There is a place...

There is a place, when your journeys take you into northern Minnesota, where it feels like you've really made the break with the ant hill world of cities and arrived safely on a shore beautiful and foreign because it is so unlike the world you inhabit for most of your days.

Its not a geographical marker, like a dot on the map, but rather a moment when you realize the quality of things have changed, that which is around you and that which is in your heart and soul. Perhaps its putting the suburban mess in your rear view mirror. Maybe its just passing through a small town in that sweet place between farm and lake. A bird in the sky may mark the spot, but so may the first real clump of flaming birches. You just know it when you feel it.

And when we arrive there are moments when time seems to stop and all we know is the sun and sky and the sound of the water and the wind blowing through the trees. A silence is there even if we are surrounded by people, a silence inside rooted in all things properly alligned. It is like a moment of Eden.

What pushes us to leave such a place, to abandon such a state for something we know deep inside is less? The whirling world where all is competition and the beginnings of ulcers. What drags us from the simplicity, the silence, the sounds of wind and water, the voices of children, and the calls of birds unanswered?

Perhaps the angel of that first Eden, the one with a flaming sword guarding its gates and keeping the guilty away from paradise, is also within us. So we feel compelled, by some force, to leave the beautiful, the sublime, the holy, and those moments when all things seem one for the world of cars and sirens and mindless scurrying, and things for the sake of things.

And we hardly ever ask why.