Embracing Change with an Awakened Heart: Isle Royale Lessons

Sep 11, 2024

Storm Demon fills the Sky Red sun Rising

Awakened by a white burst of lightning, which opened my eyes and lit up the sky, and a loud burst of thunder, I sat up in the middle of the night.

The best of the storm passed in five minutes. However, every time I opened my eyes during the night, I saw flashes of light.

We were two days into being at Isle Royale National Park.

The storm had started in the West, over Minnesota, and took all afternoon to arrive. Watching the clouds gather from the back dock, we knew we had a storm the night ahead of us.

The barometer on our fireplace mantle was dropping, dropping.

Weather is the most exciting event on the Island, as it renders everything unpredictable. Unless, of course, you are an old fisherman who would go out in any weather.

Now, in the morning, as I write this, sitting at our table, I sip my coffee and listen to the cackles and the crackles of the fire behind me, my husband reading on the wooden bench in front of the fire.

In front of me through the large window overlooking Lake Superior and the island, “The Dragon,” a neighboring island, rests peacefully on the lake, perhaps in a dreamless sleep.

Where are we?

We are at Isle Royale, the least known of the national parks, fortunate and blessed to live in the cabin for a few weeks each summer that my husband’s grandmother, Alfreda Gale, built in the early thirties with the support of a local commercial fisherman, Art Mattson. The Gale family has spent summers here since. Don, my husband, started at age one; his Dad and Mother had brought him over on a seaplane.

Now, we take The Ranger, the National Park ferry boat that has been riding the calm and often not-so-calm waters of Lake Superior from Houghton, Michigan, to Rock Harbor, otherwise known as “Snug Harbor” – and you betcha, there’s a story behind that name. We’ve been treating ourselves from 10 days to 3 weeks almost every summer. Don spent his summers there as a child, and I’ve been going since I met Don in the mid-seventies. We even got married there!

A place and space apart, “Far from the Maddening Crowds,” as Thomas Hardy named his book, Isle Royale has been a retreat for us—a place

to “be” and rest
to work to maintain the cabins
to read
to reflect
to sink in the harmonies and rhythms of the natural world
sometimes, to fish
to hike and walk
to breathe the clean air
to cleanse the body and the soul in the cold lake water
to write
to allow the Muse to awaken
to discover and learn: to receive the teachings of cultivating the kind of Patience that we need to cultivate, given the constant uncertainty about making plans with the total unpredictability of the weather

What is the place and space apart you have made for yourself?

What are the teachings of that place?

This year, I am writing my next book, the working title of which is “The Art and Practice of Sacred Listening: Having your Relationships Work.” This is a good place to write. The Muse speaks loudly here. I completed four new chapters of my book while here, chapters on creating and restoring relationships through communication.

Three years ago, the Poetic Muse awoke and contributed teaching poems to me. You, if you are an old-time subscriber to my work, may well have read that book of photographs, reflective inquiries, and nature poems, Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections. If you are new and are into diving deeper into the themes of embracing endings and starting new beginnings through the beauty of nature that is the pristine wilderness, you can find out more about that book. The book itself is filled with photos of Isle Royale that can entice you and romance you.

Isle Royale is a place to listen with the ears of an awakened heart: to open your heart and listen to the wind in the pines and firs, the mourning call of the loons, the slap and clap of the waves on the rocky shore, even to the sun rising above the lake in the morning, reflecting its ever-growing wake in the lake as it climbs higher and higher in the sky.

The first morning we were here, the red, rising sun took me out of my mind altogether with its color, like a perfectly formed elliptical ball resting on the water:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Red sun arising:
surprise me with your color.
Bring wonder to my sight

Here, it is easy to shift anything ordinary into everything extraordinary and everything extraordinary into being a transport into awe.

What is awe? “Intimations of the divine,” as Wordsworth would say.

So let me stop short of massaging your brain further with words, and invite you to find a place in your heart today to give yourself the gift of a pause and allow yourself to sink into the beauty, the rhythms, the harmonies, the song of Isle Royale, through some still photos and some videos I have taken, for you, and for me, in my journey here this year.

And, perhaps, you can find your own way, sometime in the next week or two, to take yourself on another journey, as well, into that inner quiet, inner stillness, where your own inner wisdom speaks to you of your own awakened heart. For what is it to love with an awakened heart? To be open, to receive, to be attuned to the intimations of the divine – the divine within you, the divine with another, the divine of the benevolent universe.

And, pen in hand, you might even grow still and inspired enough to allow yourself to hear the call to you to write as you allow the peace of nature to stir your heart.

From home now:

This year, we began with a storm, and we ended with a storm, a storm which created 5-foot waves and a dark sky with a double rainbow as we rode the waves on The Ranger. Enjoy the ride!

Leaving Michigan by small plane, through Chicago, and, finally, arriving on that “other” ferry, the one that takes us from the Seattle waterfront to our beloved home on Bainbridge Island:

I am delighted that you joined me on this photographic journey. If you enjoyed this Blog, feel free to share it.

May this post inspire you and open you to new thinking and feeling. Please feel free to comment. I read and respond to comments.

Awakening Heart

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