I’ve been visiting Lake Superior since I was small. My grandmother, a tough Irish woman who grew up in Duluth, used to swim in the lake every day in the summer. I hear stories of how she used to swim out until her head was a small black dot between the blue of the sky and the blue of the water.
When I was five or so my family went camping along the shore, as we often did. It was one of my first visits to the Big Water. I climbed around those magnificent rocks that line the shore. Prehistoric ones, made of red iron, the ones that lean out over the water as if to praise it. I wanted to be them. I wanted to stretch out over the water, tall and wide, to praise everything I saw there. Gitchi Gami made me know I was part of everything.
In my leaning towards union, I must have gotten too close to the water. Looked like I was about to try flying. I remember my father grabbing my jacket shoulders and pulling me back from the edge. He warned me that this Water was to be respected. That she could swallow me whole. The way she moved underneath the surface was unpredictable, cold and warranted my absolute awareness and reverence.
Over the years, this lake has been an incredible teacher for me. There is a force, a spirit, a being in that lake that is beyond words, beyond time. It has been a space of refuge, healing, teaching, deep wisdom, incredible joy, celebration, and everything in between. I could fill books on this topic…but for now, I’ll share this bit from my time on the shore this past week. Some pieces of the web meant for all of us.
[spacer_40]
There comes a time when skin presses hard against the ice, when you feel the density, the relentless solidity of a thing. There are walls and circumstance and places and people that are like this. Press as we might, they are unmoving, and somehow stronger the more we push. The ice of February does not melt if we hit, tackle, push it. The ice of February needs something different.
Just like this, there are places in the heart that few humans go. It’s easier to point the finger outside (to the wall, the circumstance, the place, the person). But these icy rigid guards stand in our hearts, too. Looming and secretive. Keeping watch that not too much freedom be felt in the chest. These barriers circle and shrink, so that eventually our hearts feel like walled cities that are growing in spite of the war. Cities with populations overflowing, because that what life does, it expands, it fills, it gets bigger. And we feel our growing hearts hitting the wall. Smack. We can’t go any further.
But look at the Big Water. She says: everything melts. Nothing is always. We sometimes wear armor that has been there so long it fuses to the skin. But the armor does not have to die with you. You have options. You can melt. Watch how I do it, she says. I look around to see a thousand melting icicles in the sun. Blue sky. Cliffs leaning out over the water in praise, dripping with sheets of melting armor. Every so often I hear a crash, she is falling apart. Icicles crash down against the glittering stone. And icy particles will eventually, by the heat of the sun, give way to liquid.
The way can be soft. Under the warm sun. We do not have to brace against the hard thing now. We can wait. Lay our hearts down against a warm stone that we trust. We can feel the weight of our bodies as ice, giving way to liquid, choosing another way.
She asks me to watch how what has been hard, impenetrable, always, eventually, melts. Walls are like this. Circumstance is like this. Hearts like this. Hearts like this collapse into a billion shining particles under the sun. We use words like “lake” and “ocean” to describe them. But you and I both know. It is love welcomed home into everything.
Recent Comments