Brenda Peterson’s new memoir, “I Want To Be Left Behind,” is a rich, often humorous and always poignant, story where fundamentalism meets nature and deep ecology. She tells the story of her unusual and often humorous childhood in the high Sierra. Her forest ranger father led her to embrace the natural world, while her Southern Baptist relatives prepared to leave this world behind. Here’s my interview with Brenda:
Jennifer Haupt: How would you describe this book?
Brenda Peterson: This is really the first time I write about my childhood struggling with the fundamentalist Southern Baptist religion and how this world-view – and my leaving it behind – shaped my early life. This is a spiritual memoir and I hope a bit of a divine, dark comedy of faith and family.
JH: How do you experience faith?
BP: As I write in my memoir, “The forest got to me before the faithful.” Meaning that my at-oneness with nature, being born on a forest lookout station in the High Sierra Mountains, grounded and nurtured me before any human belief systems could take hold. That’s why it has always been so hard for me to understand spiritual traditions that abandon the earth for heaven. For me, paradise is here.
So my spiritual practice includes a kinship with other animals, with all that is alive – from my backyard Salish Sea to the old forests, what my father called The Standing People, to my daily cat companions. All are sacred. All are included in my daily mediations. And because my faith is not in human dogma, I think I have a much more optimistic and enduring sense of life abundant here on earth. And my small place in it. So any religion that includes the earth and other sentient beings is one I can cherish.
JH: When did you realize you had a different belief system than your parents, and how did this change your relationship with them?
BP: Almost from the beginning I realized I was the one in the family who didn’t fit in. There is a scene in this new book in which I excitedly announce at the family dinner table that my science project – an ant farm – is intriguing me because I’m wondering what the ants think of this big human face that rises over their home every day. I ask, “Do the ants think I am a planet?” This question, really just an exercise in point of view, is so troubling to my father that he advises me to keep my thoughts to myself from now on.
My parents still try very hard to understand me and we’ve achieved a kind of hard-won equipoise. We are at our best when out in nature. There is a chapter in the book, “The Way of the Sea” about going to a remote Baja village with my elderly parents to encounter gray whales in their birthing lagoons. And I learn the lessons of forgiveness from another species.
JH: What is your relationship with your family, given all you’ve written about them over the years?
BP: Even though I was the oldest child, my siblings did not choose my unchurched path. To this day I am the only liberal democrat, feminist in the family and I’m more mystical than religious. My southern, conservative Christian family accepts me, to varying degrees.
I am very close with my brother and his family – and some of my nieces and nephews. And my parents and I have achieved a very hard-won equipoise. We talk every week and they have actually read parts of the new book pre-publication. When I received the first two copies of the book, I kept one and sent the other to my parents to read and decide for themselves what they think. I believe in good manners with family, keeping traditions alive together. Sometimes this means that families simply call a Moratorium on politics and religion, so that we can see one another for the souls that we are. And that we belong together.
JH: You’ve studied a lot of religions and you write about that search in this memoir. Are you still searching for a religious experience, and have you found it?
BP: I don’t think I’ve ever lost my connection to Spirit. I was born with a devotional nature and spiritual bent. And because I imprinted on wilderness and other animals before any religious tradition, all I have to do to find divine companionship is look around me – at my backyard beach, at the snow-clad mountains, at the radiance in another human or animal eyes.
My searching has been more for other souls who, like me, don’t fit into any church or religious dogma. And there are a lot more like me in the 21st century. As I write in the new book, spirituality, if not religion, is thriving. Ecumenical councils are coming together to work for social change and to face environmental challenges. In fact, Newsweek ran a cover story in 2009 on the diversity or religion flourishing, calling this trend in America “post-Christian.”
In Seattle, my homeland, 90 percent of those surveyed when asked to check a box for religion, chose “none such.” But the paradox is that Seattle is the best place to have a heart attack because more people have trained for CPR than in any other city. As I write, “Fewer churchgoers, more compassion.” Perhaps that’s why the Dalai Lama packed our football stadium with over 55,000 people to attend the spring, 2008 “Seeds of Compassion” conference.
When I study a religion I consider its capacity for joy instead of fear; for individual freedom over lock-step loyalty, for community service over the illusion of being “Chosen.” I observe what that religion embraces rather than what it condemns and now the faithful embrace rather than exclude others. And most of all, I look at whether that religion cares for the earth and all other life. I would say that in the end, gratitude is my religion. That and the strong sense that there is a higher wisdom at work here and in all worlds. As I said my book Build Me an Ark, “We float on divine waves.”
For more about Brenda Peterson, please visit her web site.
