Spiritual geography

There are places for all of us that for one reason or another take on spiritual significance. For me, and a number of my good friends, one such place is a cabin on Canoe Ridge, north of Decorah, Iowa. Fish and his Dad rebuilt a pioneer cabin on a new concrete foundation. It overlooks a meadow full of wildflowers and an oak-wooded valley that falls toward the Upper Iowa river valley. There is a waterfall on the property and in the summer bluebirds flit casually from tree to tree. For my friends and I, it's a place we visit to remind ourselves that things are simpler than we often make them. Sitting on the porch and gazing down the valley you can feel your heart rate subside and your blood pressure diminish. The noise in our heads and the anxieties in our hearts subside. There's beer and banter and occasional excess and fishing and kayaking and biking and a sense that we're in on a special secret, a privilege, a gift.

When we went to Southern Illinois, on the Ohio River, to scatter my Dad's ashes, we visited another such place. The river makes a big bend and cuts under the bluff it's made during flood after flood over the eons. My grandfather's cabin sits on that bluff, owned by someone else now, as does the ancient Rose Hotel, build in 1812, where we stayed with my mother, already significantly in decline from Alzheimer's disease. We went to the foot of the bluff and Walker and Caitlin (the grandchildren he was amazed to have) scattered his ashes into the river where Dad learned to swim, to curse, to be a boy. His footprints were all over the bluff, the rocks, the river bottom. The July water was as warm as bathwater and the weather became unusually cool, setting of a show of mist and water in the morning that made me speechless.

My feelings about my father's long death were complicated and contradictory. My grieving (for my father and my declining mother) sent me into a long depression fueled by vodka rocks martinis and self-pity. I chart the beginning of my healing from the moment Dad's ashes, rescued from the top of Mom's old Zenith television and cast in his most favorite spot, touched the water he most loved. We sat for hours on the second floor of the porch of the Rose Hotel and watched the river move and change with each minutes and we sighed. That night Mom went to bed and the kids and I lay on our backs in the grass on the bluff and watched a meteor shower. I think my children felt the magic of this place, rinsed by the river of it's tragedy and turmoil.

Today, as is our custom, we make our way to the cabin in Decorah, my friends and I. There have been months recently when I despaired of ever getting out of the house, or even down the block and this trip feels special to me. Over the summer I have learned that I'm more fragile than I thought, more vulnerable to chaos and entropy (and momentum in particular). I've had to be patient and to confront some of the flaws in my character I'd have preferred to continue to ignore. Also, I think I've become a little more patient, perhaps more grateful.

I've been reading e. e. cummings a little:

. . . for life is not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.