Paul Lake morning

From our deck you can watch over the mug of early morning coffee as shadow surrenders to light. Even in winter there is a time when there is a motion to it, a falling back as though the world were being pushed into daylight shapes again. The boundaries of things assuming their familiar proportions. There’s a great metaphor in this. I intuit that, but time and familiarity is all it takes to decipher it, I suppose.
From the deck, with the land spread out all around, I get the sense of the universe shrugging its shoulders into wakefulness. All things together. I go there to be part of that - the ceremony of morning, this first light they call Beedahbun in the old talk. The metaphor takes on more shape when I let myself be in the presence of this incredible energy. But it’s never a conscious thing.
The funny thing is that I can feel it enter me. The light pouring into the cracks and crevices of my being. Even with my eyes closed the wash of it is like surf against my ribs and the air as crisp as icicles on my tongue. There are the sounds of birds, the wind, squirrels and the clank and clatter of my wife moving about in her morning routine.
Something in me reacts to all of that, needs it, wants it. It’s why I go there. So that the sound of the wind in the branches of the pines can become like the exhalation of a great bear raising her snout in salute and celebration to this Great Mystery presenting itself again. Against the vista of pine-pocked flank of mountain it’s a jubilant thing.
“Nindinaway-majahnee-dog” is what the Anishinabeg say and when that language was reborn in me, in the awkward, clumsy way it is, that phrase more than anything adhered to my insides. All my relations. This is what I see from here - this connectedness to things, this critical joining that becomes a revelation, a prayer and an honor song all at the same time. I’m a part of all of it. There’s no need anymore to travel to find belonging when the land holds itself open to embrace me.
Looking back at the way I’ve come, I realize what a blessing it was that someone cared enough to come and find me in my wandering and bring me home to it. It was 1978 and I was a lost and confused twenty-three year old who had never really learned to see the land or planet for what it was. My mother. My home. The extension of me. It took some time to get to that, of course, but since I have, I began to slowly piece together and articulate my identity as an Ojibway man.
I’m fifty-five now. In the thirty-two years since I first saw Kenora and White Dog as an adult I’ve come to know it as home even though my work called me west and I eventually settled in this mountain home outside of Kamloops. Looking at the platter of the lake reminds me of the Winnipeg River. Stretches of bush up the timber road call me back to the northern bush. Home is a feeling you carry inside. It took me a long time to get to that too.
Mornings on our deck reframe my connection to ritual, to history language and the teachings I’ve learned to see in everything - this ceremony of becoming that morning brings me to.
There were times in my life when mornings were a blur and there was no peace. There were times when morning meant nothing but another venture into old pain. There were times when the stink of drink was on me and I had no ability to see or feel the wash of light upon me. But there were elders and teacher and guides who showed me how to change all that and I became able to reclaim the calm that lives in mornings. I learned to inhabit it, wrap it around me and heal.
What I have learned is that you become Ojibway the same way you become a Human Being. This is what the teachings brought me to. Measure by measure, step by step, you learn to walk a trail blazed by the hand of grace. You put your foot down on the path of your becoming and become willing to follow it anywhere. When you do that every awakening, every morning becomes a reclaiming of the light you were born to. That’s the simple truth of it.
Therein is the metaphor of morning breaking over things. When you choose to become the fullest expression of who you were created to be, shadow surrenders to light. Come to the mornings of your being. Peace.