Anthropologist
Loren Eiseley, whose life and career was a brilliant search for meaning and
whose books are a romance in language, called himself “a refugee at heart, a
wistful glancer over fences.”
I love that
description and find so much in it to identify with.
All my life
I, too, have been a seeker: for love; for purpose and meaning; for affirmation
of whatever skills I have learned; for an expanding awareness both in my soul
and in my mind; for an embracing of wonder and beauty, of ecstasy and delight;
a seeker of a simple goodness inspired by a generous heart.
These remain
longings of mine.
I have also
been a fugitive, an alien of sorts, a defector escaping the confines of suffocating
rules and stifling beliefs; a person displaced in a setting of so many
contradictions.
I was born a
captive and have struggled all these years to be free.
I had loving
parents and amazing grandparents. And as
a boy I enjoyed all the things boys do.
I played with toy soldiers and marched them into battle under the kitchen
table. I used to love to wear a pair
of fake pearl plated pistols in a fake leather holster and a white cowboy hat
and shoot imaginary outlaws in my back yard. I liked
girls and sneaked kisses from them behind the trees at the back of the
playground at recess and told all of them I would marry them. I played baseball in the summer on a grassy
ball field down the street from my house.
I learned to spiral a football and watched it sail into the hands of my
buddies from school.
My
adolescence was neither stormy nor awkward.
I grew into it confident that somewhere out there in high school life
would really get interesting.
But then the
restrictions of church and the rigid religious values of my parents began to be
enforced. I was not allowed to go to
school dances or even movies. Sex of
course was a secretive forbidden urge that teens, and certainly I, needed to
avoid; something to dismiss at all costs if a young person was going to be a
good Christian; even if denying it was detrimental to one’s own sense of being
human; even to one’s own sense of self-worth.
It’s a wonder I didn’t wander off into all sorts of mischief with that
kind of pressure on me to be religiously vigilant but somehow I managed to deal with sex in a healthy way. Rules, I learned, were made to be broken. And there are some things that are going to
be discovered even if God is watching.
All these
years later, after so many good and strange and sorrowful and beautiful
experiences, I am still seeking; I’m still a refugee at heart. There is that line in Bob Seger’s great song,
“Well I’m older now but still runnin’ against the wind.”
These
thoughts lately reminded me of one of the most emotionally jarring movies I
have ever seen, Sean Penn’s 2007 spellbinding film adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s
amazing book, “Into the Wild.”
The movie
captures completely the moving and true story of 20 year old Christopher McCandless. Just graduated from college and facing a
bright future in law school he was nevertheless restless and troubled about
life. From a loving home but one
fraught with high expectations, Chris felt overwhelmed with a need to get
away. A guileless, wide-eyed idealist,
he longed for space, for relief from the confining standards of people. Worn down by the meanness of others, by the
constant quarreling of society, he took off to Alaska to find peace in the grandeur
of nature.
There is a
scene in the movie where Chris tells a wheat farmer of his plans to go to
Alaska. He tells him he wants to be “out
there, out in the big mountains, rivers, sky, game. Just be out there in it, you know? In the wild.”
And then he reveals this:
Christopher
McCandless: You know, it’s about getting out of this sick society. Society!
Farmer:
Society!
Christopher
McCandless: Society, man! You know,
society! Cause, you know what I don’t
understand? I don’t understand why
people, why every fucking person is so bad to each other so fucking often. It doesn’t make sense to me. Judgment.
Control. All that, the whole
spectrum. Well, it just…
Farmer: What “people”
we talking about?
Christopher
McCandless: You know, parents, hypocrites, politicians, pricks.
Sadly, though, what Chris discovers is that nature,
too, is harsh and often unforgiving in its standards as well. He keeps a journal of his entire adventure
and despite the fact he is struggling to survive the formidable Alaskan
environment, he remains. In one of his
last journal entries he writes, “I know now how important it is in life not
necessarily to be strong but to feel strong.”
After months in the wild, Chris, half starved,
froze to death in an abandoned bus and was found by moose hunters two weeks
later.
I know what he was looking for. Down deep in many of us, we seek a freedom,
an affirmation, and the hope that out there somewhere there is a place where
life is truly good and there is a peace that welcomes all of us restless
refugees at heart.
© 2013 Timothy Moody
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