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In Everyday Mind, Thich Nhat Hanh writes “If you look
deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all
generations of your ancestors. . . .Each is present in your body.
You are the continuation . . .”
So, my biography is not just mine, but a continuation of all that
has happened since that initial explosion of energy that created the
possibility for everything; that created all my ancestors –
amoeba, morganucodon (early mammal), grandmother. I like that
idea because that’s what writing is – an explosion of energy that
creates everything. Writing, dance, music, art of every sort.
It is why, for an artist, nothing is fixed. You cannot
create out of stasis. Yet, you must be still. Stillness
and energy—the same dynamic, the same connection to the universe.
Are the places I choose to live, then, some kind of reflection of
my ancestor’s dreams? Or do they constitute a purely personal
part of my biography, a kind of sidetrack along a continuum, places
that birth the particular creative energy I need at any given time.
I think these places define me as much as anything can.
When I went to New York for my first co-op job as an Antioch
College student, I was in love with New York, its streets, its
architecture, neighborhoods, the lives of its artists, its
intellectual energy. Craving intimacy with it all, I lived there for
years once I finished school. Then, needing mountains, a world
of nature my father gave me, I moved to Innsbruck. Austria
provided an ideal combination of civilization and high mountains.
I could ski (indeed, had to, since I was writing for Ski
Magazine at the time), climb, hike and engage with the
literature and music of a language I love. Years later I was
assigned a ski story in Montana. Although I had once spent a winter
in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the next state south, I had never
considered Montana. It seemed too remote to me, too wild.
Yet, flying over the prairie toward the front range of mountains, I
knew before the plane landed I would stay. Here were mountains, the
wide open space of the plains, and my own language. (Living in
another language is freeing, perhaps because you are allowed
mistakes. But your native tongue is precious, an access to
your own mind, and to your soul.)
Most important to me, I was hungry – finally—for wildness. In
the Alps there is a wildness of weather and terrain, but wildlife
that can eat you was hunted out a long time ago. The wildness
you feel when you live where there are grizzly bears is different.
It demands of you alertness. You are aware. Awake. All
of life becomes larger, grander, more present. (Living in New
York, or any of the world’s great cities, requires equal awareness.
Just different outfits.) Montana’s wildness insists you be up
to it. I wanted to be tested. And to pass the test.
(I think I also wanted the romance of the American West, although
that’s less easy to admit.) A psychic I spoke with after I had
lived in Montana about a year said to me, “You had to come here to
be born.”
Is this what my ancestors sought? A place to be born? A
place that was theirs? Don’t we all seek that? What is it
that I continue? How did all these generations in the palm of
my hand imagine life? Can I enter into their imagination? Is
all biography a question?
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About Ruth Rudner