november december

i love this time of year because it's two months of incubation. a long ramp to a fresh start. two months of liminal music space, where you aren't adding anymore to your "2019" playlist, but haven't yet started a 2020 either. two months of old dead goals showing up alive, not dead, just hibernating, till the cold quiet weather brought them back to life. you start dreaming up a new plan for yourself. these are the months so packed, so full of deadlines and family and assignments and parties that your mind latches wildly onto any inspiration that floats along, logging it away for "when things settle down in the new year."

and once they do settle, you're left with a beautiful, full reawakening of yourself.

Built to Burn

It’s a heaviness in your heart sort of day.

In reading through all the news about Notre Dame burning, I came across a line from a firefighter—“these cathedrals and houses of worship are built to burn.”

The timbers inside the cathedral were 850 years old, some of them. The stained glass 764 years old. There is no fire code, no earthquake-proofing, no Class A fiberglass shingles. Just the hundreds of years it took the people of France to build the cathedral. Built in a way that makes it mortal, of materials that are mortal. It wasn’t built in a way to be able to withstand a fire. It was built with things that burn.

A few years back, my brother introduced my family to Notre-Dame de Paris, a musical by Riccardo Cocciante and Luc Plamondon, about the hunchback story. The opening song is called "Le Temps des Cathedrals," The Age of Cathedrals. The narrator sings,

Pierre après pierre, jour après jour

De siècle en siècle avec amour

Il a vu s'elever les tours

Qu'il avait bâties de ses mains

Les poètes et les troubadours

Ont chanté des chansons d'amour

Qui promettaient au genre humain
De meilleurs lendemains

Roughly translated, it says something like:

Stone after stone, day after day, 

with love one century after another,

they saw the towers rise--

towers they had built with their own hands.

The poets and the troubadours sang songs of love

that promised to mankind better tomorrows.

Something about listening to this song today, with the scope of the cathedral's centuries all folded into one melody, was incredibly moving. Visionaries, for centuries, poured their full-hearted dreams and craft into building Notre Dame de Paris. L'homme a voulu monter vers les etoiles. Man would that he could climb to the stars. And the masons, the architects, the poets, the musicians, all sang one song: that visions could be made physical, could be given body, could be brought into tangible, corporeal existence. 

The cathedral was a labor of love.

The cathedral was a love song.

When something like this cathedral--something you thought permanent--passes nearly into nonexistence as it did in today's fire, you think things:

You mean I'll never be able to take my daughters to sit in front of Notre Dame? 

You mean when I come into Paris after a long time away and I wander over Pont Saint Michel, Nutella crepe in hand, to watch the evening turn to night and all the lights of Paris go on, I'll come to the cathedral to find ... what? 

What of the saints and apostles carved in the tympanum? 

What of the rose window?

Kind of at the heart of Notre-Dame de Paris is this pretty little song called "Vivre." The chorus says: Live for those we love. Love more than love itself. Give without waiting for anything in return. Love the way the night loves the day. Love until we die of love.

Watching the flames today made me realize, more than all else, that our time passes quickly, and we need to say the things we have to say now, while the moment is ours. All is temporary, all shifts from existing, out. So you have to go and see things before they're gone, because things go away. You have to love the people you need to love, because they will too. We are all built to burn. Timber frameworks and breakable, meltable, stained glass rose windows. So we love each other and love what's around us all we can.

The Land of Your Ancestors (part 1)

"When you go to the land of your ancestors," he said, "you will feel you have come home. Something deep inside you resonates, as if it recognizes the place."

A friend told me this nearly two years ago, when he went to Copenhagen and Scotland, the two lands of his ancestors. This made sense to me. If for centuries, my people had lived in the same small village in the verdant greens of Scotland, farming sheep, adapting to the sodden weather, I can easily believe certain elements of that lifestyle would imprint themselves on their genes, the same genes they'd pass down to their children, grandchildren, and 10x great grandchildren. Even if the genetic imprint is simply a gentle comfort, a familiarity, with that sort of landscape.

A special kind of resonance with a place, that's what I set my sights on. I heard years ago that the ancient Celts believed in something they called thin places: actual physical locations on this green earth where the curtain between this life and the next is thin. They were sacred places, places where you could catch glimpses of greater truth that exists beyond what our mortal experience knows. Places where your presence connects you to the past, to your ancestors, and where that connection feels more tangible, more visceral, more actual than any other place on earth.

