Devotions

One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji

About a year ago, I attended a Hokusai exhibit at Seattle Art Museum. I waited until the last, maybe the second-to-the-last weekend to go; the line of the faithful, eager to pay homage to Hokusai’s iconic work The Wave in person, began at the second floor escalator. The procession ascended the spiraling escalators to the fourth floor Simonyi Galleries, where an attendant, tracking the foot traffic exiting the show, ushered us in, one, two, three at a time.

What struck me the most about the exhibit, as had struck me while an art history student receiving my education on Japanese art one fall semester years ago, was Hokusai’s series 100 Views of Mount Fuji. I was struck by his daring departure from the school in which he was trained, with its emphasis on portraiture. I was struck by his devotion to this place, this land feature, to showing up again and again and again with the intention of seeing it anew in all its constancy.

Hokusai was on to something. I felt it strongly. I sensed its kinship with the pull I felt toward the mountains here, toward the woods, toward the places I’ve seen and visited a hundred times yet still feel called back to again and again.

Early in the morning, my song shall rise to Thee.

When I was a girl, my family gathered in our living room at six o’clock each morning for devotions. We stood–my three sisters and I in matching flannel nightgowns our grandma sewed for us, my parents in pajamas and bathrobes–and devoted the day to God. Devotions were opened with the singing of a hymn, after which someone read aloud a chapter or a number of verses from King David’s Psalms or King Solomon’s Proverbs. They concluded with prayer. 

I remember always being cold in the winter, drafty as our hundred year old house was, frugal as my dad was with the thermostat. My sisters and I wrapped ourselves in our down comforters (which we called Dicke-deckes–a made up German term my mom coined in her first generation childhood, roughly translating to “fat little blankets”) and huddled over the cast iron grate work of the heat ducts, creating pockets of warmth while we waited for devotions to begin.

When I was older, our next door neighbor Addie told us that she could hear us singing on summer mornings when her north facing stairwell window was open, and our south facing living room windows were too. She’d been listening to us sing at six o’clock on summer mornings for years.

Devotions has been a trigger word, a cringey three syllables for me ever since. Tied up, irrevocably I thought, with all the triggering, cringey lexicon of my childhood in a high control religious group. So I was surprised to find myself again turning to the word last week on Cascade Head.

Eagle Poem 

(part I) by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear,

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

…

Devotions

I think I knew I’d walk the headland each morning before I even left for the coast. I didn’t know the specifics of the trail up Cascade Head–how long, how arduous–nor the weather I would encounter. But I knew I’d want a regular encounter with this place while I was a guest at its base. I knew that, like Hokusai, I sensed a devotional pull, a call to a depth of experience available only with repetition and attention.

So up I went, first thing. On most mornings my friend, host and collaborator, Josh joined me. A couple mornings I walked up by myself. I tried to empty my mind of anything that was not of the place each morning as I walked. I expressed gratitude.

Back in the little cabin at Sitka Center, I thought of the devotions of my childhood. The important thing seemed to be that they happened first thing each morning. Before anything: teeth brushing, dressing. Before everything: caffeine, breakfast. The first moments of consciousness, the very best, those moments were for God. 

I wondered, in the little cabin, what would occupy the overlap in a venn diagram of my childhood family devotions and my week at the base of the headland. Something of both the format and the primacy of devotions; something unnamable but originating in, essential to, the headland itself.

What’s your love language? I wondered of the place one day as I lingered in the wind. Is it quality time? Acts of service? Words of affirmation? Physical touch? What can I give to you?

One morning, alone (which is meaningless in a place like this other than to say without another human around), I read Eagle Poem out loud on the summit. To the summit. Some mornings I wrote. One morning I laid down on the damp ground next to the summit marker and syncopated the pounding in my head with that of the surf that echoed below me. One morning I stared into a fog so thick I couldn’t see anything beyond the line where the summit ground sloped away.

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And one morning Josh and I met up with a pair of conservation technicians with The Nature Conservancy. Together we pull- hack- and chain-sawed encroaching Sitka limbs at the edge of an important butterfly habitat meadow. I’d joined Josh for the week with the hopes of visiting Opal Creek together, but it’s still closed to the public and we were unable to gain access. Then we found ourselves in the company of friends who cared for a different place–the one we were in–who invited us to join them in that care. 

We’ll go back in the summer, when the headland is blooming, to join our new friends and watch for the flashing iridescence of the Oregon silverspot butterfly. We’ll go back to pull blackberries from the headland and Scotch broom from the meadow. 

We’ll keep pulling on the thread of this story until it’s done unraveling. Then we’ll stand in the pile of wonder we’ve co-created and know that this must be the place. Just as we knew it in Opal Creek. Just as is always the case, no matter where we find ourselves.

A pair of eagles circled us on our sixth and final morning together on the headland.

Eagle Poem, continued 

by Joy Harjo

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we 

Were born, and die soon within a 

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.