Friday, December 31, 2010

The New World

I think that there is a moment in everyone's life where you are struck with a startling, shattering realization of the world beyond yourself.  For me, it came when I was about three, playing in the sand next to Lake Michigan on a late August morning.  The breeze had freshened out of the northwest as a cold front had roared through the night before with thunder, lightening and hail; with the muggy heat wave broken, there would be no more swimming in the lake that summer.  Something caught my attention, though; I distinctly remember rocking back on my heels and leveling a long look at the northwestern horizon.  The sky was a brilliant blue and Lake Michigan was a gunmetal mirror under it; there were waves, gulls, kids running around and yelling, fishermen lounging lazily on the pier.  But there was something there; something immense, silent and still, more powerful than anything in the world that I had encountered so far.  Clean, pure, full of light and dark, beyond understanding, and somehow, I was aware that I was caught up in that and would never be able to fully comprehend it.  I remember a sense of fear at first, then a growing awe at something I couldn't grasp but was fully aware of.  And because of that awakening, I would never be the same.

I was aware of it that day, and have felt it it since:  the solitude of an abandoned concert shell in November, watching the winter winds hurl snow across Lake Mendota, northern lights setting the sky on fire at Crystal Lake; the dark schist of the Estrella Mountains brooding over the empty valley below. For me, nature is the best mirror to reflect this feeling.  I have wondered if explorers had this sense of isolation and awareness as well; a conquistadore, having left everything he knew and loved behind with a full realization that he most likely would not return to that place, stepping from the shifting deck of a ship, splashing through the water and suddenly finding his feet on the sand of the shore.  Buzz Aldrin commented on the sense of "magnificent desolation" when he first stepped on to the moon: the boot in the dust, eyes raised to a close horizon and then focusing on the blackness beyond.   The New World, and all of God's gifts therein, but never what we expected.

On a sunny Saturday in October when I watched Bill die, I was overwhelmed by that same sense of being carried away by a power I could not understand. As my husband began a journey that I could not join, I remember standing on the sidewalk outside of the hospital, balancing on the balls of my feet, feeling the world rock and sway under me and seeing that same desolation in the stretch of the sidewalk, grass rolling away to the street, the vacant sky overhead.  Eliot's words circled in my mind:   

Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

Somehow, it all made sense:  I had been iceboating once on Keuka Lake, roaring towards Hammondsport at fifty miles an hour when we hit a patch of rotten ice--not uncommon off the Bluff, at the confluence of the two arms of the lake, where wellsprings deep underwater created whirlpools and eddies.  We didn't break through because of our speed and the iceboat balancing its runners on the thin skim of ice.  There was immense darkness under that ice, three hundred feet of cold water to the bottom of the ancient glacial lake.  I looked into that blackness with the same sense of awe that I had when I was first aware of the sun, the sky, the water of Lake Michigan and the same old, old wind that blew straight across Canada from the north pole.  At Hammondsport, we beached the iceboat, and stepping off across the crumpled ice I placed my foot on the frozen sand at Champlin Beach; this too was a new world.

A year ago, I was speculating on a sense of dread that I had been feeling; my father had died the year before, Bill's health had been declining, my job was on the rocks.  As the Earth turned around the sun, three hundred and sixty five days later it is a new world.  Now, as I stand on the shores of Alamo Lake, I look north towards Artillery Peak; the sky is a clear, translucent blue, the color of his eyes.  The air is still and cold, the water smooth as glass.  I am balanced on the soles of my feet, feeling the earth under me, rocking with the beat of my heart.   

The New World: every day is a new world, full of portent, potential, life, death, silence and the hope of God.  And so we step off, as we must, every day onto a foreign shore.

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