of buffalo, a land where "the whole country was one robe," and there isn't one anymore. So it’s an ecological mess not of their own doing yet they are reviled for it. That is a hell of a way to go through life.

A female brown-headed cowbird got in my house through an open door two days ago. Luckily she managed to trap herself between the pull-down shade and the front window, so I was able to get ahold of her. I cupped her in my hands—she fluttered against my grip for a moment before she relaxed—and carried her out to the back porch. I tried to be gentle and calm throughout her travail. When I opened my hands she was perched on my palm. I could feel her little talons gripping my fingers. For a moment she looked up at me with those round, black eyes, and I like to think she did so with gratitude but who can say. I loved her. Then she flew away.

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I feel like a jackass advertising but you do know that you can subscribe to this newsletter, right? It doesn’t get you anything more than my gratitude. But it helps pay for the birdseed I use as a means to bribe my way to friendships … and coffee, of course.