Fragility/Strength

The light called me to the beach this morning.

I went, knowing there were few days left till winter.

Knowing the best of the fall colours were past.

Perfection wasn't what I wanted.


What was I looking for?

The wind. The light. The gulls and the spray.

A small group gathered to say goodbye to one they loved. They huddled close against the wind, below the bluff. A gull above. Gliding.

We gather against the wind, all of us here, we cling to one another.

The mourners burned incense. They scattered flowers and fruit at the border of two worlds. Waves accepted the offerings, carried what was given to a place we cannot follow.

The gulls and the light and the fading colour.

Gusts animate the sand. Alive, shifting. Blowing away from me.

And the gulls. I've been blind to their beauty. Look, look.

What could be commonplace here? They turn to face the wind. Dig in.

Have you seen sunlight illuminate their bones?

Have you seen sunlight splinter the water's surface into infinite shards? Alive alive.

Geese push into formation.

The gull flies.

Love the One You’re With

Sometimes I am blind to the beauty in my city. All of us humming along, lives unfolding in ways we want and ways that surprise us, even devastate us. The way we live here in the city, side by side, intimately affecting each other yet not even looking into each other’s eyes, can feel alienating. And yet when you do look, you feel, and life unfolds before you, mysterious and poignant, raucous, reckless, heartbreaking and humbling.

There’s a powerful beauty in the human landscape here, yet I sometimes berate my city for being so big, for the incessant construction, for the car culture and crazy drivers, for the way the city swallows time when you try to traverse it.

There are days when the city closes in. I long for a horizon uninterrupted by anything made by human hands. That is when, in this city, I must go down. Because below it all are the often overlooked places that, when you make time for them, when you remember to enter them, hold the power to restore. And I don’t mean the subway system! ; )

*****

Mine is a city of ravines. Its geography requires us to go down into nature, descend into it, like a memory of what this land was before us.

We dip into the ravines where the rivers of old still run, a shadow of their former selves, but still moving sacredly along ancient pathways to the Great Lake. Walk there and the city falls away as we fall into nature.

It’s like a metaphor for who we are. Our exterior selves, like the city, can be bright and shiny, or hard edged and worn down, a million different faces and facades. Sometimes we present our authentic selves, but not always. Often we present what is presentable. What else can we do?

But below these surfaces we so carefully manufacture is something so precious—our essential nature, which, like the ravines of this city, offer such breathtaking beauty. A beauty that is exactly right just as it is.

It seems a powerful reminder to, like the song says, love the one we’re with—which in the end is our Self.

Being Quiet

We need quiet to hear ourselves—our deeper selves.

In the cacophony of city life my mind makes plenty of noise—I hear my anger, frustrations, worries. Laughter and loving thoughts, too, but it all flashes like a series of brilliant reflections—thoughts into emotions, and on into moods and actions without “me” being aware of the originating thought, the original source of light.

That’s when a sense of un-ease sets in. And I get quiet here, in the virtual space of this blog, because I have nothing meaningful to share. And, truth be told, I might just be afraid to slow down enough and hear what I really feel underneath the noise.

There is an antidote to this.

I know what needs to be incorporated into daily city life to calm my heart and mind—it’s meditation, writing, making space for the inner voice to be heard.

But I’ve been reminded lately of something else that works, and with very little effort on my part.

It is going to nature, sitting with the elements—air, water, earth and fire. I don’t even have to do anything there. I can sit on a rock, lean on a tree, walk like a zombie on a forest path. And when I come out of nature I am grounded. Nature has grounded me—I did nothing but Be. Nature did all the work.

I feel peace. I see beauty. I am connected to this lovely planet. Touched by its grace.

To me, that is prayer. Simply go to your God and Be. Since my understanding of God/Source/Creator is indivisible from Nature—the wind, waves, sky, stone, tree—I need only present myself to Her to be soothed.

Then I hear myself again, or I hear something that is more than myself. Is there really any difference?

Moments

All moments lead to now.

Last Saturday, I saw this sunset over Lake Huron.

It is impossible to see such a thing and not be grateful for every moment that led to this witnessing. I mean every moment of my life—the ones I’ve celebrated and those I’ve resented and railed against. Each of those moments led to my witnessing this miracle. So I am grateful for each and every one of them. So grateful to be in this body and see such sights. I acknowledge the immense privilege.

It is enough.

