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This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Sara Kyoungah White
The unknown author of Ecclesiastes once wrote that there is a time to be silent and a time to speak. Sometimes, too, there is a time to speak about the silent things.
See me, hear me, notice me—the more the better! cries the world. In its clamoring shadow there is another kind of power whose gossamer threads hold everything together. This power is in all that is left unseen, unheard, and unnoticed. I have glimpsed its veiled face off the edge of the trail, a small hunched figure sketching among the ferns. I have heard it in the apt word spoken in private, sealed with wax and wisdom. I have felt it in the warm darkness when I was held lovingly. I wonder if you, too, have glimpsed and heard and felt it too.
When I was a child, I lived in a small brick rental house in Fairview Park, Ohio. If you step through that house where someone else now lives, you can slide open the back door and walk to the very edge of the backyard. There, a grove of pine trees gives way to a faded path through the woods—woods that were once mine.
I must have been nine years old and my sister five, the first time we ventured into those woods. Small pocketknife in hand, I left the safety of the lawn and tiptoed onto the path holding my sister’s hand, a hush falling around us like a curtain as the outline of the house blurred behind the pines.
There were hidden tulips in patches of sunlight, and a few lingering spots of snow in the shade. We passed overgrown fenced-off areas that might have once been gardens, and a gnarled crabapple tree with a high built-in seat, as if made for a giant. As the brush and overhead growth began to make our journey difficult, we twisted apart green branches that were just awakening from their winter slumber and cut through wild grape vines that dripped with sap. We ran back to get our rakes, brushing aside the wet leaves on the path to reveal black earth mixed with gravel. When we grew tired, we turned around and returned to the house to eat popsicles, then came back again later in the day.
For days we tunneled our way by stages into the woods, following the faint path, until suddenly, we reached the end. We entered an expansive space sheltered by trees, a room with tree trunks and vines for walls and a matted root carpet. We stood in the middle and slowly spun, mouths agape, squinting at the sun sparkling in our eyes through the budding leaf canopy overhead, as though miles from home.
I wonder as I did then, what used to be in that open space? Maybe a house had been there long ago, a log cabin in the woods, and we had discovered its foundations. Maybe it was an eccentric previous owner’s outdoor oasis, replete with wicker egg chairs and a butler who would crouch through the bush tunnel bearing a golden tray of mimosas. Maybe it was a secret society’s place of séance, velvet-hooded figures huddled around a fire at night in a backyard wood of suburban Cleveland.
All I know is that sometimes even today, I run on this path in my dreams. And if I ever doubted the identity of my sister, this is the question I would ask her: What was at the end of the path in our secret wood?
Now you, too, can guess the answer.
I later learned the word to describe those childhood woods of mine, where I would so often run in times of stress or sorrow: refugia. It seems the path in my secret woods led to the edges of the world.
Refugia are “places of shelter where life endures in times of crisis,” writes professor Debra Rienstra in her book Refugia Faith. “Ideally, these refugia endure, expand, and connect so that new life emerges.” Refugia are what restored the apocalyptic mountainsides of Mount Saint Helens in the decades following its eruption, small hidden places sheltering life in time of calamity to later nurture the landscape back to health, the secret of the phoenix’s cells set at ecological scale. Today, environmental scientists are considering refugia in various landscapes as one possibility for fending off the impending devastations of climate change.
Rienstra is attuned to the fact that our connection to the created world and our present environmental crisis is not just economic, scientific, or political—it is deeply spiritual and emotional. She writes of Australian environmental studies professor Glenn A. Albrecht, who invented wonderful words like psychoterratic, which describes what you feel when “you turn off an exit on the highway toward your home neighborhood or walk through a sun-warmed wildflower meadow.” It conveys the full, ineffable spectrum of psychological responses we have to a place.
There’s also Albrecht’s word solastalgia, a mash-up of the Latin words for solace and pain. It’s a “‘melancholia or homesickness’ for the way a place used to be,” “what you feel when you visit Grandpa’s voluptuous garden, formerly kaleidoscopic with vegetables and flowers, now neglected by the next homeowner and nothing but thistles and garlic mustard.”
What strikes me is how words like these come out of the most secret of places to reverberate in every private heart. I may never have turned off onto your particular exit or seen your Grandpa’s garden, but I can guess how your psychoterratic response feels, can trace my own hand along your solastalgia. You may never have walked the paths of my childhood woods, but I suspect that when you close your eyes and stand beside me, you too can almost hear the bird songs and the rustle of wind in the branches overhead.
Each memory is a refugia, protected by our necessary secrecies. It is where our lives endure. And to whisper them aloud is to expand, one refugia brushing against another, until in our telling and our living we find the charred landscape has begun to bloom.
In 2012, garden designer Jihae Hwang won the gold medal at London’s Chelsea Flower Show for her entry, “Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden” based on the landscape of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War.
Spanning 155 miles and 2.5 miles wide, the DMZ is one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world. The two countries on either side of it were one kingdom for thousands of years until, seventy years ago, they were suddenly not.
A curious thing has happened as a result of this war. The space between the two countries has become the unintended refuge of rare native Korean plants and endangered animals, flourishing in the absence of humankind. Remote cameras discreetly capture elusive creatures seldom seen in other parts of the peninsula, like the wildcat, yellow-throated martens, and black bear. Some even believe that tigers, once common throughout Korea, may still be roaming through these interlinear forests.
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