In a Bowl of Pine

Women and landscape; men and mining.

As a child, spirituality made sense in its pure simplicity and it wasn't until I tried to find my feet in the world that a veil dropped. I couldn't make the innocence fit; I couldn't make myself fit. Until I did.

On summer mornings, the lake glistened like a cut sapphire, dazzling in a bowl of pine, oak and maple. Birds by which to gauge my life danced ahead of my path. Kingfishers, chickadees, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds. I would walk as slowly and lightly as possible to the end of the dock as to not disturb the bass and bluegill living in the sunken cement blocks under the dock. When startled, they would dart from the shallows into the mysterious deep. Before the boats – before my siblings tumbled out of bed – before basketball, soccer and sleep away camp – there was the ever vibrant, life-giving elixir salve of nature.

Winter was different. It was dark going to school and almost-dark when coming home. The walk to the rural bus stop was a march through unplowed, snow-covered roads and various cuts through dense woods. Everything seemed to be asleep and I began to want to sleep too. School was not nature.

School began the alteration of spiritual clarity. I entered a system I didn't sign up for and actualized the indoctrination of how to lose one's self for the good of the machine. I learned there are terminal lakes, shifting shorelines and that men have to do what men have to do.

At mid-life, the rocks and trees cry out to me, begging remembrance of the simpler, clearer way. Thank Christ for the tribe illuminating the path.