I am my father’s Spencer Wildlife Refuge son. I was born while my family lived within its confines, and my father worked for the state of Ohio. The phrase reflects an elemental feeling of home, imagined as a house nestled among the trees. A house I can’t recall and will never see, torn down long ago. Nonetheless, I can conjure an image of it in my mind from photographs and the stories I heard later of a young family living on the shores of the Black River in northeast Ohio.
We are a storytelling species. To anyone willing to listen, I will happily tell the story of this place as a defining characteristic of who I am, even if I have no conscious recollection of it—an old house with sagging floors (so I’m told).
I imagine in my mind’s eye the glint of sunlight off a lake in the early autumn afternoon sun, the allure of nature, and…
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry
Where the Heart Is
We hold in our minds a platonic ideal–a “meta-home,” if you will–home as a metaphysical construct. But this is only a partial description. This ideal is at once an abstract impression alive within an individual human mind and a real place existing outside the human mind. It is the relationship between the abstract and concrete; an allegorical piece of ground exists in my mind, connecting me to my father, my family, and an actual geophysical coordinate labeled as “Spencer Wildlife Preserve.”
Our powers of perception are limited, as is our time on this planet. In this short span shuffling across my corner of Earth, I cannot begin to conceive how my thread of consciousness interacts, impacts, and dances with the innumerable processes and strands of causality. However, with the power of a story, imagination, and flights of fancy, I can distill the unfathomable and bring it “home.”
Scientific inquiry allows us to quantify, decipher patterns, parse numbers, analyze statistics, and model scenarios. What we can’t measure–the ineffable–is conceived in our imagination and expressed in the stories we tell and we are told.
I am my father’s Spencer Wildlife Refuge son.
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