The face of the River is hidden in plain sight. The giant logs rest on the shore like fossil bones inviting you to dream of storms, of cataclysms, of places and times where human flesh has no place. On this shore,  I feel like a child overhearing a conversation among grown-ups.

The veranda of the Edison winter home in Fort Meyers Florida reminds me of my grandparent’s home; a place where it seemed that time stretched out at a leisurely pace and was not unfriendly. In my grandparent’s living room civilization had no discontents. I knew what to expect from the next day and from the next half hour.

Now that I am older, I realize that this feeling of serenity was an illusion created for me by my elders, so that I would grow up believing the world is orderly and it was safe to make large plans.  

Looking back, I wonder if my grandparents truly believed it. They were not stupid people and life for the striving middle class was not easy, now or then But I suspect that they did believe the world was orderly and fair. Of course, they also knew about mischance, failure, wayward priests, fathers and mothers who died too young. But it is amazing how many things you can know and not know, both at the same time.

Many people believe in divine plans and “everything happens for a reason;” though there would seem to be little in a life closely observed to support this: bad men become wealthy, and many good women fail simply because they are women

The cynics say purposes and cosmic plans are a fairy tale allowing people to get up in the morning, eat breakfast and try again. But it is not as if anyone is truly able to look unblinking at the enormity of all that could happen, all that does happen, and stare it down. We all have our ruses.  -I would challenge someone to spend two hours reading a textbook of neurological diseases and sleep soundly that night.

Consciously or not we believe that although bad things can happen, they will not happen to us. We are the hero of a movie; the sidekick and the love interest might die, but we won’t; which is interesting because before he met his end the sidekick must have believed he was a hero.

The problem I see with having a theory about life is that you miss a great deal. Everything gets painted the color of Buddha or Jesus. It is like moving into an old mansion which has splendid woodwork and painting all of the trim dove grey. It might be a pleasing effect but a great deal is lost.

Life is wonderful and terrible. It is random and seems to have meaning. Both. As strange as it sounds, I want to be friends with God. I want to see all of Her works, even though I will not understand them. If I develop a theory about life, I will need to overlook a great deal. Theories are like ships in a storm, where the sailors jettison cargo to survive a gale. Perhaps you need to sail into the teeth of the wind, curious about what will happen next.

We are too enamored of our thinking part and, in a way, children understood life more deeply. They know that things do not fit together and they have learned to live with it (it is a small advantage conferred by having the cerebral cortex mature late). That is how they can believe that Santa Claus delivers presents to every child in the world on a single night, traveling by sleigh.

My grandparents never talked of inner life nor the complexities of the heart, so I don’t know much about what they thought of life’s contradictions. What I do know is that my grandfather took a scissors to the newspaper, clipping out stories of violence or sex so his daughters would not come across them. I am not sure what he thought he was doing. Perhaps he believed that these stories were exceptions to a rule in life and there was no point in calling attention to them. Though he also must have known differently.

 I did not clip stories out of the paper to protect for my own daughter and I answered whatever questions came up for her because I came to realize that children take in what they have a use for. When I explained to her how babies were made, I could see her mind filing that away as something that might be useful someday. But at the time it was just a part of the normal weirdness of life which every child experiences.

When we sat on the deck in summer and she asked questions about the stars, I knew that I did not have to do more than tell her the science of things.- Children know that life is strange, and just as there are elves and magic bunnies, there can be gravity, light years  and stars creating new stuff from explosions.-

But I made sure she knew that I would protect her, that she delighted me and I believed our lives had meaning, though I could not tell her precisely where is was located. – We tried church for a while, but the sermons were arid and the ceremony felt like holding your breath under water.

So, what she had was two parents who loved each other and who tried to live with curiosity and wonder. Both worked to make the world a little better. -Only my daughter can say if we outfitted her well for her journey.

But I take some comfort in the Buddha’s dismissal of questions about demigods or an afterlife. He said that it is hard enough to live well day to day; asking ultimate questions was not useful.

If there is an answer to these questions, it will come when life is done, but it does not belong to the life we live now. – I am reminded of a story about Leonardo who, when he got a large commission, immediately began experimenting with a new varnish to apply when it was done. – His patron remarked: ‘he will never accomplish anything.’

When my daughter came of age, I made sure that she knew I was comfortable with no longer being the wizard Dad she had once thought I was (though she had doubts before then). I needed her to know that she was ready to deal with makeshift and disconnection in her world and that she was about to begin a a great adventure.  -I used to say to her, “you know, there really aren’t any grownups. There never were. It’s just people like you and me, which is probably enough if we are lucky.”

As she grew up, and to this day, I allow her to be the age she needs to be.  Most of the time the count of her years is exactly how old she is. Sometimes when she was younger, she needed to be 26, though she was only 12. That was usually OK because I had learned that there were many situations that I could make worse and only a few I could make better than her own judgement dictated. She was a fast learner.

