Home Trip

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It was all right to hit the highway and head back to the city. On the rampway to route 45 he put on Dwight Yocum, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. A driving song from one of 100 playlists in his cell phone.

The miracle fish was a joy to devour back at his campsite over the open flames. The dry pine he had turned into kindling sparked and snapped wildly before mellowing down to the perfect bed of coals. He kept the head on and ate the delicate meat with his fingers. The whole place reeked like Brown Trout. 

Bear were known to live in those areas of course, so he did his best to clean things up afterward. It was time to go home anyway. Still, he packed up and headed out looking over his shoulder fairly often just in case.

Later he smiled at how the days ruminations had met up with a profound example of his own contingency. If there had been no trout, he might've been on to slugs or snails or something even more disgusting. As it was, he had eaten well and was grateful and would take the experience back with him to remember where life truly comes from. Breath by breath and drink by drink and meal by meal .

Now back to the city and to the Uber job and bike route. And of course, Laura, with all of her enthusiasm. Getting in touch wasn't going to be a choice it was only a question of when.

When he stopped for gas at the Shell station, still an hour from his apartment, he took a second to check messages on his phone. There among several from family, one or two goofy ones from Perkins, was another from Laura. It was an image of a red Poppy in miniature.

She's honestly sending it to me, he said to himself… Like I need some reminding or something?

The only message just below the image of the bright red flower with its glistening, it's pure water droplets wobbling fresh at the edges of each petal… The only words were these: you mad at me?

Do you think so maybe? Like so many times before him in his life, something beautiful had emerged, spiritual and close to the heart. No wonder he felt her energy as intrusive. There were so many projects he'd tried to do with friends, of course, that never worked out. Collaborating – especially after a fair amount of pressure – never seemed to turn out well for him.

Creative inspirations are sacrosanct, he said, this time surprisingly out loud. He heard himself say it inside the Subaru which had now been filled with the aroma of Reese's peanut butter cup. Whatever's in the spiral came out of me… What's more – that it felt so divine, like such a sweet touch from God – –

Dammit! Why on earth did I ever open things up to the extent I did?

The picture was a gift from her. Fine. He should have never told her where it had taken him, should never have involved her in trying to discern what on earth to do with the experience… That was between him and God.

He shut off the music and cracked both of the windows and pressed his foot to the floor. He picked his thumbs at the corners only now wishing, although on his way back to an indoor way of being, he'd grabbed another pack of Marlboro Lights.

He picked up the phone to call his friend and tell him he was on his way to pick up Zoe.

Yes, he said to his friend. It was a great trip – I could stay out there for months, man.

CONTINGENCY

[Continue]

Although he had no more food, he decided to push himself, to test his skills. The campsite was still comfy enough. All he had to do was catch something and he could buy himself another forty-eight hours out in his paradise.

He found himself and lost himself throughout the hours of the morning.

It's the way of gratitude… in the extreme. Reminding; I don't have to be here. Take away but a few essentials and I am in good company with the animals of the wood to provide what is needed to live, or else… It's where I discover my true contingency as a being.

What it sees becomes real, each thought an invitation to manifestation.

Back when he camped that first full night alone so many years ago he'd hiked the woods and found an opening to a beach where a large oak tree had fallen near the shoreline. Now he sat on what remained of it on a beach that had grown more sandy and spacious. His teeth were trying to pierce through a sturdy fishing line, attempting to snip off the old set up with a bobber and try some casting with a sluggo instead, see if a bass would take it.

He was there but his thoughts, still juiced up with morning coffee, were elsewhere.

It can be a trained action of love and devotion. Keeping one's whole heart open toward the other; a pure vessel of love, restorative wholeness.… What might blossom from it?

Laura would rush ahead and forget too much and turn it into something quick and cheesy for church folk. No thanks.

He enjoyed most, in his imagination, the interview format where he sat with headphones on his head in a cramped studio in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago with a well-known host on spirituality and it all poured out of him like warm syrup, no… like a balm, a soothing ointment on an angry contusion.

"I guess I'd invite people to think more about a life posture, if that makes any sense. There's never a bad time to remember, to reconnect more fully to life and to come to a certain enjoyment of the ebb and flow of forgetting and remembering, …  as I think also there's not much use in adding thinking or worry to our forgetfulness, the seemingly necessary interruptions of any day-to-day human encounters, God knows."

