The me in the middle

I just got back from mingling with the universe. I highly recommend it.

Spicy temps and a gorgeous blue sky convinced me today was THE day ― the official start of the 2024 kayaking season. I think my trusty red sit-on-top was as happy as I was when I slid it off its shelf in the garage and into its place of honor atop my Jeep.

If ever you are in the Jackson, Michigan area and need a place to spend a glorious hour and half slow-paddling in the sunshine, I highly recommend Lime Lake, just south of Spring Arbor. The middle of the lake (north part, for locals who are wondering) drops off deep and dark, but along the edges, a whole, lakey world is visible under and above the brown-clear water.

Oh my gosh, so many turtles. Don’t ask me what kind, because I don’t know, but they were having a glorious time lurking on logs, sometimes plopping gracelessly into the water at my approach. One poor fellow, a good five or six feet above the water on a thick branch, wiggled off his perch in alarm, only to knock into another branch and execute a full flip before tumbling to the water, little legs kicking the whole way down.

Other turtles, alert but brave, held their ground as I slipped past as quietly as I could. Equally fearless were the fish that often surrounded my boat. They were nowhere and then everywhere, zipping forward in determined lines or milling like teens outside an ice cream stand. One fish (don’t ask me what kind, because I don’t know) eased up alongside my kayak and swam with me for a while, seeming as interested in me as I was in it. I itched to reach a finger through the water and boop the fish in the snoot, but I didn’t try it. I was utterly content just being there, watching, drifting.

I thought I would think, out there on the water. But I didn’t. Sun on my back and the pleasant tug of exercise in my arm muscles, a great blue heron winging its awkward flight over my head, nobody there but me and the lake and the trees and the reeds and the fish and some frogs and the turtles and two swans, I could only exist, there in the middle of it ― exist, and nothing more.

A poem by George Gordon Byron, a.k.a. Lord Byron, a.k.a. Georgie B (I mean, I assume that’s what his friends called him), scrolls through my head often when I wander pathless woods or stand with bare toes on the lonely shores of a Great Lake. 

Byron finds healing in nature-nurtured moments, he says, “in which I steal” ― or slip away, with stealth ― “from all I may be, or have been before…”

Oh, to sneak away from the weight of all I might someday be ― the expectations I place on myself, the potential for failure, the uncertainty and what-ifs.

Oh, to escape, for a moment, all that I have been before ― the mistakes, the wretched mistakes, the inadequacies, the brightness I can’t regain, the lost opportunities.

I walk too often juggling all I may be and have been before, trying so hard to brace for the one and justify the other that I lose the person in the middle. 

I thought I needed kayak time to get it all figured out, all the past and the future and the problems and the puzzles. Turns out my brain needed the turtles and fish so it could be still and just BE, and to have that be OK, just for a little while.

Georgie B gets it. He steals away into nature, he says,

“to mingle with the universe, and feel what I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.”

Yep, sometimes you just gotta go mingle with the universe. Gotta let go of all the Stuff, all the coulda and shoulda and maybe, and breathe deep and just feel. Feel that part of you for which you don’t have words. The part nobody really knows but you. The part that gets lost sometimes and needs to be found.

Maybe that’s not nature for you. Maybe it’s planting flowers or the rhythm of farm work or watching your kid at a sporting event. Maybe it’s snuggling a grandkid or coloring in a coloring book. Maybe it’s your head bowed in prayer, heart thudding at the realization that the hidden part for which you don’t have words doesn’t need words, because it’s seen and known and loved, completely and always.

I need to go outside and pull the kayak off my roof and tuck it away in the garage for the night. I don’t want to. I want to go back to the lake, back to where I could just mingle with the universe and not think about what comes tomorrow or what I didn’t do today or what’s for supper.

The lake will be there when I’m ready to go back. In the meantime, I’m a little stronger, a little braver, a little more willing to look for and love the me in the middle, regardless of all I may be or have been before.

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In case you’re wondering, the acrobatic turtle was fine. I watched him scoot off underwater, looking embarrassed but unharmed.

The complete stanza of Byron’s poem appears below. It’s only a portion of a much longer poem, the rest of which is pretty bleak. But that’s Byron for ya. 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

- Lord Byron, 1818

48 Hours, a jury box, and the hurt we can't ignore

Last week, I got cozy with a film crew from the television series “48 Hours” to cover a three-day hearing about a small-town murder that may or may not have happened.

