I was born in southern Indiana and spent the first
ten years of my life living on a farm between two rivers. We
lived a couple of miles from them, and every few years you'd hear
that the rivers were rising and flooding “the bottoms,” that lush
acreage near their banks. So experience taught me not
that rivers are roadways that can carry you far away, so much
as they are forces that periodically overwhelm you.
Really, though, I rarely gave the rivers much thought. Mine
was a flat, landlocked world of wheat, corn, and soybean fields,
large expanses of flat midwestern topography, full of stillness
and yellow light and insects.
Not much happens on a farm in southern Indiana...
or anyway, it didn't in the 1960s. Our world was very small.
I remember one day a car with a New York license plate drove by
our house, and we all talked about it for days, as though we'd
seen a UFO or something. But all that, the sameness,
the smallness, the stillness, suited me. I was a shy
kid. When people came to visit—even relatives, family friends
who'd known me since I was in the womb—I would run and hide.
Timid.
Why did I love the storms, then? They
were amazing, especially the summer storms, the clouds black as
pitch and the air electric. We'd wait eagerly for them,
feeling the air charge up, keeping one ear pinned to the television
for tornado warnings. But the tornadoes always passed us
by, touching down in Evansville or Carmi or Louisville...close,
yes, but not close enough. “It's because of the rivers,”
my parents always said. “Tornadoes jump over water.”
I was an intrinsically scared kid, but this disappointed me in
a way. Guess I’d seen The Wizard of Oz on TV too many
times, and figured tornadoes were a one-way ticket to a place
with green horses and winged monkeys, which intrigued me very
much. Or maybe deep down I knew that someday I’d have
to leave and see more of the world, but also knew I was going
to have to be pushed into doing it. Maybe a tornado
would help me out.
Instead, as it happened, my father died in an accident
the summer I turned nine. The rest of us stayed on the farm
another year, wandering around like ghosts, and then mom moved
us to Los Angeles to live with her sister. I suppose
you could say I got my tornado after all: It picked
me up and set me down in a completely foreign land of preternaturally
tanned, thin people, where you couldn't see the horizon, where
there were no still, black, heavy summer afternoons of excited
terror, where instead the damn ground would periodically shake
without warning. My tornado blew me to a place where not
only were there no winged monkeys (we lived in the suburbs, not
Hollywood), but where I was a homesick and uneasy Dorothy,
always looking for a solid place to set my bare hillbilly feet.
I came from a prairie land with rising rivers and
violent storms and wind and funnel clouds that will pick you up
and shake you and throw you back down on the ground, but that
was no preparation for earthquakes. Earthquakes pick you
up and shake you too, but psychologically it’s a very different
experience. Tornadoes, at least, assume a world where the
earth is constant, stable, reliable—something to be picked up
from. But earthquakes rob you of even that reliability.
The earth, steady beneath my feet, was not a given, as
I found that out when my father was killed; and moving to hyperseismic
California reinforced this perception.
In time I grew up and married a man from New Zealand.
If you'd told a shy Indiana farm girl who was awed by an out-of-state
license plate that she would someday visit the South Pacific,
let alone marry someone from such an exotic place, she would have
laughed. Or, more likely, run to hide in a closet somewhere.
My husband is from a beautiful but tempestuous land, volcanic
and seismically troubled, and his life hasn't followed a peaceful
trajectory either. Yet-- born with the Sun in the fourth house
(Cancer's natural domain) and a Taurus Moon-- he's secure in a
way I’ll never be. Psychologists would point to complex
factors in our respective upbringings, and as an astrologer I
point to his natal chart; but perhaps it's simply that when you
grow up in such a geologically volatile place, you develop “sea
legs,” an internal gravity that makes it impossible to throw you
off balance. He learned to ride the waves of seismic unrest
at such an early age that he never developed insecurity.
He moved all the way around the world, settled in an alien land
and embraces it without fear. Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes,
whatever: he grew up in one of the most volatile places on earth,
so nothing scares him. Physics and the attraction of opposites
being what they are, I suppose it was inevitable our plate boundaries
would eventually merge.
Each time I've moved, each time I've lost someone
I loved, I've developed a little more gravity, a confidence born
of survival. My life has become a series of tremors
punctuated by the occasional 7.5 catastrophe, and if one is
inclined to be metaphysical, I suppose you could say it's because
I needed to learn to stand on my own two feet; and if you're
a benevolent universe, how are you going to help a kid achieve
this incarnational imperative? Forget The Wizard of Oz:
The occasional tornado alone is not enough to do the trick.
To really develop inner security, some people need to be set
down in a place and in a life that systematically undermine their
external security, then be given a life partner who is a good
role model for navigating change with élan.
During this season of eclipses in Cancer and Capricorn
- the signs of security and home, and of the larger world outside
it - here is some food for thought: As much as we seek
security, our souls know we need movement in order to keep growing.
Even the earth - our home - is not a given, not a solid platform
we stand upon. Like life, it's a relatively thin and fragile
thing, broken into big pieces that bang together, drift apart,
and graze each other in passing - full of movement and change,
designed to put us exactly where we need to be and to keep us
wondering where, precisely, that is. Our tectonic home is our
intermediary between the air that invites us to fly, and the gravity
that gives us our reference point when we come back down to earth.
Its plates are boats we sail into destiny, bobbing along on the
ionosphere of happenstance, looking for our sea legs.
