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