Spacious, Not Desolate

I’m driving south through landscapes some would call desolate, though I prefer to see them as spacious. I’ve left the dry lands of eastern Washington, where I’ve been assisting my partner in caring for her elderly mother after an injurious fall. I see herds of wild horses that populate the hills. I pass through outposts too tiny to earn the name “town.” I see surreal wind farms, their giant sleek windmills towering over the Columbia Gorge. I cross that great river, a natural feature that serves as the artificial border between Washington and Oregon. I slip south through the wide open landscape, changing states of mind as well as states on the map.

This part of eastern Oregon is nearly a desert, though snow-capped mountains are in full view from too many miles away to even estimate. I see a ranch for sale so large—sixty-six thousand acres—that it takes me twenty minutes to pass the line of “for sale” signs. The scales of distance out here are vast. They give me beautiful room to breathe, roll, absorb family changes and challenges. The scales of distance within me become spaciously vast as well. I focus on a relativistic driving meditation that’s been part of my gratitude practice for many years: I am sitting still. The world is moving by me.

No sight compels me to pause until I almost pass an abandoned church, sitting just off the roadside in another tiny outpost. After a moment’s hesitation nearly becomes a decision to continue south, I ease off the empty two-lane road and circle back to park near that old church.

I think it might be Sunday, but I’m retired enough to not need to know. In any case, no congregation has come to congregate. The bell is missing from the tower. The stained glass is gone too. A slight breeze blows through the empty window frames; also through gaps in the roof where missing shingles have opened the inner church to the wider sky. Even the trees nearby are apparently dead. I look at the strange dignity and majesty of it all and think again: Spacious, not desolate.

Lately I’ve been surrounded by stories of decline. Declining health in aging. Declining civility in society. Declining number of animals and plants in endangered species. Declining faith in the future of humanity, and in greater spirit beyond. And I decline to argue with any of those perceptions of decline, as stark as the evidence for many declines have been. Still, I look again at the missing church windows, then notice the grass silently restarting to grow up around it all. Spacious, not desolate.

The persistent grass and grace remind me of a card I kept on my desk for many years. Barn’s burned down. Now I can see the moon. The inside of that card was blank, and I preferred it that way. I’d bought it as a remembrance, rather than to send to anyone. I have no idea what happened to that card now, but the perspective it gave me remains. Spacious, not desolate.

I’ve had to learn to see spaciousness, in order to celebrate my own declining future, to which this moment will someday inevitably lead. I’ve had to learn to let the landscape within mirror the landscape beyond, especially in times when my inner life felt desolate. I’ve learned that we’re all spacious too, even then. There is room then for new life to grow, in forms beyond our imagination; forms we have no ability or need to control.

Seeing spaciousness instead of desolation gives me faith in the persistence of nature and spirit. Yet neither faith nor belief are even needed, to notice the beauty within even our most difficult days. Nature’s steady ability to express new forms of vibrant growth is larger than all of our viewpoints combined. It transcends our times of decline and passing.

I see all that in one abandoned church, built by people with a religion I don’t know, in a time I didn’t experience, in a place I’ll never live. And if I’m the only congregation this morning, no matter. Others will join over time, at a distance, in a place and way I’ll never see, to celebrate life’s persistence and regrowth—just as you do now in joining me in this moment. Spacious, not desolate.

As I leave the church behind, I celebrate that it’s always this way. The light on the mountains is newly enlightening, ever changing across the miles.