The Place We Are Planted

 “His Roots Grasped New Soil” – Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous

“Wherever you go, go with all your heart!” -Confucius

I spent my grade school and early high school years in a small northwest Iowa farming town, in a time and place where as a young boy I would hop on my bike at seven in the morning and not return home until dinner. It was a town with sidewalks and neighborhood parks, ball fields, urban woods, a river, with everyone I knew living within a three-mile radius.

It was in this little town that I got my first 10 speed bicycle, my first drink of alcohol, my first kiss, where I first experienced something like God, and where I first turned from him. It is where I both found and then lost my place in this world.

In a 2014 essay for “First Things”, Dale Coulter writes “Every story takes place somewhere, and every place has a story to tell.  Place is where our stories are born and grow. One comes to love life by loving the place of one’s sojourn through life and then one finds the reasons for this love in the tales one tells and the vision that emerges from those tales.”

Searching for one’s place in this world is the greatest treasure hunt one will ever undertake. On the other hand, to never discover that place may be the saddest thing of all.

When I was seventeen my dad moved our family from small-town Iowa to Reno, Nevada, after having a string of “differences of opinions” with his immediate boss. As we pulled away and drove west from my home in this little farming town, I watched everything I had ever known and felt and hoped recede in the rear-view mirror.

It was while I lived in Reno, the “Biggest Little City in the World”, that I bought my first car from my wages working in a wholesale bakery loading ovens. It was a 1963 metallic midnight blue Chevy SS Impala with a 425 Cubic inch engine. It was equipped with black bucket seats, automatic on the console, and the latest and best 8-track tape player money could buy. Strangers would gawk at my car as I pulled to a stoplight, and say “Man, that is a sweet set of wheels”. I could not separate their comment about my car from myself. I was the owner of that sweet set of wheels— therefore, I was a cool dude, no doubt. I was forced to relinquish the last vestige of the place I had made my own.With that car and a few friends, I drove the roads from Virginia City to Carson City to Mt. Rose, Lake Tahoe, and even to Boise and back.

In Reno I fished for trout with salmon eggs on the Truckee River, from its banks deep in the desert all the way down to its shores winding through downtown past the business district, boutiques, and bars.

It was in Reno that I met a mystery girl I fell in love with in one night, never to see her again. In Reno I was introduced to the world of girls, pot, western boots, and rock and roll.

In Reno I would roam alone the high desert hills behind our house, hunting huge jack rabbits with my dad’s 22 pistol. I scrambled up boulders as big as houses. Once, while pulling myself up onto a rock plateau, I faced a den of a dozen or more rattlesnakes wound together seeking the cool of the shade under the cleft of a rock. I dropped back down and flew away from there. Yet, I am still talking about that moment over fifty years later.

In Reno, I felt I had once again found that place, my place. I had no doubt that life would only get bigger and better right here in this little Desert City.

Then one Sunday afternoon after Mass, Dad gathered us all and broke the news to us that we would have to move yet one more time. “We are moving to Decatur, Alabama—a small town in the northern part of the State.” He had had been let go. (The next day, I would be too, since I worked in the same manufacturing plant that he ran.)

I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly. “Alabama”? I repeated. “Yes.”, he replied as firmly and resolutely as I had ever heard him. “But why Alabama?” I asked. “Because that is where my work is”.

I instantly searched my mind for what, if anything, I knew of Alabama. The only images I had were plantation owners, slavery, heat and humidity, and endless fields of cotton. I was being dragged from Paradiso to Inferno.

We had three cars, but we could only take two. Dad decided that my car, being the oldest, would have to be sold. This car had become a part of who I was.

We drove across the Southwest to Alabama the summer of 1970, the year the movie “Woodstock” came out. My sister and I went to see it in Albuquerque. I had long hair, wore muscle “tee” shirts and a suede leather belt with a tassel that hung down my hip. Once more, I was trying to be a part of something—to belong to the “Love and Peace” generation by simply trying to look the part.

“Fitting-In” was what I chased. While I had not consciously realized it, finding the place I belonged has always been my quest. It has been said that there are only a few major plots in the history of mankind and our life stories, and the most prominent of them all is the quest for a certain place to settle and call home. I am thinking of Odysseus striving to get home to his beloved Penelope, frustrated in his attempts by years of detours out of his control and personal mistakes very much so. Many of us find we must journey the majority of our lives to eventually find that place. Being frustrated in that quest has led me and millions of others into those dark places of addiction and depression.

I lost my place when we moved from Iowa. I lost my place when I sold my car. I lost my place when I left Reno. And now I was sure Alabama could never be one of those places I could settle down into .

