Arctic Dreams

“There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."

-Barry Lopez

We lost a luminary this week, with the death of Barry Lopez.

I read Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape the year after I left the Arctic, where I'd resided for five years. The book is a celebration of the Arctic, and it is also a book that questions what it means to live on the land, what it means to love a landscape, and how that love can change us. It is also a book about what it means to be human and to live with integrity and with respect for all of life, and how we must exercise restraint and enact awe to protect the land. Lopez taught me about paradox, about the cycles of light and dark on the earth and within us, and about how grief, grace, and gratitude are always intertwined.

While he doesn't often come to mind when I'm asked about who my favorite writers are, Lopez's words have been foundational to me, influencing me in an almost visceral way. I've absorbed his words deeply, and they reside within me, in my sinew and bone.

"No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate life existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."