THUNDER BAY – It’s a pristine morning along the coast of Lake Superior. Like humans this enchanted body of water has its moods too. Perhaps following a cluster circles of stones late into last night our Mother Superior is sending out less energy–at this time–inside that special atmosphere before sunrise.
Yet these awakening shoreline hiking moments require nothing of the handful of walkers whose footwear crunches through pebbles and driftwood washed ashore over time. We don’t require any passports, documents or visas to travel here. In company. Or solo.
The naturalist Edwin Muir, who so admired the ambience cocooned within Nature’s holdings, wrote such inspiring stuff a century ago. In a margin of my weathered sketchbook, I’m making shoreline drawings in, I revisit his clarity in seeing our universe meshing land, water, and, sky.
Muir had scrawled this bit of inspiration as he travelled his adopted new home in North America having departed Scotland.
“Take a course in good water and air; and in this eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own,” Muir predicted to others. And so it is here, by the magnificent wavy rhythms of this gigantic freshwater swimming pool our Creator has juxtaposed to our homes we find not only Muir’s spirit. We, as well, taking Lake Superior’s tranquil subject for this day’s awakening.
Many discover an ongoing secret in the infinitesimal masses of pebbles and stones. Each human, like a pebble in a larger hand, is as unique and outstanding as the new born sun glinting off the shiny wet pebbles my hand holds now. While an upwelling of fresh waves becomes symphonic as the smell of birch fires give generous proof our neighbours are alive as well.
Ronn Hartviksen