I was wrong. Within a week, I had found my tribe-a small group of guys in my Church Youth group. Now, I wasn’t at all interested in the content or activities of this group, but I liked these guys, and they seemed to like me. I was welcomed and included into the group that would become close friends, several of them for life. I found a place I could fit in. Alabama may not be so bad after all.

I also met my future wife in this youth group. I fell in love with her well before she even took notice of me, other than being the “new” guy. We would marry several years later, set up house in Tuscaloosa, attend the University of Alabama, and begin raising our family. For the next twenty-eight years, we lived in Tuscaloosa. This medium sized city, in the heart of the deep south, became our home. We soaked in the slow and easy southern culture like we did the heat and humidity that filled the air. I developed a modest Southern accent, but our children speak it today like the natives they are.

Once again, I had found my place. This spot of the world seemed to belong to me. Then, after twenty-eight years in Alabama, I left for The Puget Sound for both work and to care for my ageing father.

Relocating to the Pacific Northwest was profound. I had always been drawn to the west, to the mountains. As a boy raised in the farmland of Iowa, there were no mountains to climb, but if there was a hill of any size, I was compelled to summit it, and soak in the perspective from the top.

That early impulse served me well, living in the shadow of the Northern Cascade and Olympic Mountain ranges. In my twenty-two years living there, I summited all four Washington volcanoes and many of the 4000-to-8000-foot peaks in the Cascades and Olympics.

I also feasted on Puget Sound salmon and crab. I tried out a variety of new foods, from Vietnamese PHO, Pacific Islander short ribs and poi (not a fan), Korean Fried Chicken, Tai beef noodle soup, and Filipino adobo.

I snow shoed in the mountains, kayaked on the lakes, ran on the urban trails, road my bike from Seattle to Portland, romped around the progressive cities of Seattle, Vancouver CA, and Portland. Rafted the Wenatchee River, rambled along the wild Pacific shores of Oregon and Washington, watching the seals, otters, and the occasional whale play in the Sound.

The Pacific Northwest, particularly the Puget Sound, has a reputation for being overcast, gloomy, and rainy for most of the year—and that reputation is just fine with the residents, seeing that it is one of the fastest growing regions in the country. However, the “marine” weather along the Washington Coast and the Puget Sound suited me wonderfully. I did not mind the overcast months (November – May), or the frequent misty days, nor the long dark winter nights. It was my signal to enter into my seasonal retreat, to write, read, and pray more. Besides, the mild temperatures and the glorious four months of sunshine in the summer was a nice trade.

My wife and I endured the “Seattle Freeze”- that tendency for Northwesterners to look down at their feet or far off as they walk past you. While I made wonderful friends, it required some patience. My wife, who has never met a stranger, would greet everyone on the trail as we hiked, and only occasionally get a response. I would play a game with her as we hiked the trail—to see how many would greet her if she did not greet them first. Often it was ZERO greetings the entire hike. Of course, she hated that game. She has to greet people!

I went to dozens of music festivals featuring the Northwest “Grunge” sound and got hooked on the Puget Sound Indie radio stations. I was a frequent visitor to the Tacoma art theatre, the opera, and off-Broadway shows.

I loved to roam around downtown Seattle. It was a true city-where millionaires and the homeless walked the same streets-where the business conventioneers, musicians, dot.com employees, and artists drank coffee at the same Starbucks—where hippies, yuppies, generations A-Z all seemed content to share the same city space with each other.

All of this, over the span of those years, did something to me. The geography, the music, the cuisine, the wide diversity of cultures on display everywhere (in my parish church, for the first time in my life I was a minority) – all taken together was like an incubator for me—changing me in ways I would not realize for years, and in ways I would not have predicted.

It was through this very physical experience with place that I began to discover something of what I was supposed to do and be. Here in this place, I accepted that I was a writer, that I was a contemplative seeking solitude, and yet I was also drawn to mentor others, especially men, young and old, into the discovery of the spiritual dimensions of life. It was in The Puget Sound that I began to understand what it meant to set my roots down deep—first of all physically, which was in itself most important, but then mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—to abide precisely where my feet are in this moment—present and engaged.

A year ago, my wife and I found ourselves at a point we were not accustomed to. We were at a place in our lives where we were for the first time free to choose where and how we would live. We were just retired, and no longer driven by job demands. The choice couldn’t be clearer. We would return to Central Alabama to be close to our children and grandchildren.  Twenty-five years ago, I would never have believed all our children would set their own roots in the South and never leave. But there they were, and there we went.