"We stay awake. We find trust, we are granted trust, strong trust. We open our eyes or reopen them. We replace ourselves into the present, breathing in, breathing out [for most of us]… Fully alive to the moment which always means aware of our choices, our true freedom to take responsibility for and manage our thoughts, feelings and longings.  Love illumines, by grace, a kind of truth-sight; the eyes of the soul, the entire body-spirit illumined and awake."

He stood up and walked down the shoreline, one foot in the water and the other not. He went barefoot as it was really starting to get hot and he walked down into more shaded space and started to cast. He'd reel in evenly then give a few firm snaps on the line with a flick of his wrist to make the neon yellow and green lure dance beneath the cold water.

We fall asleep and are driven by our minds down pathways and around a million different byways where we, from that place, can be said to have become unconscious.

It pays no attention and can become a place of reactivity only, a place of responding only to what's in front of us, of nonstop strategizing with full possession of the imagination enlisted, attaching to outcomes we want, on the lookout for danger and pleasure, taking the nearest fruit, the more instant and satisfying googo available, the "thing" that we believe will satiate in the moment. Call it: Comfort Coma… wherein "I want-I want-I want" replaces one's awareness of life, "I breathe in, I breathe out."

Flies buzzed about and some would bite in search of his blood to live.

We can wake up and in the light of loving compassion more accurately See the more reactive thoughts and entanglements, we can awaken to tenderly guide our awareness toward what's alive in us. Here possibilities emerge as we listen to our longings, the powers of imagination are reenlisted to a much more beautiful cause… And the flow continues.

He reeled and tugged at the fishing rod. A large crow gave Caw! out beyond the hillside to his east.

What's most noticeable in the awake place? We live and move and have our being, gift by gift… One breath at a time, one meal at a time…

SNAP!! FISH ON!

Catch and Release

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Drip. Drop.

We outpour until empty. We wait and hold and carry until full. We outpour until empty.

Although Acorn Lake had supplied him with a new adventure and plenty of perch, parked near Crows Lake his campsite was nearly the same as it was when he was a boy. It felt like his. Home base was a place from which to go adventuring.

This morning, upon its blue-gray face cool raindrops pattered and plucked all about the surface in circles and plops, speckling the canvas through the cool hours of the morning.

Breezes touched in gusts, feathering as a finger would the broad spaces with rippling waves, patterns of movement keeping his eyes more than hungry to follow the wind wherever it pressed. There were deeper swells fanning more slowly and other ripplings trailing away with haste as the gale came and withdrew its invisible caresses.

Out in the deeps the chop increased with crushed whitecaps bubbling over while the skies grew more cloudy and the mist of early dawn clung wet to everything alive and green and bouldered and of bark and twig and blade and leaf; rain even found its way through the sifting teeth of the gravel beneath the stump he chose.

The whole world was trickling.

It would never end.

It was a pain to put together a fire with everything soaked, but I managed to get one going and was glad I kept some kindling in the tent on purpose. I got the fire hot and the pan put on top and then opened the bacon that was waiting in my cool pack. The parka was at home in the environment, the air was full of pine and dead wet leaves and bacon was what won out after all as the aroma filled the forest.

Bluebirds erupted from a nearby shrub ushering praises to the pig. The fat sputtered and shot fiery from the pan. He threw it into his mouth as hot as he could stand it. He left it on to get crunchy much farther than most, but loved how most of it at that point just melted in your mouth.

I did fried eggs over easy.

The wind picked up and became more steady. Flashes of sunlight gave way to longer periods of shadow and looming cloud cover.

I lit a candle and read inside the tent when rains returned.

I gave myself a back rub against the stony ground just beneath my sleeping bag.

I took a nap after a knip of brunch-time bourbon, forgetting about how Zoe was doing on her second retreat, forgetting about what I still wanted to add to my thoughts on the life of prayer…

About how sure one could be of the reality of God's hiddeness.… The felt sense of being unable to locate God's presence throughout a situation, is human as human can get… So the divine participates as well in a sort of shared disorientation and it has always been part of the cycle of communion and withdrawal between the divine from the mortal from the very beginning.

At least it would seem to me. I dipped my bacon in syrup I brought for pancakes that I still was saving for one more morning…

We outpour until empty. We wait and hold and carry until full. We outpour until empty.

