The survey of an irregular parcel of land is said to proceed by “metes and bounds” – lengths of feet, at precise angles, defining the shape of its ground.  But from where?  A surveyor must derive, from established longitude, latitude, township and range, a universal pinpoint from which to start.  Every survey thus calls forth its “true point of beginning,” before chanting a runic round of metes and bounds, and inevitably returns there.

Every August I return with my family to a ranch in Montana.  I can’t claim to be a native.  Though I worked here one summer as a teenager, I make few physical contributions to it now.  I kill and eat a couple of trout, burn a little wood, and do my best to leave no other marks on the ground.  And yet I’m “from there,” in the sense that, every year, I begin here, and then follow the course of each year’s metes and bounds.

This is the first year since my mother’s death, and the nineteenth since my father’s.  You might say our parents are also a true point of beginning, and so were mine.  They set me out on terrains of privilege, duty, and freak occurrence that I still traverse today.  From my father, a legacy of land.  From my mother, a legacy of horse.

And now, from the late midlife of parents gone, kids mostly fledged, and a thirty-plus year marriage still standing strong, I’m about to begin again.  I’m struck by how, in our fragile, burning land, truth is increasingly defined by its negative, by what is not false.  Certainly it’s easier – safer — to decry falsity than to find truth.  To talk about actual “truth” sounds presumptuous, even arrogant perhaps.  And yet not to proceed from one’s own sense of truth is to get lost in a windy desert of argument, where one claim is as good as another, until the claims of the most powerful choke the sky and bury all the rest.

But then, to stay inside the yard of what we are convinced to be true makes for no journey at all. There’s a lot of that going around as well, as we fortify and police the boundaries of the known.  Leaving behind the enclaves of belief requires one to ask directions, trust strangers, be a guest. Sometimes, as you navigate contested ideas, you might even get shot at by your friends.  That’s where the accumulations of midlife come in handy.  At my age, a certain kind of risk is affordable.

So this year, in this blog, I’ll try to derive my own true points of beginning. From there, for my metes and bounds, I’ll just look around, and keep my eyes and heart open as I ask the way.