Sleeping Bears

Floor to ceiling windows of the two story cabin face deep into the pine and birch forest. To the west, the Sleeping Bear Dunes tower above Lake Michigan. To the north and east, lush, dense forest rises and falls along the glacial paths of ancient water.

This is Ojibwe land. Her legend says that there was a great fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan, driving a mother bear and her two cubs to seek shelter. They entered the great lake and swam for many miles, trying to reach the other shore. The twin cubs began to lag. When the mother arrived on the eastern shore, she was alone. She climbed the high bluff to wait for her cubs, but they never arrived. The Great Spirit, moved by the mother bear's faith and determination, created two islands to honor the cubs. Winds eventually buried the waiting mother under the sands of the dune where she waits and sleeps to this day.

At dawn, a family of deer feeding near the cabin notice me, noticing them. We watch each other for a long time. It was so quiet, I could hear their hooves stamp through wintered leaves and piles of lingering piles of snow.

At night, a hundred million blazing stars surround the cabin, something surely unseen in the summer foliage of this place. Around 3 a.m., the waning moon hangs low, seemingly caught in an impossible wooded cage.

Deer, bald eagles, and sleeping bears – that life is more than enough – and yet – it is not my life.

Kyle sleeps in, wakes to coffee, and kisses me on the forehead as I write. For a quarter of a century, we have grown together, loved one another, and after wearing a hundred different masks, finally learned share the kind of honesty that saves.

My cubs have made it to shore; the mother can be the woman awake on the hill; the woman can honor the Great Spirit and begin to move about the land, following the deer deep and deeper into the wood.