Free Perfection of the Morning by Sharon Butala Page B

not back yet, and I’m still tired. I was tired for days.
    Every spring for perhaps the first five years of our marriage we did this, so that eventually I wasn’t constantly lost, but gradually gained a clearer idea of where I was even in these huge fields empty of any conventional landmarks, since one hill looks much like another. As I learned the geography of the wilderness, Peter was teaching me about the animals and birds which inhabited it. Without direct teaching I was learning to read the sky for weather, the habits of range cattle by spending days with them, the precise composition of the shortgrass vegetation by crossing over it day after day. I began to observe the passages of the moon. Like most urban people, I had never even paid attention to the moon before coming to the country to live; I was so embarrassed that I didn’t even tell Peter that I was paying attention nightly to her for the first time in my life. I knew nothing about the moon’s phases, about her rhythms, about where she rose and where she set. As I gradually learned what to expect from her night after night, month after month, a kind of awe was dawning in me, and I was gaining a hint of what it was that made Peter so secure and calm.
    I wanted to tell everyone about my discoveries—no, I wanted first to understand them clearly, then tell everyone. But these weren’t things you could tell people, I was realizing. Did you know the moon has phases ? My friends would have thought I’d lost my mind. And anyway, such a question hardly conveyed the magnitude or quality of my real discovery, which was closer to something like this: life makes sense, or the world has a governing body, or the power and beauty of Nature is astounding.
    I wanted to tell everyone, but the people I now lived withalready knew these things, whether they spoke of them or not, and I could not convey in conversation any of them to my old friends, if they’d been around to listen, which they weren’t. As a way out of my frustration, I wrote them down. I did this with no clear reason in mind; I certainly wasn’t thinking of turning them into a book or even of sending them to anyone else to read. I wrote them out of a deep drive, a need to fully assimilate them, so extraordinary did they seem at the time that I couldn’t think of them as my life until I had in some familiar way concretized them.
    In these early notes I tell, in utilitarian prose, exactly what happened. For example, there is a three-page record, dated February 9/78, of our adventure one evening going by snowmobile in the middle of a five-day blizzard to visit a neighbor a few miles away. (The snow had drifted across the road in fingers that were as deep as eight feet, sloping up on one side, and dropping abruptly off on the other. We had to drag the snowmobile up the sloping side, then Peter drove it down the cliffside, braking all the way so as not go end for end. We did this for almost two miles before we reached a flat field that was smooth driving. It was worse going home at one in the morning, but anybody blizzard-bound for four days will tell you it was worth it.) Before that detailed description, I found a paragraph of ruminations about the rural value system.
    By May 1979, exactly three years after my new life began, I was writing notes in a consistent pattern. I have kept journals continuously since, although their character changed fairly quickly from detailed, factual accounts of events to the psychic journey I was already, without knowing it, launched on.
    I couldn’t be with Peter all the time; I needed time to myself, and I had housework to do and cooking and clothes-washing. Sometimes Peter was out fencing with his hired man and didn’t needme, or he was off at a cattle sale or a farm auction, or working with other men at one or the other grazing cooperatives. All of these meant that I was often alone in the house, working by myself.
    In those first years I was trying to be a traditional