what the big lake told me

things i made while i was camping

Today I returned home from a state forest in Wisconsin where I was camping with three of the people I love most in this entire world, and it was the best. I am feeling so grateful and full and ~emotional~, and I have been thinking about all my years finding this kind of peace in the woods.

I started camping when I was 19, weaseling my way into a chaperone role on a wilderness camping expedition with middle schoolers in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Never having camped before in my life, I told them I was experienced and comfortable. I don’t know what it was, but something was telling me that I needed to go. I have never been able to explain it, nothing about the experience was in character for me, but I knew I had to.

I spent that week doing many things I’d never done before, among them portaging with a canoe on my shoulders and learning how to build a fire, but the most astonishing moments came when it was early in the morning and I drank my coffee in the rain, or when we were painfully tired, paddling silently on a lake; I felt a connection and presence in a way I had never, ever felt before. I have come to identify this as a feeling of spiritual fullness, maybe like meeting with god, and I found it first and most undeniably in the wilderness.

This is obviously not a new experience to recount- many people feel like I do in nature. Communion with the land is a cornerstone of indigenous cultures, and I have learned so much from Native writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kaitlin B. Curtice, and Linda LeGarde Grover. I have also talked with so many of my native neighbors and friends about their experiences and the stories they hold dear. I am so grateful to hold that knowledge and those stories, because they have made me a better, fuller human. I want to be in partnership with the land, and there is no one better to learn from than those who have always lived that way.

Since my first call to the wild, I have been able to follow that feeling, the unexplainable pull I feel towards certain things, and find god, spirit, completeness, holiness, in many many more places. But I’ll always love being pulled to the edge of a lake or to a big, old tree, and I got to do a lot of that this week.

This week I was drawn to the shores of Michigami (most commonly known as Lake Michigan) over and over again, and each visit was something different. On one visit I sat on a log for an hour in the cold wind, sand sticking to my face while I wrote furiously. Another time we walked out together as a group with our too-strong camp coffee after a bad night of sleep, making footprints and talking about tides. I went to the beach every time I walked by the easiest entrance, sometimes only for brief moments, but every single time it felt important.

I got to do a lot of drawing and writing on this trip, and I really needed it. I’ve collected and refined a few recurring motifs that came up for me (been very into drawing houses and other buildings as you will see) as a midweek offering. I hope you are finding fullness and meaning and peace this week too.

Now go outside and take a big deep breath!!!!!! Your body and your heart and your soul WILL thank you.