I took a nap… I took a nap forgetting about all of this.

Nevertheless all of the words were out and real, as real as they were spoken.

I lick the syrup from my lip and crunch down the salty fried fat.

The smile could not be wiped from my face, ever.

Timeless

[Continue…]

The great waters of Superior lie still at dawn.

Above on a branch

Cry, cry Mourning doves.

Love. Oh love, love.

Love. Oh love, love.

He sat with the stars for hours and poked at the embers in the pit all aglow like a face lit from the other side of the earth reaching for food from the forest …

…so I threw twigs into it nearly to falling asleep.

Of the 9 to 10 questions she had asked this was the one he pestered with presently while whittling a stick with his jackknife, his boots crossed over one another beside the fire on the 2 1/2 foot pit the county had put in with concrete and aluminum wheel rims.

Q Right up front you seem interested in what prayer is and how prayer happens. You give it a life so to speak. Could you talk about that a little?

A. Sure, I'm inviting and feeling invited to See the life of the prayer… To recognize how some of it is listening and how some of it is speaking… How visions come, where our individual thrills of the heart meet the Spirits sacred anointing for the sake of others and ourselves…

It's birthing, and prior to that one can even be drawn toward what transpired, what radiated from someplace outside oneself, choosing to make its way to an epicenter of one's essential charged existence. It comes into being. The cause is always the movement of God and we then respond. 

I sip on my coffee and check back into one of my old journals. Sure enough, here it is:

From a prayer of St. Augustine – You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet perfume. I tasted you and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and I am inflamed with love of your peace…

For me, the picture of myself somehow "calling out" would only serve to illustrate how I, in that state of thought, misunderstand myself and my environment.  Nevertheless, through that calling I sometimes move myself into awareness of Loving Presence which is of course there the whole time and never leaves us.

I wanted to keep thinking about it. It bothered me greatly that she thought I should. I feel as though I am being pressed to pry open something that would otherwise remain rather sweet and private and not a "thing" to be autopsied or studied. If I chose I would think about it some more.

I will not, however, dissect what is holy to me.

For anyone. Ever.

He savored every sip of his coffee in the tin cup he brought along in his pack once purchased at Drummond Island bakery on the far east Islands of the Upper Peninsula.

He had taken the fairy there and spent most of his time with his then girlfriend Jane, bicycling and tenting all throughout northern Michigan and Ontario during their two summers together.

I finished the last of my coffee and made my way over to the pack where I got eggs and butter and other things gathered to cook some breakfast. I threw a few pieces of kindling on the still smoldering ashes and watched them light up like another little miracle out of nowhere. I put the cast-iron skillet right on top of the coals, let some butter sizzle for a second and through five eggs into it and scrambled them up nice. I threw a can of hash into the other hot pan beside it and kept a lid on to keep the pine ashes from floating in.

I was thirsty after the Jamison from the night before so guzzled one cold orange juice and sat there listening to the chitters and cheeps of the Finch and Cardinals. There were no blowers blowing or lawnmowers running. All I heard was the water trickling over each of the pans as I cleaned a little bit with paper towel and water out in the bushes away from the site.

I got things ready and departed and after a two hour walk found Acorn Lake and a dock with boat rentals and spent the afternoon catching perch in a little hole I uncovered that was tucked away behind the shadows of four enormous Michigan White Pine. It was a fine day in the sun and fun to catch a good suppers worth, with stripes all up and down their sides. 

Time was nowhere to be found. I lived forever.

I sprinkled them with Shore Lunch and fried them up and drank red wine and waited for a second course of piping hot baked potato out from the coals. I was only angry I had forgotten salt for about fifteen minutes. Who doesn't bring salt, if he bothers to bring potatoes?

A gull cried that he could hear from the rocky beaches not far from where he'd parked. Everything was closer without any noise that could interfere but what was pure and breezy and wide open. All that spread apart the deep blue above him was a slender sheath of white cloud whisper, as if threaded, one slender seamless and centered cloth and it amused him to see such beauty right beside the small bag of trash he'd started gathering.

Now he wanted to lie down and swing in the hammock. He brought a paperback book filled with astonishing essays by Brian Doyle.

I swung from side to side. Watching what was made and witnessed all at once, in love.

It lasted forever.