Perfection of the Morning: Sharon Butala (1994)

FEBRUARY, 1997, Volume XXII, Number 5

The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature

Sharon Butala

1994: Harper Collins, Toronto. 193 pages.

Canadian writer Sharon Butala has a number of books to her name, including two collections of short stories and five novels, but the book that has won her particular recognition and a wider reading public is autobiographical. The Perfection of the Morning has been described variously as “one of the most perceptive and moving meditations ... on that mysterious and often misunderstood place that we call nature,” and “a new spiritual geography in a place where truth and myth collide.”

What led to the birth of Sharon Butala as a writer and visionary was her marriage seventeen years ago, at the age of thirty-six, to her second husband, Peter Butala, a cattle rancher in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan in an area known as the Palliser Triangle. The Butala family ranch was a part of the North American Great Plains which extend from Edmonton in the North to Texas in the South. The only relief in this vast expanse from the burning sun of summer or winter blizzards was offered by coulees, or chasms carved by meltwater, where trees had sown themselves and animals both wild and domestic sought shelter.

The landscape was alien to what Sharon Butala had known before although she had lived in Saskatchewan for much of her life. But that was in Saskatoon, centred in the university where she taught, with her mother, three sisters and a wide circle of friends nearby. The long periods of isolation, punctuated by the occasional demands of being a rancher’s wife, and the customs which guided the social exchanges of rural agricultural people, were all foreign to her. “I came a stranger to this magnificent but in some ways terrible place to live, with its more tragic than triumphant history,” she writes in the preface, “and gradually, although never easily, I found both a way to feel at home in my own skin, and in this place.”

She continues:

Through the struggle to fit ... I became not the painter I once was but a writer, and I discovered that the writer I’ve become is the Self I’ve been in search of for so many years. But at the same time it has been the act of writing that created and continues to create that Self I’ve at last found, and that acts as the instrument of integration between myself and my environment, chiefly my home in the landscape. The last seventeen years here have been a long, intensely personal spiritual journey, one that has been inextricably intertwined with my reacquaintance with the land and the effects of this renewed relationship with Nature on my own woman’s soul.

In her first act of real daring, Butala found herself alone from dawn to dusk, without job, friends, family, all the things that gave her identity, nor indeed did she have anything to do. So she began, deep in thought, to walk the land. It was on one of these walks that she was given a glimpse of what life in this new world might bring. On the far side of a hill she came upon Peter, face down upon the grass, fast asleep, with his saddle horse browsing beside him, while around him a cluster of his cows, accompanied by their calves, chewed their cud. At the edge of the cattle grazed two antelope. “All of them,” writes Butala, “were oblivious to my presence and paying no attention to each other, as if they were all members of the same contented tribe ...”.

In the second year of her new life, Butala began to keep a journal. Yet it would be another two years before her notes assumed any consistent pattern. At first she logged actual physical events, but gradually her psychic journey, still unacknowledged, took over. The daily walks continued, less aimless than before, as she would choose for her destination a rock, a coulee, or a favourite stretch of road. One particular field of native grassland, too stony to be farmed, she reserved “for the days when it felt right to go there.” From it she was to learn more than she had ever imagined.

"(W)hen out in Nature, not shooting, collecting, studying, naming or farming,” writes Butala, “we realize that an entity is present, or that Nature is alive, even that Nature has a memory.” It was these and other “numinous” experiences that gave her confirmation of Erich Neumann’s statement in his essay Mystical Man, that “Man is by nature a homo mysticus.”

A new kind of reading had begun for Butala with the experience of “strange, powerful, beautiful dreams,” and a growing sense of despair. When she was in the city she haunted book stores where certain books seemed to “jump off” the shelves at her, among them Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Another day, she discovered three massive hardcover books, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, The Golden Bough and the Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths in a sales bin. “I bought all three,” she comments, “and carried them home as if they were a king’s treasure.”

She continues:

I keep remembering—I think it’s a Sufi belief—the saying that when the pupil is ready, the teacher will come. My teacher was to be books.

