John Muir stabbed one of his eyeballs with an awl. He was an avid inventor who, it is said, worked 24 hours around the clock tinkering with mechanical things. When he awoke from his bed rest after 2 weeks of blindness, and could see again, he went out into the world of nature to experience the delicate harmony of creation, change, flux, death and beauty.
I put down the book I was reading at the moment, describing John Muir, and decided, at 1130 at night to ride my bike up the hill to the lake where I have set up a tent for us to escape to, a summer home. The air was cold and the sky tumultuous. Dandelions are popping out all over the sides of the road. Far out on the fjord I could see dust being swept up into columns of silt. The ravens, who have been pushed out of town by all of the perching song birds, flew around the nests they have made in the hard sand cliffs conveniently located near the trash pile, which was smoldering from the last burning.
A fox ran ahead of me up the road leaving little prints in the sand.
When I got to the lake shore, the sky had just begun to touch down over Garnet Mt in the distance. The tent site is an elixir to the cement walls of the KISS building where all the communal noises of people living together commingle with the passing cars, airplane patterns, restless teenagers standing and un identified industrial sounds. At the lake I have a belonging sense. A time to look at Greenland without bus stops or computers or cars. I can allow the deep green of the hills and the storm sky blue gray of the water to color my marrow. I can try and become sympathetic to the possible meanings of the singing birds; at the very least I am becoming increasingly bewildered at the might and the passion of a bird tiny anatomy and Herculean soul.
Upon waking I noticed the first new Harebell, a tiny 4 petaled tissue paper of a thimble sized flower. Mist, as soft as a fresh woodland spider web, fell gently about my face. I forgot about my colleagues from work, the excited, celebratory researchers preparing boxes for their flight home.;even the noisy, midnight action of the local youths , in hooded sweatshirts and baggy jeans, leaning up against buildings, smoking cigarettes ,in the heart of Kangerlussuaq, had gone.
The bridge across the river allows for one to pass from the human world of daily necessities and hub-bub populace (even in a town of less than 600 ) into the ephemeral world of nature. It is a transport from a place of jet airlines and fork lifts and i-pods to a place of still fingerling and stoic sentries without names.
This is the thing I have been trying to grasp! The alluring aloofness, the odd magic and light. The weirdness of a felt feeling for the chance of a mastodon standing alone in the next broad valley. The drum beat of a people, whose ancestry is not so ancient yet.