Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“My soul is downcast within me; 

therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, 

the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.”

 

 

For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning I could I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries ago, along the Big Sioux River, where the land opens broadly into a landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite space. Literally, there is nothing there. There’s corn and there’s beans and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try.  I do what I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over country here, an area most Americans see only from the relative comfort of a jumbo jet. But then “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” says curmudgeonly Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

 

Some time ago, the New York Times ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest.  When I sent the story to friends, the Times website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day.  Amazing. 

 

And in some ways, terrific. It would be nice for everyone here if some companies would relocate to the rural Midwest, where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial shot in the arm.

 

But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor, I can see for miles. 

 

Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down, even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see more out here.

 

I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same, I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.

 

Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky, at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces. Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s nothing, there’s really something.

 

And I say all of this because in the second bout of sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that Psalm 42 doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.

 

Honestly, I think I know what he’s talking about. Seems not so ago I was all by my blessed self in the snowy country just a few miles east of Glacier National Park. All by myself.  Oh, maybe a horse or gang of deer, but all by my blessed self, and it was a blessing.

 

Snow had just blew in from the far north, chilling everything and leaving an icy glaze over the world. I should learn how better to adjust my camera’s f-stop. 

 

Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul. 

 

I think I know that one.