Satellite

A tangerine moon stares through the spruce trees as stars reveal themselves in the night sky, multiplying, first one or two then too many to count. And the coolness of the air... What person isn't overcome by this vastness, this space? There's no quantifying or qualifying what I see from my front porch. Then, a starlight like the others, moving steadily, interminably across the sky, so closely blending in, but for the linear projection, the controlled velocity, predictable in its human intention. It glides beneath--a soft tear in the fabric of the firmament.

Gone

Whatever it was is lost now to the low lying place behind the tamaracks. An object, a child, a feeling, that idol you worshipped and allowed to define you is buried in the peat preserved for another to find, identify and apportion themselves to.
It's like that, isn't it? So long as you know it's there and understand that it can't be rediscovered by you. You've buried it, but exhumation is no longer possible.
Reanimation is unnatural. The result is a dead wish, moldering on the edge of our desire, tender and soft and malignant.
You must make new and leave the anthropology to those more qualified. Return your shovel to the shed and just remember.

What is this?

What is this that we walk to desolate places and sit? Quiet, isolated places where the sea gulls scream or the wind whispers in the pines. Is it a taking stock somehow of our inner selves to see if it is well with our soul? Or do we wander around a store of fine gifts, examining, turning over in our minds of what we could have if we were willing to pay the price? Too often we gently replace each object on the shelf and move on.
But what if we didn't?
These questions by now are tired and shopworn, yet essential to be asked because it is the asking that may permit us to pay the price.

Mow Carefully

I have a good friend who once told me if I found an eagle feather not to pick it up or touch it because in his Native American spiritual beliefs it has sacred qualities. I understood that it would be disrespectful to alter it, sort of like desecrating a church, I suppose. So later, as I mowed the trail near the giant, old red pine in our yard,  I looked up at the eagle’s nest which has been there for as long as I can remember and again admired its massive size and position atop the last thick limbs of the tree before it begins to taper off.  This time, however, there was a feather on the ground in the path ahead of me. Heeding my friend’s request, I stopped the mower, got off, and gently pushed the feather into the tall grass at the edge of the trail and continued on with my mowing.

Later I looked up the significance of the eagle feather and read that it symbolized great strength, courage, leadership and prestige and that the bald and golden eagles are considered sacred birds. They only have two eggs and this is a reminder of both the dichotymous and binary relationships in our world.

I turned off the computer and thought, it is a story, no different than those told to me during Sunday school and in church when I was younger. But that was not the point. This story, like all of them, is only meaningful because of what the hearer or reader brings to it. To the story of the eagle feather, I bring the love I have for my friend and so when I moved that feather from my path, I respectfully acknowledged his path and was glad. 

Crossbay Lake

From here the north knows no boundaries. It does not recognize state or province, village, hamlet or city, but the north is there in all of the sublime mystery that drives people to go, that pulls people toward it out of a need to discover for themselves that which they cannot find in themselves. While it may not even exist and we fool and deceive ourselves in myth, it is no more or less valid than all of the myths by which we live. 

First Day

Here is where I end up with my students, contemplating this line, parsing its language and the meanings it suggests. Fitzgerald transformed Gatsby's tragic quest for a return to an innocent past into an observation of what it meant to be part of this vast country--suggesting Gatsby's delusion may be ours as well.   

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

It may be a while before I see that line again, as today, my first day unmoored from my world as an Aitkin High School teacher, I begin living it.

Between the World and [Him]...

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in brutal prose of his experience as a black man in America where he uses his body as a motif for the realities of existing in a place that is built on the destruction of bodies. It is a letter to his son that tells of growing up in Baltimore, the school system, his family, his college education at Howard and his time overseas--of the recent spate of well publicized deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and of a man named Prince Jones whose story comes to us in part from Prince's mother's perspective, a woman born of soul crushing poverty who had risen through hard work, determination and persistence to be a successful medical professional and had built a home and life based on all of the rewards she has earned, but her son, too, was killed. Those rewards could not save her son. Coates is the sum of his experiences which have led him to fear for the safety of his son, and, while his son grows up in a different world than he did, it is still too familiar to allow complacency to undermine one's ability to forget the road traveled. To forget that road is to forget the lessons and warnings that portent the ever-present possibility of the destruction of one's body.