But from time to time she still wants to have a wizard Dad who can explain things; like how to deal with car insurance, even though she is now a young doctor, able to arm wrestle with death.  –

So, I still keep my wizards’ cloak in a closet, taking it out from time to time when she wants to be counseled by someone wise and benevolent. We smile at each other shyly when that moment has passed. 

The bottomland along the Minnesota and Mississippi is a place shaped by “too much” and “not enough.” There is too much water and not enough sun.

The trees desperately try to colonize the land after the spring floods have receded, while small plants struggle in their shade. Throughout this liminal place the forest is littered with the bones of shallowly rooted trees which have been blown down in storms or strangled by floods. It is a place of endless beginnings which go nowhere like Leonardo’s notebooks.

But perhaps this is just the way things are. When I try to retell my life as a story, I am frustrated by the many projects that faded into inconsequence (the study of Italian and bird song, tai chi, a balsa wood model of a Spitfire…). But maybe I have been wrong to think a life can be like a good novel with beginning, middle and end; and no extraneous material. Perhaps, instead there are many branches, tangles, and no way to express all that you know, feel or desire.

There have been a few points of constancy: my lover, my profession, my child. They have risen like the silver maples from the flux and decay, able to withstand floods and draught.

The River breathes out in its heavy summer sleep. The other shore is like a future, indistinct and inviting. I envision it as made of some other stuff than things over here.

 Here will break your heart with its precise articulations. I am lost here, like a frog on dry land. I want to glide, to slide, to be wet.

Over there the trees are green luminous shadows; they remind of first love that ever renews itself. I would like to walk in and out among those trees.

Here you must either be tree or not. Never both.  

If I paddled the opalescent water to the other shore it would initiate me on the passage, preparing me for a different f life. – Here is death and there is birth. Or is it the other way around?

The leaves over here are like insect wings sailing on the light

An alchemist wishes to transform, to evoke a pure moment of communion between a soul and the world. -The philosopher’s stone does not produce wealth nor does it give long life. Yet everything is transformed. Our humors, the hot, the cold, wet and dry, are out of balance. You can see it in faces: disguised by anger, desire, and boredom. There must be a way to find balance. There are hints of this in moments such as an early morning when you awaken and walk down a boulevard under sunlit trees, finding you want nothing, fear nothing. You can see out of the eye’s window and for a moment know what is there. In that moment it seems possible that the world will throw off its disguises.

It is like falling in all directions. There is nothing to hold onto. How terrifying to fall into grace. Yet, when you discover this, everything is possible. You are flayed by beauty, and must trust it completely.

On the river it is like paddling through a series of lakes, one after the other. You paddle to the far shore and it then opens up to another turning. Each pool the same and different: a little like life itself, where each day you encounter a limited horizon with no sense from day to day  of ‘going somewhere.’ You pass from pool to pool and “nothing is happening.”

But nothing and everything is happening. -The smell plants and of decay, the water sparkles and paddling under the summer sun, I feel bounded in my own skin. My blood whispers in my veins. The river goddess says “join me, be on your way. You are not bound by this moment.”

So, the only way I can escape is to enter here.

Much of the landscape of my native place is like a first draft, with scratched out passages, inserts, elements that don’t seem to belong though each strong in their own right. – At Schasrs Bluff near Hastings , MN there is park next to the remains of an orchard; a feral land no longer tame or wild.

Walking in the Midwestern landscape it is sometimes difficult to find the rhythms of the natural world. What is natural? The only thing that can be trusted are the ethereal effects of light. You become a man of air and fire longing for water and soul.

Here is where God found inspiration. After the separation of earth and water, She was a poet wanting to find a line and asked, “what comes next?” Perhaps here she envisioned the beauty that would become women, here she imagined the song the birds would sing before dawn. And perhaps here she thought up the longing that pervades a soul, finding no rest. “Longing in the key of E major.” She said. “Just the thing.”

God, like any other artist, needed to find the grain, the secret tendency of things, their affinities and limitations. She had to see her mark upon the canvas of time in order to invent what needed to come next.

 

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It felt as if I were looking backward in time, both here and there; recalling a memory some things very clear and others, for unknown reasons, vaguely formed. I had a sense of mystery and good fortune yet a little disembodied released from the immediacy of desire. I was neither body or soul but precisely both and neither. Longing was there and not there, a memory as well as an intent or purpose.

 It is, perhaps, a photo of the Bardo zone, looking back on that time just before rebirth when you cannot recall what it was like to want something, and yet, even then, a vague not unpleasant disquiet leads you to choose to be reborn again.

 There on the other side of the bridge another life begins.

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