I devoured them from Jung to Joseph Campbell to the Bible and Bullfinch’s Mythology, from William James and Evelyn Underhill to Thomas Merton.

I didn’t see it clearly at the time, but I was undergoing psychoanalysis, with myself as therapist to my own soul, for reading Jung to the extent I did and with such intensity I couldn’t help but examine my own history, the story of my own life, which I began to mentally write, and sometimes put in my journal, for the first time.

It was seven years after her ranch life began that Butala experienced a strange dream in which the word “anomie” appeared across a pale dream sky. In the weeks that followed, as its meaning became clearer, she became aware of a profound sense of desolation. She didn’t turn to Peter, whose own life was so uncomplicated he would have difficulty understanding it. Instead, knowing it was her own struggle, she was determined to live it through. Although constantly in pain, she continued to write novels and short stories, “all of them informed by my personal struggle and conversely informing me as I worked to give shape to my experiences so I could write them down.”

Since much of Butala’s fiction was located in the area where she had moved, she was forced to educate herself about its history and plant and animal life. Her own observations and reading helped, Peter continued to be a fund of knowledge and there were the stories of the old settlers. With this new information, she began to make it her own and to begin healing.

Yet the healing was also to have another source. A life lived in nature, Butala was to discover, drew her closer to her own nature. Her significant dreaming began when she moved to the Great Plains. One dream in particular which occurred at the end of her fifth year, she came to recognize as a life dream, initiating her whole study of comparative religion, myth, dreams, and eventually herself. She describes it as follows:

(I)t was night but so clear and bright it was almost as light out as during the day. I was standing inside the door of the back porch of the old ranch house. In the dream the door was divided in the centre into an upper and a lower part which opened separately. I was looking out the open top half at the sky watching in awe and wonder a gigantic eagle as it soared over the ranch. It was so big that with its wings outspread it covered the entire year(sic), which is about twenty fenced acres. It had a slender, stylized body and wings and it was a smooth, delicate pale gray. Its beauty was entrancing. Even now, remembering it, something in my viscera opens into an infinitude that frightens me.

In front of me, on the rectangle of cement at the door, stood an owl which was at least six feet tall. It was also a creature of stunning beauty, a pale brown with deep turquoise fan-shaped regularly spaced markings on its breast. The eagle soared above us and as I watched it, the owl watched me and repeatedly bumped its body against the door in front of me, which was not latched, as it was trying to get into the porch with me. It wasn’t threatening and I wasn’t afraid. I simply glanced at it and kept it out while I watched the eagle.

Butala has continued to find new meaning in the dream. In The Perfection of the Morning, she offers this interpretation:

At an archetypal level, it is a dream about masculine power, symbolized by the soaring eagle, and feminine power, symbolized by the owl standing near me on the ground. In beauty and power they are exactly equal, but I, a woman had spent my life to this point following the eagle—that is, accepting masculine interpretations of life in general and, of my own life, accepting masculine goals and taking masculine desires for my own—instead of cleaving to the owl, searching out and coming to terms with my own feminine soul.

“Searching out and coming to terms with (her) own feminine soul” led Butala to choose the traditional lives and concerns of contemporary ranching and farming women as the subject of her novel Luna which followed The Gates of the Sun. Inspired by Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess and disappointed by Freud’s and Jung’s view of women, she sought books about women by women. Among them were Marion Woodman, Adrienne Rich and feminist archeologist Marija Gimbutas. When she was not driven by the needs of her book to find a grounding in the feminine, it was her dreams that drove her on.

The Perfection of the Morning is the story of a woman who virtually took a leap into the unknown when she embarked, against the advice of family and friends, on marriage to a man whose life-style and values, however admirable, were alien to any she had known. Despite the pain of inner conflict, she never retreated but held the opposites. It is also the story of the teaching and healing power of the unconscious and natural world when we open ourselves to their wisdom.

—Alice Johnston