RandomBliss: Biking on the Bay

The path along which I ride to the go the library.
To the left is the water of the bay.

Listening to: Something to calm me after a morning of Internet service hell!

Today's Bliss Formula: That I am finally writing this post. That things seem to be working. Today it will be extra important to be outside after fighting with, getting beaten up by technology.

I am a Great Lakes Girl.

For a long time, when I thought my bliss resided outside of me, I looked for somewhere cooler, hipper to move. I would drag my partner, Frog, all over, visiting places only to come home and realize I couldn't leave.

It took me years to stop the pretense of researching and traveling and finding reasons not to like other places. (I have moved a lot in my life -- but all before I was 22 and I don't want to move anymore. For more on the idea of having roots, go here.)

It took me years to realize that I am a Great Lakes Girl.

Lake Erie is literally and metaphorically and spiritually my true north.

When we are sitting out back, gazing upon our yard, we are looking toward the lake.

Another shot of the bay. To the right is a small tower
(not so small up close) and right there is the library.

I love this lake all times of the year.

The summer is beautiful, obviously, especially since we have a peninsula with sand beaches.

But the winter...the winter is amazing. When the peninsula is so quiet and frozen over and the trees look like glass sculpture. So barren, almost ghostly, but breathtaking.

Just to immerse my feet in the water during the warm weather is enough to make me feel completely connected. For a poem about this, go here.

Just to stand at her edge when she has a frozen skin, stand in the quiet and hear the very slow and sluggish movement of her beneath the blue-green covering. It is like she is breathing, like she is breathing me.

The line of trees is the peninsula, beyond that is the lake.
The tiny dot in the upper right-hand part of this picture is
a Great Blue Heron.

If you've never seen a Great Lake, imagine the ocean. There is no land to be seen on the other side. It is immense.

But different from the ocean. Where I think of the ocean as potentially deadly, I see the lake as a nurturing mother.

And you can feel the peace of her as soon as you are near. I feel her, now, sitting in this orange room atop our brick house.

When I saw pictures of the town I am from in the Black Forest of Germany, it was a town on a large lake.

And I wonder, as Frank MacEowen does in his book The Mist-Filled Path, what does this mean? What does it mean to be a person of the water?