The Longest Winter

What a good winter it has been for hibernation. If I’d had the option to curl, snout to tail, into a little ball back in September and slept and dreamt away the season, would I have?

Perhaps, but I know how the old stories go. There must be long winters, hard and cold, in every heroine’s tale. Times when the sun doesn’t warm and sets quickly. Times when although we can see the beauty that is every day before us, we can’t feel the beauty. The realization takes us by surprise, and it frightens us, and perhaps adds a chilling layer of longing. The longing to feel again.

But after every winter the light does come back, slanting into our rooms at a new angle and illuminating what was there all along in a way we haven’t seen before. Suddenly we feel a stirring again. A stirring toward something, that unnameable thing we know and don’t know.

The light shifts again, so quickly, and the feeling passes. The days are still short, but lengthening.

But the reminder of the “something else,” of the “something that calls to us” has washed over us and we are not the same. Something inside has quickened and we must tend to it.

Returning and Going Away

This summer, it was back to the cottage we went—at the end of August this year, instead of mid-July.

There were changes, but mostly to us. Time works on the landscape more slowly than it does on humans. Rocks and lake and sky live so much longer. To see the changes time works upon them, we must slow down, approximate the pace of nature.

Humans change quickly. My boy is officially a tween now, and by the time we arrived at the cottage he’d had another year of summer camp under his belt. The camp’s out-trip to Georgian Bay and a canoe-camping weekend with his dad had produced a confident paddler excited to show me his new strength and his ability to sit in the stern and steer. He was no longer a passenger, but a driver.

I am a little bit older, too. And better at Sodoku.

There was a new family of ducks, the ducklings already almost as big as their parents, but that seems right at the end of the season.

They swam together but independently, wide spaces between, not clustered closely for safety and comfort.

*****

The sun rose more southerly in late-August compared to high summer, as it daily shortened its arc across the northern hemisphere.

Each daybreak the sun dazzled me, producing an entirely new, never-to-be-seen-again dawn. It stretched out over rounded hills dark with the silhouettes of white pine and maple and birch, and then beamed at me from across the lake.

*****

This year our visit was timed with August’s Blue Moon. 

Night did not fall but rose like a stage curtain as the moon ascended centrestage, fat and orange on the horizon, then growing whiter and smaller the higher it climbed...

...until, at dawn, it greeted the rising sun. 

The Morning Moon—pale and silent and lonely in the west. 

********

Our days in this quiet place rushed on as the sun and moon chased each other across the sky.

Our cottage time was coming to an end. As was summer.

I knew that soon we would be back to a city of hard surfaces, and back to school, back to routines. 

The canoe was beached, ready for the boathouse.

Days were hot but mornings were cool and the signs clear: dew clung to newly fallen leaves long after dawn,

and in the Technicolor day, sumachs were singed scarlet and burned against a sky that lied, singing to me of a summer everlasting. 

Before I knew what I was about, I stood in wonderment at my last lakeside sunrise of the summer. It was a gift, I knew, a parting gift. A promise. It said: I am here, I, the sky, the water, the rock and trees and the living mist, I am always here.

And the mist blew from the next cove, shape-shifting, advancing always, but never arriving.

Until finally it was consumed by brilliant blazing fire, the life-giving fire that warms all that’s upon the earth.

Every day that flaming ball rose, whether I slept in or rose with it, worshipped it or rushed on to make coffee, it rose in glory regardless of me. Here in the city, and there, too, the same sun rises.

******

Later, the car packed, all of our lovely visitors long gone, just me and the tween hovering between this magical place and the trip home, between summer and something else, there was time for one more throw of a toy airplane off the dock.

Will he play with toy planes next year? Probably. You’re never too old...to play...

 to wade into crystal clear waters and rescue a seaplane from an unfortunate landing...

to wonder at what lies below. 

Sometimes, when we look under the surface at just the right time into the just the right spot, we get a glimpse of the life submerged, revealed by a shaft of sun that reaches down and turns the depths into a gold dream.

*******

I am home now. In the city. Sad to have left the cottage behind, but grateful to have been there. And I hold the hope that there will be time again to roast a marshmallow... 

 or maybe two...definitely two...

and to bask again under a fat full moon. A moon that made me wonder, does gravity pull that mysterious orb to us or by some magnetic magic does it pull us, do we gravitate to it? Something that rises in my chest at the sight of the moon tells me the latter is as true as the former. 

There are answers here, in witnessing and participating in the daily natural planetary rhythms. 

I will go back again and again. I must.