The attention-grabbing case involves a woman who disappeared from her rural south Michigan home in April 2021. The courts ruled the woman legally dead a few months ago, and the husband now faces a murder charge, even though police have never found the woman’s body.

I was in court, squeezed into a jury box with the rest of the media, to cover the husband’s preliminary examination (at which a judge hears testimony and decides if the prosecution has enough evidence to proceed toward trial), for The Brooklyn Exponent, a weekly newspaper near my home in Jackson, Michigan.

At one point, I had to nudge the “48 Hours” sound operator in the chair to my left when he started snoring. A Toledo radio reporter juggling two laptops elbowed into my space from the other side while a guy with a camera on a tripod blocked my view of witnesses. A local newspaper reporter who hadn’t made it into the jury box eyed me irritably from the back of the courtroom. (On the second day, he hustled to the courtroom and slid into “my” chair before I could get there, which I thought was pretty funny. Someone made room for me at the other end of the jury box.)

We all stepped politely over each other’s cords and put up with a little squishiness in the jury box because what was most important was what was happening on the witness stand.

What I saw there was a lot of hurt. The missing woman’s adult children talked about the last time they saw their mother and of their dwindling hope as they searched for her. They talked about the couple’s financial stresses and the mounting tension of running struggling businesses together.

They also talked matter-of-factly about the fights they often witnessed between their mother and their stepfather, verbal wars laced with screaming and swearing and threats to leave.

I don’t know if Dee Warner is dead, or if her husband killed her. We may never know for sure.

I do know that it’s incredibly sad to picture two people who once promised to love and support each other both hurting so badly that they tear each other into pieces.

You don’t get the whole story in a court case. Witnesses don’t get to talk about the inner demons that make one person lash out or the decades of trauma that make another person’s scars flare up in seething rage. Police reports and court records don’t tell you about the desperation behind the curses, the longing and self-loathing that makes someone push hardest against the person they most need to not leave them.

You don’t get the whole story looking at your neighbors, either. Or the couple sitting in front of you at church, or the young lovebirds who seem so compatible when you meet them for dinner.

You can’t know how many of them go home to sniping words or stony silence. Or who bury their unhappiness in busyness or work so hard hiding it from the kids that they hide it from themselves.

Most couples’ fights don’t turn into missing persons reports or murder charges. In a way, that makes me even sadder.

When something goes really wrong, we pay attention, even put it on the nightly news. But people all around us are taking their hurts out on the people they love, and we don’t see it, and we don’t do anything about it.

But, we say, as long as nobody’s killing anyone, isn’t other people’s pain their own business?

That depends on whether we’re OK with living in a world where hurt people hurt each other while we watch “48 Hours” and shake our heads and click our tongues.

I don’t know which of the people around me are struggling in their relationships, and I can’t step in and counsel each of them through their crises. But maybe I can look for actions I can take that strengthen families and ease stresses.

Maybe, at the next school function, I can sit next to the parents of the screaming kids and lend them a hand and an accepting smile.

Maybe I can take my coworker for coffee and ask her how she’s doing and let her see that I really want to know.

When I see anger brewing, instead of looking away, maybe I can step closer, gently and genuinely asking if there’s anything I can do to help.

If I’m lucky enough to have a local newspaper, I can buy a subscription to learn about and support efforts to increase the availability of mental health workers so that people in pain have somewhere to turn for help.

I can pray ― pray with closed eyes and a clenched heart and arm outstretched in the darkness toward loved ones I know need peace and grace. And I can let that prayer lead me to fight for them, for their marriage, for the healing of their wounded hearts.

We can’t look at violence on the evening news and grumble that somebody should have done something sooner and then not do something ourselves. We just can't. The world needs us to have eyes that see hurt and hands willing to reach toward it.

Somebody has to do something.

And we’re the somebody.

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I’ll share my news story about the missing woman case on my Facebook page (I’m pretty sure you can find me at julie.riddle.77770 – don’t ask me where all those sevens came from, because I don’t know), or you can find it on the website where some of The Brooklyn Exponent’s stories are posted, theexponentlive.com. If it’s not there yet, it will be soon.

You can also google Dee Warner and learn more from other media outlets. But my story is better. : )

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On my author website, you can read about the book I’m writing about another murder case and what we can learn from it about ourselves, our communities, and what we can do better to stop the next one.

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