With these words pulsing in my heart, I planned a trip to Norway. At the time, I knew the majority of my heritage was British, but had discovered that way way in the distant past, circa 850 A.D., I have a little group of ancestors from those Northern fjords and searoads. When you learn that you can claim a place as mystical as Norway, well, I quickly became fascinated by Norse mythology, by the art of Norwegian woodcarving, by my grandfather’s mission stories of Oslo... And I was certain that should I go there, it was be a thin place for me, a place where I'd feel the kind of homeland resonance I'd heard about.

Grandpa (right) on his mission to Oslo 

I planned the trip with my brother, who independently but simultaneously had had his own surge of Norway interest. Further proof our Norwegian ancestors were calling to us! Months before our trip, I printed out the Norwegian section of our family tree for us to study. We read stories of Rollo son of Rognvald, Snae son of Frost, and Thrond the Old. --All real names, all from my family tree.-- I downloaded Neil Gaiman's book on Norse Mythology for us to listen to while driving across that ancestral homeland, touching the metaphorical fingertips of our ancestors via what I could only imagine would be a wonderland of thin places.

Well a funny thing happened. We started the trip in France and Switzerland, where we had a couple extra days before our flight to Oslo. We spent those days wandering the Swiss Berner Oberland. We stayed in a small village on the shores of a giant turquoise lake, rode a cable car up to high alps, and drove through some of the most breathtaking farmland I’ve ever seen.









Here's a map of our route in Switzerland:



It was a quick couple of days. And just a quick 46 minute drive from one end of our trekking to the other. A tiny blip on the map of Switzerland, of Europe.

Then we flew to Oslo.

It was a funny experience in Norway. We saw the glaciers, we traveled the fjords. We drove from farmland to snowy wilderness to seaport. And all the while, not a single spark of the resonance of home I’d been promised. In fact, of all the places I’ve traveled, nothing has felt so foreign, so unfamiliar to me as Norway.







But the funny thing was that all the while in that Norwegian ancestral land of mine, I was achingly homesick for Switzerland.

Everywhere we went in Norway--the fjords, the seaport, the mountain tunnels--I felt tugs inside to go back to the Alps and Swiss farmland we'd left just days before. I could still feel the alpine air in my lungs. I could still feel the afterimage of its mountains around me.

It felt like a yawn—like a big part of myself that I hadn’t known existed was opening up, waking up. Or like hearing a melody from long in the past, one you knew as a child maybe? Or when was it? Like echoes from some far distant memories that are part of you, but not your own.

It all sounds so corny when written out, but I just don't know any other words for it.

So the night before flying back to the States, on a whim, I searched through my family tree of ancestors to see if any came from Switzerland. I hoped that maybe one or two would give me claim to that beautiful country, and maybe give some sort of explanation to the homesickness I’d felt as soon as I'd left it.

Imagine my delight when I found that night, scanning my family tree, that my great great grandmother was 100% Swiss. Her parents, her grandparents, her great-grandparents, all the way back to 1470 when the Swiss first started keeping church records, are Swiss, from a tiny town in that beautiful farmland my brother and I had driven through just a week before.



Here's that map again, this time circled with all the villages where my thousands of Swiss ancestors lived out their lives.

Little did I know, but our little route through Switzerland while waiting to go to our supposed Norwegian homeland, was actually right through the heart of my heritage.

I know what thin places feel like now.

I know what it is to be homesick for a place that you yourself have only just met, but where your genes have been for hundreds and hundreds of years.

This find was so much more than an intellectual discovery--it was emotional and heartwarming and felt tied to who I am.

When I got back to the States, I set out to research this line of my ancestry. For the next year, I read all I could about Switzerland. I took a course online to learn to read German Kunstschrift. I picked my way through birth records and marriage records in church books from the 1800s, the 1700s, the 1600s…

I didn't find much in the way of new information that hadn't already been recorded in the online genealogies, but I did find their names, written by hand, hundreds of years ago. Schenk. Burkhalter. Locher. Gerber. I saw who stood as witnesses at their christenings. I found tiny details about their lives: one a cobbler, one a choir director. I saw the dates of their weddings, and which of their village neighbors were also married that same day. I saw their ages when they passed away, written beside the date they died, the date they were buried.

And I grew in love for these people I’ve never met but whose genes I carry with me everywhere I go.

***

For the last year I’ve also been studying swallows... (to be continued)