Perfection of the Morning

A book about life worth living

I love the wide open skies of the Canadian Prairies. The sense of vastness was palpable to me as a youth on my grandparents’ farm. The ability to see the horizon, miles and miles away, in all directions made me feel special, different than I felt in the city.  This first hand experience of the fascination of my smallness in the enormity of our planet was reinforced by books. In school or university, I read Who Has Seen the Wind, by W.O. Mitchell, The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, and As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross, and felt a deeper connection to those Canadian stories for having been there, seen the prairies for myself.

In Canadian Prairie literature, the vastness of the sky and the sounds of the wind are recurring symbols of something larger than life, our relationship to the planet, our place in the cosmos. To have an author explore these existential questions from her personal experience of walking in nature was amazing to me as I read The Perfection of the Morning - An Apprenticeship in Nature by Sharon Butala when it was released in 1994. I wanted to have an awakening such as hers.

The Perfection of the Morning

The Perfection of the Morning is a memoir of Sharon Butala’s life in the grasslands of southern Saskatchewan. It a writer’s search for meaning. From the book description, it is “a meditation on the world of nature and a personal and spiritual exploration…. Through history, dream, vision and the reality of everyday life, Butala has created a rich portrait of her outer landscape… and her inner one, the world of artistic imagination.”

Her story marks the beginning of my search to understand what spiritual exploration meant for me, and to find more teachings – whether in books or from people - that explained what I was seeking. What more is there to know about experiencing the power of dreaming. Where are the teachings that explain dreams in a mystical way. I was familiar with fictional methods of describing dream states, but hers were actual, real states of being.

I know now that hers is a story of directly experiencing the symbolism, the archetype of a mystical realm. We usually tell stories of magic, the otherworlds. We have myths to convey a relationship that a character has with the mystic, the sage, the seer. Yet, Butala had a direct experience.  And moreover, she wrote a book about it, sharing this depth of insight with strangers. I simply had not considered how spiritual awakenings were possible, or an option in real life, and am grateful for her courage to go public with her inner truths.

Through history, dream, vision and the reality of everyday life, Butala has created a rich portrait of … the world of artistic imagination

Butala left the comforts of her job at the university in 1976, her social standing in the city, to follow a man she had fallen in love with. When she arrives to her new husband’s remote cattle ranch in the southern grasslands of rural western Canada, she steps out of time. She is living in rough conditions that have not changed much since Canada was settled a hundred years before. There literally are no other people nearby. She struggles to understand what she has taken on, where this adventure is leading. She takes walks alone and writes in her journal.

She describes, on page 76, her revelation that writing can be an “instrument of self-knowledge” – I have a strong memory of the shock of such wording. The phrase captured me. What did this mean? What is the purpose of having self-knowledge? Didn’t I already know myself? How can writing be used as an instrument to know more about myself?

What Butala was discovering on her own in the 1970s and 1980s, Julia Cameron was teaching in The Artist’s Way. As I read in 1994 about writing for self-knowledge from Butala, I didn’t find again until I found The Artist’s Way over a decade later.  Butala references Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, and several other scholars that I have now become familiar with. She referred to books to help provide herself a context for her inner experiences.  Importantly, she provides guidance on who else to research if the reader wants to follow a similar path.

Feeling like you are alone on the edge of the frontier, feeling the wildness of the natural world, does something to you. Either your mind sharpens or is lost. Turning inward, getting to know the self, making a spiritual connection is the topic of comparative myth, psychology, and the creative process. It’s different to have a direct experience as compared to reading about transformative themes in texts.  

Butala’s story starts by taking the risk to follow a man to the edge of the world. It sounds romantic. She ventures into the unknown to discover what makes a life worth living. What risks must she take, and once stepping forward, what does she lose or gain by not being able to go back. How far can she push, or be pushed by, her own fears and desires. What ultimately is asked of her in return.

It has an element of romance and adventure, but really, The Perfection of the Morning is a timeless story about consciously facing unimaginable hardship, about finding a way through, becoming able to trust the higher purpose.

And then writing about it for others, like me, to read and re-read searching for guideposts along our way.