Alabama is still hot and humid in the summer. Yet, I am older and take better care of myself, so I avoid the sun and the hot part of the day. But the summer mornings are pleasant, and instead of the incessant cawing of crows I heard in my yard in the Northwest, I listen to mourning doves cooing, and blue birds, cardinals, mockingbirds, finches, flickers, and red-winged black birds all singing their morning and late afternoon songs. In the evenings, I sit on our porch, pluck my banjo, and listen to the bull frogs and crickets, while watching lightning bugs dance on the surface of the lawn.

Once more, as in nineteen seventy, I have made close friends quickly in Alabama. I notice drivers are quick to give a wave, and the patrons in stores are quick to engage with someone they have never seen in a casual conversation. My wife, who as I have said has never met a stranger, is in heaven after years of the “Seattle Freeze”.

As I approach the end of my first year back in Alabama, I look out my office window at our neighborhood lake, and I watch the great blue Heron fishing on the shore, barking at the nearby egrets, while mallards and turtles casually swim by.

The Heron flies just inches above the surface of the lake, her long spindly legs dragging behind her, tapping the water that leaves a trail of silver rings. She disappears into the trees, leaving evidence of where she had been as she glides into the mysteries beyond the shore. I wonder if that is what I have been doing as I lived in various places—tapping my place with my mark, moving on to the next one, leaving a faint sign at each place that I was once there.

As I survey my past, and the places I have landed, sometimes for just a short while, I realize that each place deposited something within me that I continue to carry with me today. Something useful, something I can share as a gift to others. It is always up to me to make a place mine, and if I do, no matter the soil, I will soak it up and become a part of that place.  Today, I am settling in here in the Alabama countryside, like the Crepe myrtle in my front yard, into this hard, red, soil—allowing this place, this climate, this people, this culture, to shape me even more.

It now seems to me that I have been shaped, formed, and even transformed through the different places I have settled in. Allowing a specific place, with everything that place includes—the people, the landscape, the activities, the challenges— to seep slowly into the deepest part of oneself will overtime transform you. The operative word is to “allow”.

The prophet Isaiah, speaking of those who choose to remain in the land they were brought, says “you will take root in the ground and bear fruit above. (IS 37:31), while King David sang of the glories of being planted in the place God chooses– “The just will flourish like the palm-tree, and grow like a Lebenon Cedar. Planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God, still bearing fruit when they are old, still full of sap, still green”.

Roots and Fruit. Grow where I am planted. Sink down into the soil of the place I find myself. Only then will I be able to give back, and in the process, change.

In the fourth century, St. Benedict of Nursia established numerous monasteries throughout Europe based on his written “Rule of Life” which many historians’ credit for saving civilization through the dark ages. Benedict understood the importance of place in the conversion of the soul. One of the three core vows of the Benedictine monk is “Stability”.

The Benedictine Spiritual principle of stability means that a monk stays put. The Benedictine monk Thomas Merton explains: “By making a vow of stability the monk renounces the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.’ This implies a deep act of faith: the recognition that it does not much matter where we are or whom we live with. …Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary.… Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings.”

Over the past twenty-five years I have spent many weekends and a number of weeks living, eating, and praying with Benedictine monks in monasteries in Alabama, Washington State, and Georgia. I have closely observed them over this time live and work (and play) within the confines of their monastery, each year maintaining and improving upon the land they made a vow to live on. As I have returned over the years, I see the same Benedictine brothers, older, slower, a little stooped in posture and halting in their gait, but still there, doing their chores, saying their prayers, singing their hymns, and telling the same stories and jokes I heard years ago. These men were living testaments to the power of a place, of an environment, and of the people you associate with to mold and make you.

Like these monks, most of the events of our lives are routine and “ordinary”. The paradox is that by embracing the good and routine and ordinary in our lives in the very place we live, over time some surprising and extraordinary things occur. From simply showing up each day in our neighborhoods and communities and places of business with an intent to serve, to see what one can do to be helpful in the precise places we live, careers are advanced, friends are helped through hard times, private journaling becomes published writing, mountains are climbed, marathons are run, spiritual life and wisdom advances, relationships are healed and strengthened day after day, and, yes, joy is experienced.

When I look back, I wonder if I ever really choose my place in the world, or if, as I suspect, life itself chooses my place. It remains then my choice to either reject or embrace the place I land –do I sink my roots—my very self, down into the land?

So, maybe, whether I am in cornfields of the Midwest, the High Desert of the West, the mountain ranges and rain forests of the Northwest, the big progressive cities, the small conservative towns, or the cotton fields, woods, lakes and rivers of the Deep South, there is always a place chosen for me where I can drive my roots down into the soil I find, and maybe in the process bring something good into the place I have been planted.

And yes, I still miss my ‘63 Chevy!