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What the Rockies Can Teach Us About Life and Death

Amal Alhomsi’s first book is a thoughtful meditation on a year spent in the mountains.

Ximena Gonzalez 24 Sep 2024The Tyee

Ximena González is a freelance writer and editor based in Calgary. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail and Jacobin.

“There are two types of people who live here: people who spend their time in the mountains and people who are the mountains. The rest are only passing through,” writes Amal Alhomsi in Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies. The essay collection is Alhomsi’s first book, and the contemplative work explores climate anxiety, love and death.

Inspired by the majestic beauty of the Rocky Mountains, Alhomsi’s book uncovers the secrets obscured in the landscape as they’re brought into focus by the flow of the seasons. In the Rockies, the élan of summer is extinguished by a fleeting autumn that, carrying the weight of winter, reminds us of our own impermanence. Then spring inevitably blooms with hope.

In this cycle, death and renewal manifest fully.

“Life and death are not wings to the same bird,” Alhomsi writes, of the healing nature of change. “They are the bird itself — not carried but carrying.”

Alhomsi is a Syrian author and educator who has lived in Banff since 2018. His essays scrutinize the landscape for meaning, weaving in the wisdom of poets, prophets and entomologists.

A fallen leaf, carved with the imprints of a leaf miner, pique Alhomsi’s curiosity, unveiling a world hidden in plain sight. “I look at the leaf, the browning petiole, the tip, the half-munched veins. The leaf miner ate God, the devil, and the detail. The venules are tangled like a bad metaphor, like thunder under a line of clouds.”

Alhomsi’s lyrical, reflective writing seems to delay the passage of time. The material is composed as if to ask, why have we chosen to hasten our pace?

In a recent conversation with The Tyee, Alhomsi talks about our cultural reluctance to grapple with senescence, the process of growing old. And what we could gain if we ventured to slow down. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: You’ve been living in Banff for six years now. How has living in the Rocky Mountains changed you?

Amal Alhomsi: Historically, mountains have always been a spiritual place. Almost every major religion started on top of a mountain. If we think about Moses, he received his commandments there. Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, received his revelation on the mountain. Jesus spoke his sermon. The Stoney people go for visions on the mountains. The Greek gods live on Mount Olympus.

So, to me, the mountains have always been a place of spirituality, rather than the standard western way of seeing them, as just something to summit.

In my tradition of Islam, there’s this notion of when the world is ending, seek refuge in the mountains. To me, with climate change, and at the time [of moving to Banff] it was the Trump era, I wanted peace. So I went to the mountains. I think the mountains changed me by giving me that peace and that spirituality that I’ve always wanted to experience. I never in my life imagined I would write about nature, or the mountains. I’ve always wanted to do political writing. But once you look at a mountain that’s so large and magnificent, you start thinking, ‘Nothing matters but this.’

I went to the mountains to write about Syria, not to write about the mountains. But when you’re faced with such largeness, you can’t ignore it and write about anything else.

The book cover image for 'Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies' features light brown sans-serif text in a tonal gradient across a dark brown background featuring scientific illustrations of insects like moths and bees.
‘I think the mountains changed me by giving me that peace and that spirituality that I’ve always wanted to experience,’ said Amal Alhomsi.

Your essays aren’t necessarily about the mountains, though. They seem like an excuse to write about something deeper.

I opened the book with [Jorge Luis] Borges’ quote, “To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing.” We live in an ecology of things that are in relationship with one another. Everything is tied, so I wanted to write about myself, but the best way to do that was to write about something else.

When I started writing the book, we had the hottest summer on record, and I thought, “This is how death begins. It begins with a scorching.”

By the time I stopped writing the book, because you’re never really finished, I noticed that I had written 12 essays, which was fully by accident, and each essay was written in one month, so I thought it would be perfect to organize it by the seasons.

The seasons in Banff were very different than what I know. Because when I lived in Syria and then in North Carolina, you get the seasons fully. Here, we get two weeks of autumn and seven months of winter. When people talk about the seasons, they talk about winter — winter is everything.

Senescence is a very interesting subject to approach, especially when we’re immersed in a culture that neglects the subject. What do you think we lose when we fail to acknowledge the looming presence of death?

In biology, senescence is the period when a flower reaches its full bloom. It’s that moment of fully knowing youth in life, and then decaying after that. Death begins with life, and I never see death so fully except in the summer, because you see its opposite and you keep wondering, how is this going to disappear? But it does.

I’ve always viewed climate anxiety as another manifestation of a fear of death. People say that the world is ending; they don’t say that we are ending. But the world is not ending, the world is renewing itself, maybe shedding its old skin. But we are dying.

The notion that if we die, everything else must die too is why I got a little into eschatology in the book. I wanted to see how humans have historically viewed their death, and historically there’s always renewal, except for today. Today you hear, "the world is ending," "we are dying," "there’s no hope." But there is hope. There’s always been hope.

I think this fear of death, and this might sound a little bit controversial, stems from a lack of spirituality. When you know this is not final, that there’s always a next world or something that is larger than you, you don’t fear death. When you break a cup, it’s done. But if you think that that cup is going to become something else, then you have hope.

In one essay you write about the importance of seeing like an artist. Is this a skill we should develop to nourish hopefulness?

To see like an artist is to slow down and look deep; to see what’s in the cracks, and what’s in the lines, and what’s in the details, but in the age of distraction that’s becoming impossible. When an artist looks at something, they want to see it in a way that they can “unpeach the peach,” like Annie Dillard says, to look at something and see something else.

To see like an artist, I think, goes against seeing like a scientist, unfortunately, because the language of science is the language of one meaning. As a scientist, you look at the moon, and the moon is just a rock that reflects the light of the sun, but to see it like an artist is to allow for meaning and a tolerance for different interpretations. When you do that, you become more understanding of the world and what it is that it means.

But doing this requires a humble attitude. There’s a verse in the Book of Job, where God tells Job, “You shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field will be in league with thee.”

The West seems to be living out of context politically, emotionally, spiritually. They’ve isolated themselves from the world. We need to put ourselves back in the context of our world, and that way maybe we can see the full picture.  [Tyee]

Read more: Books, Alberta, Environment

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