Canada Saga 2011, June 16

"Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar."( Pablo Picasso )

"We can see a thousand miracles around us every day. What is more supernatural than an egg yolk turning into a chicken?"( Rutherford Platt)

 

It is not quite 5:30AM, and already the sun is shining on the tall spruce and cedars outside the window. I should be out walking, getting a head start on the intensity of the blue skies and relentless sunshine that the day promises.  Instead, I sit and listen, an audience to the staging of this new day, as the fountain's waterfall provides a background for bird psalms and the eagle cries,

 

Yesterday we made our annual June trek to Hornby Island to walk the mystical magical Helliwell Park trail, through deep cool moist woods, carpeted in velvet green moss which climbed over stumps and up trees.  The filtered light of the sun plays games here with the shadows, and coaxes the timid ferns out of their hiding places to sparkle in an array of dew-drops. Whatever scents are used in lotions and air-sprays labeled 'forest'  don't come close to capturing its fresh softness, with the invitation to breathe deeply. An enormous bald eagle watched from his perch about 500 yards away as we walked along the cliff, and we both agreed the hike seemed shorter this year.  Later we drove the island to discover new trails.  While I explored the incredibly moon-scaped Sandpiper beach, with its  smooth wave-swept rocks pock-marked with nature's own petroglyphs at low tide,  Michael napped on the warm boulder put there just for him.

 

I told him that June is my favorite month here.  We still have the lingering drizzle and cool temps of a Pacific Northwest spring, transitioning into the longer days and occasional startling crisp blue skies of the approaching summer. The mountains that ring the Island still wear their snowy caps, and the emerald green of new growth is in the gently undulating meadow grasses, as well as in the leafing of the trees. Bright gold, purple, orange, yellow and white wildflowers splash through it all. Fawns walk on wobbly legs towards their moms, tiny ducklings swim like pros in our little pond (although I hate to count them, because for some strange reason, as the eaglets get bigger, the ducklings disappear), and small rabbits nibble the wet morning grass. The summer possibilities stretch out before us: new trails to hike, concerts to attend, side-trips to take, as we rediscover our old favorites and reconnect with old friends.

It is the time, as Mary Oliver writes in her beautiful poem, where

 "trees stir in their leaves and call out,

'Stay awhile...it's simple.'

and you, too, have come into this world to do this,

to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."

When we arrive each year and greet our friends, the conversation is somewhat predictable, always beginning with welcomes followed on both sides by: "How was your winter?" Depending on the relationship, the answer is either the perfunctory "Fine. How was yours?" or the more real and encompassing, "We have to talk."  Because although the answer 'fine' is perfect, since we have clearly survived whatever the winter brought, there is always a back-story, the details that we save for our dearest friends who have not asked just an idle question, but want to share our lives.

 

One of the many blessings of having this interlude in our year is just that: we step away for a bit, we gain perspective and see beyond the mundane day-to-day minutia of our lives. We "see a thousand miracles" that surrounded us as we moved through the ordinary, and we see them through the generosity of our friends' listening.

 

So I find myself telling my friends about the deaths and near-deaths of the winter, the passing of Michael's elderly cousin - he was the love of her life - and all of the pain that went into this chapter of her living; the passing of my sweet Aunt, and her pre-death stories of visiting the other side where "our language is not like yours, and there is no pain in the body";  the great joy of our niece's wedding, with all the family dynamics that stir us and unfold our stories; the humbling and tremendous spiritual retreats and books that have opened the heart and shifted the soul; the great sharing with precious Grace and how she's growing and discovering her place in the world; the wonder of my beautiful nephew, Michael, his continuing adventures into teen-hood and his blossoming into the generous and open and kind spirit that he has always been; the joy of Brett's hard work resulting in his acceptance into the theater union in New York and our visit to their first home; and the glow of another niece as she announced her engagement.

 

In the sharing of it all, in the gracious attention given by our friends, we realize how deeply and profoundly the winter has touched us.  We process and integrate those events in our own lives and see the opportunities for soul-growth that have perhaps eluded us in the living of them.

 

So we come to the island. We come for so many reasons, even though it gets increasingly hard to leave our beautiful Louisiana with our family and friends there. We come here because, as John Muir says, we need "beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray, where nature heals and gives strength to body and soul alike."  We come because we need to know that we have experienced the miracles of winter, and 'not dissolved' at all, at least not yet, although in a perfect response one day to a Loving call, ultimately we will.  We come that we may see more of those miracles around us, and to extend the invitation to others "to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."

YAY GOD