Just being in the world

Teaching Places by Audrey Whitson, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2003, 192 pp.

It seems serendipitous to me that I was given the book, Teaching Places, by Audrey Whitson to read and review just when I came down with pneumonia and cracked a rib coughing. I was forced to stop most of my everyday activity, to rest in bed, recuperate and in the process reflect on and re-examine my priorities.

Whitson's book does much the same thing--withdraws from the busy to become still, journeys into the wilderness of Western Canada and into the wilderness of the spirit. It became like a travel guidebook for an inner journey, a stream-of-consciousness logbook of Whitson's adventures into nature and her own true nature.

The book is an inspiring and uplifting read, especially for an invalid also questioning and reworking dreams. Complete with awe-inspiring photos of rocks and grasses, foothills and plains, misty mountaintops and mossy river valleys, it is a transporting book, especially for a shut-in. As I learned to listen to my own body and its slow, painful mending, I was moved by Whitson's deepening trust in listening to nature, communing with the land, being touched by the bending grasses and hearing the ancient stories in rocks.

Whitson's travel journal reads at times like a captain's log, at times like a letter to a friend, at times as a metaphysical nature poem. I wonder if its mystical quality was enhanced by my own heightened consciousness with fever.

Her preface proclaims this book to be a merging of two dreams she had: the first, an invocation to literally "pitch her tent in nature," and the second a call to chronicle this experience in a journal. She exclaims that in merging the two, she becomes a "priestess preaching nature." Whitson looks more and more to native traditions and the earth herself for new reference points to faith, for a new language in which "prayer and living become one."

Just as Whitson seems at first overwhelmed surviving in nature in silence and solitude, I found it at first hard to "get into" the simple and seemingly uneventful narrative. But eventually, it is this quiet and simple reflectiveness that makes the book such a soothing and meditative read. As the old spiritual practices fall away in her spiritual quest, she learns to "just be" in her body and hence the world. What a powerful message for a "do-er" to read in a sickbed!

For Whitson, the rocks become her prayer beads, and the examples of metamorphoses all around her in nature become the inspiration for her own spiritual alchemy. The winding paths that at times circle back, at times trickle off to nowhere, at times take her to breathtaking new vistas, parallel the personal choices we choose to follow on our spiritual journey. Whitson travels to places that have no maps; the paradoxically lush and harsh Canadian wilderness becomes a backdrop for her musings on her own wilderness, and that of the church. Whitson's poetic sensibilities and Biblical allusions make the book at times allegorical, describing the delicate balance needed in the hills, our bodies, our church.

Whitson's central connecting theme proclaims that this journey "has propelled me into the unknown, outside the settled and predictable. I stand on fertile and shifting grounds." This rings true as I navigate my body back to health and ponder the health of the planet, the health of the church." Like a chant, Whitson repeats the call to "Pay attention!" This journey would not have been possible had she not lived like Jesus, 40 days in the desert "the long years of digging in the soil of my psyche, my roots, my faith."

She exclaims that none of this simple wisdom of the Earth could have been revealed to her, and thus us, without her wilderness retreat where she found her voice, her poetry, the land of herself.

Katie Marshall Flaherty teaches in Toronto.

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