Grandpa Florian
My father’s father spoke very little.
His voice was kind, calm, and gentle.
As a child, I loved to be near him.
He smelled fresh, like clean sun-dried laundry.
He walked every day through his orchards and vineyards.
Maybe the fruits whispered to him and he to them—
concords, niagaras, agawams, currants, pears bosc and seckel.
He was color blind. What did he see in hues red, green, and purple?
He was compact and fit. He ate modest amounts
yet left space after dinner for coffee and fruit pie.
In the evening he worked crossword puzzles.
He liked to learn new words.
What thoughts did he have with them?
I was too young then to ask him. He’s been gone more than fifty years.
Still, he feels very near. I can smell his fresh smell
as my daughter and I look at his pictures.
Wisconsin Flowage
Maybe what I am remembering is the flow and feel of the waters
around my canoe and my body, around the bodies of loons and of fish
as osprey seized them into air, the continua of light and sound
from the waters’ ripples to the aspens’ quiver,
gleams and shadows on white birch, a deer almost unseen,
her coat dappled as she drinks by the water’s edge,
all of this moved by the flows of rivers, lakes, and creeks, of winds and breaths
in which the same never reappears. One can never reenter it.
One could not even ever again be where one was for a moment.
Amidst these vast acres of water, the mindstream in its canoe found its way
from day to day, camping at night by a stream. Overhead, the flowages of stars.
I seem to remember, too, or did I imagine it, a small, quiet lake, a mirror to the sky,
its refreshment from earth-rooted springs, a mother’s hands, wrapping my body.
I cannot say that I was cleansed or reborn. I was where I was for a moment.
More than sixty years ago it was, when I was young, that I entered this flowage.
It reminded me, even then, it seemed, of something I needed to remember.
True Nature
Sometimes a momentary perception of a sudden motion of light or wind, of smoke or a bird’s wings opens a crack in the limits of thinking.
At such a moment the usual division of self and other may give way.
The experience is usually preceded by some kind of suffering.
In a flash of sunlight on a pewter dish, Jakob Boehme saw revealed the secret heart of nature, “the inmost birth of God.”
Masanobu Fukuoka watched a breeze blow up over a harbor at dawn light. Mist disappeared suddenly, a night heron appeared, gave a sharp cry and flew off, its wings sounding in the silence. Fukuoka saw “true nature” revealed in this instant.
Sometimes, as when the angakoq Aua saw through life’s darkness, the seeming solid world takes the form of a world of light.
More commonly, people report glimpses, small sips, quiet intimations, a shaping of emotional purpose.
Neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio theorizes that our feelings express “human flourishing or human distress, as they occur in mind and body.” (Emotions are bodily, feelings are mental.)
Science, he says, endorses Spinoza’s argument that the mind knows itself by perceiving the ideas of the body’s emotions. “The mind is the idea of the body.”
In accordance with the laws of nature, feelings draw the dial on our moral compass toward bondage or freedom.
George Eliot, Spinoza’s first English translator, found calm of mind through translating his Ethics Geometrically Demonstrated.
In the epigraph to Daniel Deronda II.16, she writes, “Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history,….hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action.”
A narrator, she says, threads those hidden pathways. The journey is difficult and long, unique to each person, unique to each time and place.
Consider the young Anishinaabe water protector Autumn Peltier who narrates the sufferings of her people and the distress of all beings whose water is polluted.
Her people’s story is of a water journey by canoe from the salt sea through the Great Lakes. A bright shell guided them on hidden paths to their sacred food, manoomin, wild rice that grows in the waters of lakes there.
She perceives the thoughts and feelings of water on the analogy of our experience in womb waters and our being more than half water and how our woman side tunes to water.
On a pilgrimage with my Anishinaabe grandchildren to the Lake Michigan bay near where I was born, I wept as I felt all the emotions of my life cresting and settling in the waters.
My grandchildren gathered, as I used to do, stones smoothed by the waves, stones shining when wet.