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.

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.

Perspectives

I went out for a walk early yesterday afternoon (to get fish for dinner) and ended up coming home four or five hours later (just in time to cook said fish). La famille did wonder a bit at that—I should have told  them I'd caught the slippery fellow myself...they might have taken the bait (ahem).

I ended up on a nature trail I'd never been on before, so I was glad to have taken the camera. It's good to know there are still places I've never seen within walking distance.

I was happy to see green finally, but surprised that the shy buds didn't curl up into themselves and hide at the sight of me—so timid the little tendrils have been in this Most Reluctant Spring.

Later, I studied the shots at home and realized that they were more tightly themed than I'd first thought. I found that either pairs of photos or in some cases one photo on its own presented two dramatically different interpretations depending upon perspective. It was the distance that time provided that enabled me to change my perspective.

This tree that's growing horizontally over a ravine, for instance: is this its canopy or roots?

This view is beautiful, but dangerous.

Do pine needles prick or are they soft?

Do the same pictures in black and white change the tree's visual texture?

Is this a troll bridge or a dinosaur carcass or scrap lumber nailed onto a tree long ago fallen?

These flowers were rare bursts of colour in a grey ravine—not much when you stood back and looked at the wider landscape.

But look closely. Already a bee, slow-moving and groggy from winter, is hungrily feasting on pollen—up close we can see the miraculous symbiotic relationship that animates the landscape. Up close, we have new information about the mostly brown and grey "dormant" forest. Going in tight, we gain a new perspective. And what of the bee's perspective? Imagine that!

This is what we do in writing, too—see different perspectives, different points of view. It's essential in bringing characters to life, but it can also make writing difficult. My imagination allows me to see each character in many different ways, to hear their side of the story. Is the archetypal Evil Stepmother really evil? Does she have to be? What made her so? Couldn't she be terribly misunderstood? Or maybe she just is what she is, as a willow tree is not an ash, maple, oak or pine. It's a willow.

Or is it? Perspective and imagination can transform this tree.

When I see a willow, especially in Spring, its boughs are draped in jewels. They are ribbons of gold embroidered with green and pink tourmalines. In even the most gentle breeze they sway seductively, sleepily, and I imagine long-haired water nymphs or ondines rising from dark, weedy pools to tempt mortal men into marriage and thereby gain souls.

Undine by John William Waterhouse.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naiad

The Rhinemaidens by Arthur Rackham.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DieRheintöchter.jpg

Rhinemaidens Warn Seigfried by Alan Rackham.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rackham

And that, I am EXCITED to say, has given me a clue into a particular character and into the plot itself of my story. Perspective and time has given me insight into something that has puzzled me for the last few days. Perspective, time, and the generosity of the Nature Muse to bestow, once again, the gift of inspiration to the writer who was feeling a tad confused before she went out to the forest to get a fish.

           I'm very grateful. 
Happy Earth Day, sweet planet.