The timing was crucial. Vicki was to have her operation on the 14th, which I had to be at and after that, too; but there were also other meetings, one maybe that could be skipped but not both, and one was Thursday and the other, the weekend. Then there was the snow; the deep snow in the lake-affect snow belt of the UP usually started in the 20’s of November. Thanksgiving was in the early 20’s this year, so that time was out, too. So the trip had to be taken in the next few days, no excuses.
My friend Al, who was supposed to go, had his excuse, and I don’t blame him. No, he wouldn’t be going with me to the UP in cloudy, cold, barren November to a little cabin with no running water or electricity, no showers or Packer’s games, and as much as he would be missed, that was OK with me. Ah, solitude; I needed it as much as I needed festivities and drinking and people laughing, needed that other side with its depth and its real-ness, the no BS of the prison-house of self when it quiets and expands into something else, something that touches the nerve of the wilderness. I needed it, but needed to drive there first, and all of that depended on just when the snow would come.
A few weeks out, they said there would be no snow, and anyway, I did not know then of my stingy time line; by a few days out, when I knew of my tight window of opportunity, they said it would be three to six inches. There would be no plowing on the last four miles of road, and of course none for the remaining half mile of trail to the cabin, but I had a Jeep. In the ads, Jeeps climb mountains, and I would only climb a mountain with someone else’s Jeep. Still, mine was a Jeep, and three to six inches was doable, even for so long distance. I could also leave earlier if I heard of a change of weather, as inconvenient as that would be.
The next morning, I packed for the North in my usual frenzy that always left something behind, and six and one half hours later, there I was at the cabin, the ferns now gray and lifeless and matted to the ground, the trees stark and bony, the chill touching at freezing. A shiver went through me then as it always does this time of year when I go up alone, a slight trembling in anticipation of the dark hours of loneliness to come, which would cause some complaint and discomfort before the good stuff came, the relief of the burden of the social self. It is the deeper self that demands it, but like a cleansing fast, solitude requires a discipline that is hard to muster. A determination must be made. Here, though, it was easier: either stick with it or drive hour after hour back home. The decision to stay had always been easy.
Until that night, when I took out the little weather radio and cranked up its battery before flipping it on. I caught it in mid-report, as it said in its mechanical voice, “… up to 19 inches in some places. A storm warning means that it will be difficult or impossible to drive…” Oh no. I listened and cranked to keep the battery alive as it went through the marine report: “Up to 15 foot waves and gale winds up to 47 knots…” and then waited for the land forecast to come around again. Yes, it said, the lake effect snow would begin the following night and continue for a day and a half, its fury, as usual, pointed right at the wilderness spot where the cabin sat – a wilderness spot for a reason, for few wanted to live in the annual path of such snows. Maybe I could stay the next night and drive out before the snow was too deep? But if I got caught, the mess, the expense…and I had that surgery and a wife who depended on my being there. Oh no.
I left early the following afternoon, and in doing so, left a hole at my center that has yet to be filled – or more accurately, left a jumble of knots at my center that had not been cleared out to make a hole. The time spent alone in the car, then at the cabin, had simply not been enough. The purgation was incomplete, the drive almost for nothing.
I have been reading lately about angels, of all things. If we believe in them at all, we love them as our protectors and as our earth –to- heaven connectors, but they have been traditionally so much more. Thomas Aquinas, who is still the primary “doctor” of the Catholic Church, wrote on and on about them, and what he says is surprising – that they take no space, although they can take on human form for our sake at will; and that they take no time, being able to be in one spot and then another without traversing space. Some quantum physicists have related these qualities to the photon, which as a wave is everywhere and eternal, but as a particle is localized and limited. Interesting and perhaps profound, but as a laymen of such things, what interested me most was his description of their voices: a choir of joyous song to the creator (and creation) that we can hear in the silent spaces of our mind. How can a heavenly choir sing in silence?
The better question is, how could they not? Aquinas himself fell ill in the last year of his life, saying as he came out of a spell that all that he wrote, all the thousands and thousands of pages of brilliant discourse on heaven and God and doctrine, was as straw to the truth – to what he now understood without discourse - that is, in silence. He seldom spoke again for his remaining year and would not write, not even to finish his Theologica, for he had found the silent choir of angels and knew, then, that discourse is nothing when confronted with the rousing glory of eternal silence. There, we find knowledge; there we find the peace and fulfillment that our busy lives had been so frantically trying to construct, and so fruitlessly. There, in heavenly silence, we find that the voices of the wisest are as straw, and the silence of the lowliest simpleton is as the angels’.
