Reflections on Alaska

We’re back from Alaska and the Yukon. As you move up through Alaska, the Yukon, the Far North, the land is so big. Feelings arise from some unexplored place in oneself – feelings that have a primeval quality that both beckons and yet also puts one on one’s edge. I had felt these feelings 30 years ago the first time I hitchhiked up to the Far North. At that time, I simply gazed dumfounded at the space, the vastness. This time, as a family, we were searching for a word. “Beautiful” felt too civilized and vague. “Raw”? I started with “enchanting”, shifted to “entrancing”, and ended with “extrancing”.

There are several different thinkers I’ve read who develop the idea that a culture creates a collective trance. Not in the sense of deadening the senses but in the sense of focusing attention on certain things, of spinning certain interpretations on what we experience, and of generating a certain aura or mood about being alive. These thinkers tend to say that one of our individual challenges is to wake up out of the collective trance.

One of the exciting things about travel is it plops you into regions where you hear a different lilt and different words, see different homes and entertainments, experience different music and food. Such travel bends and expands assumptions. It keeps one on one’s toes. It makes one realize that we have access to far more ways of being than we practice. One is less confined within a particular form of trance.

But in the Far North, more than anywhere else I’ve experienced, one stands staring at the Land. The Land. It is always there in one’s vision, one’s awareness. Hours are spent just looking at the Land, feeling its presence all around you. It is so vast. The thinnest (so there is no distortion of the shape of bedrock) of vegetations colors glacier-shaped lands. Not just a high mountain valley but thousands of square miles smoothed into majestic sinuousity. It lies outside of any trance. No trance can contain the space and the power of that elemental land. Before any trance was such land. Thirty years ago I felt the Far North casting a spell on my spirit. Now I think of it differently. The spell of the Yukon is the lack of a spell or trance. It is simply the Land in all its primeval primacy. It is so overpowering, like blasting sunlight, that we have created trances like psychic sunscreen.

It’s intense in the Far North. In the Grand Canyon, the sense of space and the power of time is immense but one knows that the civilized world is just over the horizon of the Rim. Or on many mountains, one looks out in at least one direction and sees the mountains giving ways to foothills and ranches. In such places, one is at the center looking out towards the edge. But in many places in the Far North, after walking several miles from the few roads, one is still at the edge gazing inwards hundreds of miles towards a center that you know you will never reach in your lifetime. The difference is deeply moving.