North Keppel, Ontario July 21-30, 1978

I spent a week or so rambling around southern Georgian Bay, camped near a town called North Keppel, which has a wonderful welcome sign.  

 

I found a quiet tenting-only area in Craigleith Provincial Park.  My site was as close to to the Bay as I could get, and there were enough trees and undergrowth that it was private.  I bought some firewood, and settled in for 10 days.  I was on my own for almost the first week, and enjoyed the quiet, and the time for reading and reflection. 

 

 

I finished Wolfe’s ‘Of Time and the River’ when I was at Sweet Grass Farm, and am now reading ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’.  It’s passages like this one that reverberate somewhere deep inside:

   Some things will never change.  Some things will always be the same.  Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.

   The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air – these things will never change.

   The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry – these things will always be the same.

   All things belonging to the earth will never change – the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth – all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth – these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.

 

I feel intimidated by the power and voluptuousness of Wolfe’s prose.  I cannot imagine writing anything even remotely as good.  And so, for a time, I am not writing at all.  

 

I am walking, and sometimes cycling – usually after driving to other nearby areas where there are fewer people, and I can get ‘closer to nature’.  I am taking photos, playing my flute, and spending my nights sitting by my campfire, sometimes reading, sometimes thinking and once in a while, dream-thinking – letting my mind wander where it will.

These cows lived on the property above.  That's their barn.  They were very curious of my bike.  Or maybe they thought I had food?  I spent some time communing with them from the safety of the other side of the fence.  

 

 

In the past four days I’ve been joined by an old friend from Vancouver.  Well, more than a friend – someone I’d lived with for several years until our circumstances changed, and I decided it was time to part ways.  He was very much more into what would become his career (we were both still in university), and often seemed to have no time for me.  When I asked him, one time, whether family or career was more important to him, there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation: “architecture will always be my mistress”.  

 

Still and all we’ve had a pleasant and harmonious time camping together, and talked – me still just in whispers – long into the nights.  We’ve talked about what it would be like to actually live a more rural life (we were both Vancouver born and raised), about the more relaxed pace of ‘country living’, about trying to simplify one’s life in the country.  My friend wondered if 'country life’ would be ‘enough of a challenge’. I wondered, aloud, does there have to be a 'challenge'?  Predictably, his response was: "Yes, I like to be challenged, it keeps me on my toes, keeps my mind sharp."  I had an image of a pencil in one of those wall-mounted sharpeners where you turn the handle and push the pencil in.  I remember, as a child, pushing the pencil in, then pulling it out only to find the end still broken, or the sharpening uneven, so I pushed the pencil in again, and kept repeating the process until, in the end, there was almost no ‘pencil’ left to the pencil – just a sad, but sharp, point.  What is the point of this kind of sharpness?

 

I am like that pencil.  I have always responded, perhaps even too well, to the challenges put before me. Rising to the occasion.  Sharpening my skills, testing my limits, and too often going beyond them.  This kind of striving, this endless pushing to do more, be more, achieve more, comes at a cost.  For me, this time, what broke was my voice – how fitting, to be no longer able to really talk, especially in a career that involved so much talking – so much talking.  Now I am beginning to question the value – to me – of doing that.  I wonder, if I ‘go back to work’, if I keep pushing myself, what will it be next?  And do I want to take that chance?  I don’t talk to my friend about any of this.  I can hear his response in his mind.  It is the refrain I have heard all my life: ‘you can do it!’  And the implied, or often overt, ‘you should do it’.  

 

Being on the road and camping has meant I’ve had to simplify my life.  My possessions are limited to what I can pack into my little Toyota Corolla – and once my tent, and bedding, and cooler are in it, well, there isn’t really room for much more.  My food choices are limited to what I can eat fresh, or easily cook over a fire or on a two-burner camp stove, and what I can buy at a local market, like the one here in North Keppel, where choices are, to put it mildly, rather limited.  I eat a lot of yogurt and fruit, bread and cheese, salad, and eggs.  And always, morning and afternoon, a nice cuppa tea.  A lovely cuppa tea.  My range of activities and contacts is equally limited.  I’m still avoiding crowds – really gatherings of any size – or even much contact with individual people, so as not to have to use my voice.  Then of course there’s the obvious fact that I am not working, not having to observe any particular schedule, or deadlines, or expectations.  And perhaps this last factor – the fact that I am not dancing to anyone else’s tune – is the most significant one in terms of a life made simple.

 

Today, on my own again, I have been thinking about grace. How one can create, and live in, a state of grace. What does it take?  It takes a slower pace, a slower pace to even experience a state of grace.  It seems to me that the faster the pace of our lives, the more we are doing, the greater the chance of discord.  I think of this in musical terms, how two notes, played with a 'decent interval' between them, can sound melodic, but played together or in rapid succession can sound discordant or jarring.  Or like a little stream, flowing slowly, gently and gracefully over loose gravel, creating a happy, relaxing melody, or a fast-flowing river, after a storm, crashing through the landscape in a great show of power and strength, overflowing its banks, and tearing out bushes and trees. Or when we are driving, if we drive too fast, in our hurry to get somewhere (or nowhere), no longer really seeing the landscape; it becomes an undifferentiated blur. But when we slow down, beginning to notice things more – that amazing hand-made driftwood gate, a heron, almost hidden, fishing in a ditch, the little girl in a pink tutu, licking a pink popsicle.  

 

Is there, as with driving, a graceful speed, a speed at which we may live our lives more harmoniously?  And what is that speed dependent on?  Our age and stage in life?  Our inherent personality, our mental capacity, our emotional state – and stability?  I would like to live in greater harmony with myself and my world, to experience a more natural ebb and flow, to relax into the flow.  To experience, even for short periods of time, states of grace.  And so I must adjust my pace.  Slower, I think.  Slower.