Grateful for Interruptions?
“Whoever you consider yourself to be is also the result of your own imagination. . .each new experience adds to you and alters your shape and image. . .Of all imaginative work this is the most intimate and creative.” Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (page 136) by John O’Donohue
We think of interruptions and interrupters as unwelcome and rude. But islands intrude with such beauty, we celebrate their disturbance. Islands disrupt the flow of light and sight, sound and wind, travel and thought. And their interruptions inspire imagination. Gilligan’s Island, Swiss Family Robinson, Endurance, and Castaway--how many of our favorite stories feature islands?
The purpose of my blog, Love with Roots (lovewithroots.com), is to meander through an alphabet of gratitude. The letter I inspired meditation on islands, interruptions, and imagination. But like islands, my thoughts seemed to want to have a little space between them; with asterisks like stepping stones.
*****
The woman approaching the Forest Service information desk glowed and stank. Her ripe smell came from the sweat, bug repellant, and woodsmoke of a five-day canoe trip. Her incandescence came from falling in love with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). Like most of us when trying to learn more about our new infatuation, she had questions. I tried to explain the limits to canoeing when lakes are covered with ice and snow.
She asked, “What do you do with the islands in the winter?”
Her question has tickled my fancy ever since. I imagine Forest Service crews pulling hidden pins on thousands of rocky BWCAW islands. Rock ledges miraculously part and bob like inflatable rafts. Crews would have to paddle their canoes for all they’re worth to tow an island because motors aren’t allowed in most of the wilderness. Pine trees at the top of the islands would sway with the rhythm of their strokes. Island-gathering could only be done on calm days or maybe when the wind blew in the right direction and would have to be completed before ice-up. Until ice stilled them, the sound of hollow rocks clunking together would roll from sheltered bays where corralled islands bob together like floating puzzle pieces.
***
But that is fantasy.
The BWCAW lies along Minnesota’s boundary with Canada. Islands are knobs of ledge rock, part of an ancient lava flow known as the Canadian Shield. In this water-rich ecology, they are like a person’s knobby knees in the tub, rising separately from the bathwater, but still very much one with the body. Except this bath freezes, usually sometime in November and generally doesn’t thaw until mid-April (rarely in March and occasionally into May). A person would take her knees and get out of there by early September. The islands, with their roots of bedrock, stay put.
***
The ice/not-ice nature of this place means travel modes to and around islands are interrupted. In the wilderness, canoes and kayaks are replaced with skis, snowshoes, and dogsleds. Outside the wilderness, non-motorized choices mix with motorized means. Watercraft of all sorts are replaced with ‘hard water’ options like snow machines and side-by-sides. When ice reaches more than a foot thick, roads are plowed across some lakes. An ice road might shorten trips to town. Others end in little villages of ice (fishing) houses. When ice is forming in the fall or melting in the spring, travel of any sort is halted. “Bad ice’ might last for half a day or weeks.
*****
Islands disrupt the view of a far shore with beauty and mystery. What is behind them—swamp or bog or rocky shore, a swimming bear or a wolf pack flowing along the ledge rock? Is there a rickety dock serving a tiny cabin? A boat with fishermen, cagey about how many walleyes they have on their stringer? A boggy shoreline, with a loon hunkered on her nest?
*****
Sound carries so well over still water. Teenagers screaming as they leap into cold water, a group laughing around a campfire, even quiet conversation between two people can be heard more than a mile away across a lake. An island in between plays with the sound waves. A rock cliff ricochets the noise back toward the source. Thick moss absorbs stories, laughter, and even angry outbursts. Bristling juniper bushes and boles of aspen and pine scramble it all into unintelligible sound. Deep snow holds brittle sounds and secrets until warm air coaxes out defrosting lumps of truth. Dripping icicles ping granite flakes. Rivulets chuckle down a hillside and people stop talking to listen.
***
Canoeists seek the lee side of an island as relief from wind and waves, while fishermen (and women) look for walleye on the windward side where breaking waves stir up feeding grounds.
***
Gaps between island and island or island and shore create spaces in our brains and in our hearts. Into the space held by water or ice might glide anything: a swimming moose, a canoeist with a dog in the bow, a pack of snarling snow machines, or moonbeams meandering crookedly atop soft waves.
***
We fill gaps between ourselves and other people with imagination, too. Romance, disappointment, anger, surprise, expectations, truth, lies, and love flow between us.
*
We were a month into Minnesota’s Shelter-In-Place. My daughter, Celin, and her husband, Sean, were essential workers which meant my job as daycare provider for my granddaughter, Ailish, continued too. In an effort to cut down on our group exposure, Celin was doing all of the grocery buying. Sean was doing much of the supper preparation and I had a standing invitation to eat with them.
“I’m so glad I have the three of you right now! If not, I’d be stuck alone in my house all day, every day.”
Celin and Sean burst out laughing. Fifteen-month-old Ailish joined in because heartfelt laughter is contagious. And it was a little rare right then.
I was mystified. “What’s so funny?”
“In February, you whined that we were the only people you were seeing anymore.”
To be Grandma Daycare I moved and then retired. The move was to a small town only twenty miles away, but spending time with Ailish was my passion, even on days when I didn’t need to be there. As always, if I’m not part of the problem (in this case, the whole of the problem) there is no solution.
The interruption of the pandemic showed me that I had other connections. Old friends in yoga, new friends in pickle ball, and my writing group were all suddenly only available through social media. I wasn’t the only one who gained greater appreciation for easy face-to-face connection. Other friends and family reached out with texts, calls, and emails too.
***
Interruptions inspire imagination. Our writing group was already sharing work online before meetings. After a flurry of emails, we moved to an electronic meeting. As Minnesota’s beautiful summer unfolded, members of pickle ball, our writing group, and yoga all found outdoor spaces. Mondays became my contact day when I drove to my old hometown for yoga in a large driveway. Afterward, I met with friends outside for walks or deck sitting.
The pandemic is exposing other illusions of separation. We thought our families were self-sufficient until we saw people working in grocery stores, clinics, EMS, and as part of supply lines as essential to our survival. Our connections ripple through communities, our states, our countries. We are just a bunch of little rock islands rooted in the same bedrock, Earth.
*****
A few months ago, I was a widow settling into a house in town. After selling the woodland our family lived on for thirty-five years, I resolved to celebrate the row of cedar in my back yard. As sunlight blesses a new day in early October, I watch from a different seat on this earth. I’m in a little cabin on the shore of a good-sized lake, still in northeastern Minnesota. Mist rises in wisps from an expanse of briskly cooling lake. A breeze dimples the water. The mist plumes lay over, pointing toward a scattering of islands.
*
A few mornings later, burly fog rising from a warm lake into frosty air bunches around and between islands. Even as I rue this sign of summer’s passing, its beauty lifts my heart.
*****
Now, in late October, the results of the election aren’t known. Maybe this is the moment to scoot across a thin crust of time. We fill the gaps between us with our imagination. Yes, politics are important and right now we are separated by them. But the separation isn’t complete.
I wish for us interruptions of calm, like the lee side of an island in a windstorm. My hope is that peace will allow us to look down through still, clear water to see the bedrock that flows between us. Whatever we imagine the distances between us to be, may our words and actions be set afloat wearing little life preservers of love.
What are you grateful for that starts with I?
