the pretty way

by bam

long a proponent of “the pretty way,” the winding way to wherever i’m headed, i am up against the GPS current, the Waze current, those little voices that come out of the ubiquitous boxes in our lives that try to tell us what to do––and the shortest, fastest, sometimes blandest way to do it.

it’s one thing when running late to a doctor’s appointment on a rainy afternoon when the roads are under construction. but not so when the afternoon is a span of time unmoored from anything else, except an eventual need to show up somewhere.

i am seizing one of those days today, as i drift north and a little bit west and steer myself toward a corner of the world i’ve never seen, a corner called “the driftless” (and if i ever employed my caps lock key, that d would be a D, as in a capital proper-name letter). it’s a corner as dramatic as any in these middlelands of the continent, a chunk of 8,500 square miles described as “a sudden maze of hills” and bluffs and valleys below, rising out of the flatlands of southwestern wisconsin.

it’s the land that time (or at least a good chunk of the ice age) forgot. while the glaciers of 500 bazillion years ago steamrolled the behoozies out of the rest of these parts, they never rolled through the driftless, leaving time to do its thing: cold water streams kept on carving through rock, sculpting and clearing and doing as they pleased. the meltwater from parts beyond incised valleys and bluffs, sinkholes and springs, caves and labyrinthine cave systems. and so, in the midst of a topography best described as pancake, suddenly there is capital D drama.

i could do with a good dose of topographical drama. and today’s the day i’m making it happen. because there’s not a Siri in the world who will point me the ways i want to go, i’ve had to revert to pen and ink, and scribbled my route onto an index card. 90 to 20 which turns into 69, quick right onto 81, then city road G/N and, at last, onto 23. u.s. highways and state roads, roads with alphabetical options, and streets with no names at all. that’s how i’ll get where i’m going.

and all the while i will marvel, and gawk. might even put the car in reverse, to gawk all over again (don’t tell the designated “careful driver” in the family, he who would insist on seizing my wheel).

it’s all a way of seizing time. of gulping down as much as you can of the wonders not too far beyond our very own windows. for the most part, my days trace and re-trace old, familiar routes. and for a homebody like me, that’s a very fine thing. if given my druthers, i’d stay curled in my window seat for hours on end. but, when distant parts call, i’m intent on getting there my way.

which is always, always the wiggledy way.

the way that makes me so blessedly thrilled to be drinking it in.

luci shaw is as dear a soul as she is a fine poet. and this morsel from luci fell on my path this week, in a resurrected interview with Image Journal. here’s luci’s take on why we write:

I have a magnet on my file cabinet that says, Write to learn what you know. So often the physical jotting of words in a journal or on a screen is like a key opening a lock. We know more than we know. When that door is opened, we find unsuspected treasures that can become available to others in our writing. This is a mystery. Because words and ideas have been recorded for centuries, they are available to enlarge our own thinking. We can connect with the words of the great writers of the past—Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Dante, Donne—because they were written down and preserved. It is magical to realize that their ideas are still flying, reaching over hundreds of years into our lifetimes, and as we read them, their revelations are transferred into our modern minds. I just wrote a poem inspired by a saying of Tertullian, an early church father, about birds, and the cross they make with their wings when flying.

and a little dose of poet and zen monk jane hirshfield to wind up the week….

To Drink

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink.
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek—
it is the same—
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass;
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.
––Jane Hirshfield

how might you make the most of time today?

p.s. i’m headed to mineral point, wisconsin, for a weekend of Book of Nature extravaganzas, beginning with a saturday morning nature hike through a wooded (and likely muddy) preserve, followed by an afternoon book talk in a charming book store called The Republic of Letters, followed by a gathering at a new cook shop, followed by my first from-the-pulpit sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church on sunday morning. then it’ll be back home the windiest way i can wiggle…(here’s a little recording the mineral point chamber of commerce posted who knows where…)