When I was a little boy I had a favorite aunt who seemed like a passport to other worlds...mostly the world of words. She was so smart, thoughtful and articulate. She was a painstaking writer and a brilliant essayist. Her book, By Monomoy Light, is a narration of an island, a testimony to the reclamation of her life and a variation on retreat to nature to find oneself. When I began to heal, I read this book and this was my favorite passage:
BY MONOMOY LIGHT
Living simply and in solitude is difficult, admittedly, since it strips you of distraction and defense. You find out the gravest danger you face – always – is yourself, and that you are your own way out of trouble, the doorway to your own hard-sought freedom. These are truths not everyone wants to know. But they can stay at home.
As for me, I plan to remember Monomoy and face the really scary business of day-to-day living with purpose and a sense of my own necessity, as the birds and animals do.
With me I carry a page torn out of Crossing Antarctica, the journal of Will Steger, the leader of a six-man international team that crossed the vast southern continent on skis and dogsleds – and faced dangers more tangible and extreme than I probably will ever know. In the long polar night, in the midst of his expedition of hardships, he recalled the earlier difficult and rewarding times: “During the struggle to raise money to go to the North Pole,” he writes, “we had an ardent supporter in Duluth, Minn., an 85 year old woman named Julia Marshall, whose family owned a hardware store. At a time when we were desperate for cash, I remember getting a check in the mail from her for $5,000. Accompanying the check was a nearly illegible note, which took me four or five readings to decipher. It said simply: ‘WE NEED ADVENTURE NOW.’”
And we can have it.
Of course, adventure, like everything else worth having, has its price: I’ve had the discomfort of poison ivy for weeks; I know what it means to be cold, drenched to the skin, and squirrelly from cabin fever. But a little risk has its undeniable payoffs, too; being awakened at midnight by the eerie, lone cry of a great horned owl; being stopped dead in one’s tracks by a doe diving through bay berry for cover; finding all vital hungers filled.
Talk about fear. You could move without love, forget how it feels to live. You could think you were safe – and never know the danger of deep joy, the pitfalls of beauty, and the passion of being free.
- North Cairn
Some words of wisdom from a little yellow bear:
