Nothing Special

Here we are way up north in the land of the Northern Lights, the land of my family’s ancient roots and my old home town at the edge of the woods where everything was as familiar as the taste of salt and everybody knew my name. The land I left long ago.

Culley Jane and I are on “vacation,” as they say. We drove here a week ago from where we live now at the eastern edge of the Denver metropolitan area, across the plains and into America’s agricultural “heartland,” and then north into “the woods” as far as the eye can see.

Two years ago, we “vacationed” in Paris. This year, I wanted to go to a place that only exists as memories in my mind.

We’ve been here for a busy week now, visiting my parents in their 90s and the new generations of an extended family getting settled into the rhythms of the land of long winter nights. We went to the cottage on the lake I’d once helped build by hand. We drove by the house where I grew up on D Street. My brother-in-law told us that a beaver dam had flooded the two-path road to the camp. Everywhere we went I’d run into people I knew, once upon a time. We drove up to Marquette on the southern shore of Lake Superior where I went to college during a war and decided to become a writer and wrote my first poem drinking cheap wine with Depression-era hoboes perched like blackbirds on the fire escape out back of an old hotel down by the railroad yards. They had little left but a hot plate in their rooms and stories to tell. Everybody has a story to tell… my folks and sis and my brothers and the children of Gaza.

I came here hoping to find an elusive clarity to direct my steps, to anchor me -- an illuminating pine fire in the geopolitical woods that surrounds me back at the World Headquarters of Westphalia Publishing. 

I forgot to bring along my copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, so I’ll probably not be quoting him exactly. But I’m pretty sure, though, that I remember the gist of what he said, that we spend our lives searching for an elusive clarity. If we’re patient enough to find it, he said, we’ll realize that it’s “nothing special,” No cosmic lights in the northern sky. No cryptic lines in a mound of clay. Nothing special. Just coffee in the morning, pass the cream, listening to the stories that others tell of joy and hell is all that we need to know the way.

Packing tomorrow to head back home, to the foot of the Rockies and our gentle cats who'll have plenty to say.