this godlike mystery

a view from the top of all seasons resort

I realize I’ve been kind of missing in action. Life is too busy, but all in all it is marvelous. Even though I bitch and moan almost every single day about the shit of injustice, inequality, and destruction that I see falling all around, I cannot dismiss the fact that I am able to see the billowing, steel gray clouds of a Michigan Autumn and breathe in the chill air as I sail over the roads on my bicycle.

I am blessed. Amidst the pain and suffering I see all around me, I can still catch ever-cascading glimmers of joy and mystery. Two weekends ago we traveled up north in Michigan to kk’s cabins. Her family owns a “resort” on Paradise Lake in Carp Lake, MI. Her dad and mom bought the place over twenty years ago, and now we are fortunate enough to travel up there every fall for a getaway with many of our dear friends. We also go up for a one-week vacation every summer.

My heart moves to a steady stillness when I am able to sit in the cleaner air of northern Michigan. We are surrounded by such beauty and quiet in the ever-changing landscape of the north. By ever-changing, I mean that we move from thick, forested areas to sandy coasts within minutes. I can hike through forested dunes and end up on the edge of Lake Michigan; I can cycle over paved hills and look out on apple orchards, corn fields, sheep farms, bee hives, wooded plots and still beyond the horizon see the Straits (the place where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet).


a far-away view of the straits--at the top of a hill on bicycle ride

During this year’s Fall Getaway hike, we took a 3-mile trek over a Harbor Springs’ Chapter portion of the enormous North Country trail. We entails a group of 6 friends, k and me, and Pookah—the whippet—and Turner—the standard poodle.



a walk in the woods

The hike was full of fungi. Mushrooms of all varieties busted up out of the loamy earth. Some seemed as if they had just erupted, right before the humans and dogs bounced by; gray sand-dirt was practically trickling of the smooth, strangely colored surfaces—the mushrooms in motion.


mushroom on the rise

It is this privilege of seeing the mysterious unfurling before me that makes me yearn to create life more than ever. What a joy I anticipate in the sharing of all things mysterious with a wee mystery—a child. To be up north in the company of michigan’s lakes and dunes and forests and animals, is to be in the company of that which is bigger than human understanding.

The pieces of something godlike re-surfacing in my heart are deeply connected to the joy I find when sitting, walking, biking, hiking, or swimming through the bounteous land and water that I am fortunate to call home. If there is a god, it roams somewhere within all of this beauty.