That was my hole, then, what was left behind to escape the blizzard – the hole, one could say, that I sought in the comparative nothingness of the wilderness. But that was not a loss, either, not really, for it has brought me here to understand the loss. Maybe I had taken it for granted; maybe, even, I had not really understood its blessing. For now once again, I do, as the real hole, the bleak emptiness that is not THE hole but an overfull drawer of stuff, reminds me of where it is that the real “stuff” is, where the real chorus of angels can be heard. In silence; in silence that brings awareness, that brings astonishment, that brings praise, that brings the choir that cannot be heard but can be, too, vibrating not in the ears but in every cell within that goes out and out, beyond even the storm- filled skies. FK
My friend Al, who was supposed to go, had his excuse, and I don’t blame him. No, he wouldn’t be going with me to the UP in cloudy, cold, barren November to a little cabin with no running water or electricity, no showers or Packer’s games, and as much as he would be missed, that was OK with me. Ah, solitude; I needed it as much as I needed festivities and drinking and people laughing, needed that other side with its depth and its real-ness, the no BS of the prison-house of self when it quiets and expands into something else, something that touches the nerve of the wilderness. I needed it, but needed to drive there first, and all of that depended on just when the snow would come.
A few weeks out, they said there would be no snow, and anyway, I did not know then of my stingy time line; by a few days out, when I knew of my tight window of opportunity, they said it would be three to six inches. There would be no plowing on the last four miles of road, and of course none for the remaining half mile of trail to the cabin, but I had a Jeep. In the ads, Jeeps climb mountains, and I would only climb a mountain with someone else’s Jeep. Still, mine was a Jeep, and three to six inches was doable, even for so long distance. I could also leave earlier if I heard of a change of weather, as inconvenient as that would be.
The next morning, I packed for the North in my usual frenzy that always left something behind, and six and one half hours later, there I was at the cabin, the ferns now gray and lifeless and matted to the ground, the trees stark and bony, the chill touching at freezing. A shiver went through me then as it always does this time of year when I go up alone, a slight trembling in anticipation of the dark hours of loneliness to come, which would cause some complaint and discomfort before the good stuff came, the relief of the burden of the social self. It is the deeper self that demands it, but like a cleansing fast, solitude requires a discipline that is hard to muster. A determination must be made. Here, though, it was easier: either stick with it or drive hour after hour back home. The decision to stay had always been easy.
Until that night, when I took out the little weather radio and cranked up its battery before flipping it on. I caught it in mid-report, as it said in its mechanical voice, “… up to 19 inches in some places. A storm warning means that it will be difficult or impossible to drive…” Oh no. I listened and cranked to keep the battery alive as it went through the marine report: “Up to 15 foot waves and gale winds up to 47 knots…” and then waited for the land forecast to come around again. Yes, it said, the lake effect snow would begin the following night and continue for a day and a half, its fury, as usual, pointed right at the wilderness spot where the cabin sat – a wilderness spot for a reason, for few wanted to live in the annual path of such snows. Maybe I could stay the next night and drive out before the snow was too deep? But if I got caught, the mess, the expense…and I had that surgery and a wife who depended on my being there. Oh no.
I left early the following afternoon, and in doing so, left a hole at my center that has yet to be filled – or more accurately, left a jumble of knots at my center that had not been cleared out to make a hole. The time spent alone in the car, then at the cabin, had simply not been enough. The purgation was incomplete, the drive almost for nothing.
I have been reading lately about angels, of all things. If we believe in them at all, we love them as our protectors and as our earth –to- heaven connectors, but they have been traditionally so much more. Thomas Aquinas, who is still the primary “doctor” of the Catholic Church, wrote on and on about them, and what he says is surprising – that they take no space, although they can take on human form for our sake at will; and that they take no time, being able to be in one spot and then another without traversing space. Some quantum physicists have related these qualities to the photon, which as a wave is everywhere and eternal, but as a particle is localized and limited. Interesting and perhaps profound, but as a laymen of such things, what interested me most was his description of their voices: a choir of joyous song to the creator (and creation) that we can hear in the silent spaces of our mind. How can a heavenly choir sing in silence?
The better question is, how could they not? Aquinas himself fell ill in the last year of his life, saying as he came out of a spell that all that he wrote, all the thousands and thousands of pages of brilliant discourse on heaven and God and doctrine, was as straw to the truth – to what he now understood without discourse - that is, in silence. He seldom spoke again for his remaining year and would not write, not even to finish his Theologica, for he had found the silent choir of angels and knew, then, that discourse is nothing when confronted with the rousing glory of eternal silence. There, we find knowledge; there we find the peace and fulfillment that our busy lives had been so frantically trying to construct, and so fruitlessly. There, in heavenly silence, we find that the voices of the wisest are as straw, and the silence of the lowliest simpleton is as the angels’.
That was my hole, then, what was left behind to escape the blizzard – the hole, one could say, that I sought in the comparative nothingness of the wilderness. But that was not a loss, either, not really, for it has brought me here to understand the loss. Maybe I had taken it for granted; maybe, even, I had not really understood its blessing. For now once again, I do, as the real hole, the bleak emptiness that is not THE hole but an overfull drawer of stuff, reminds me of where it is that the real “stuff” is, where the real chorus of angels can be heard. In silence; in silence that brings awareness, that brings astonishment, that brings praise, that brings the choir that cannot be heard but can be, too, vibrating not in the ears but in every cell within that goes out and out, beyond even the storm- filled skies. FK
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