“Oh honey, just open your heart and let the words flow,” says Barbara Parker. She’s ninety-one. A fair-skinned and very slight African-American woman who sat in the pew behind me at St. Michael’s in Flint for years. My phone number, scrawled on a piece of paper, fell out of her address book and she thought she'd give me a call. When she asks about my daughter, Katya, I give her an uncensored earful. “Just sit her down and ask her, ‘do you love me?’ And if she says yes, then say, ‘so why do you hurt me this way? Why don’t you try to make me happy?’” Barbara's parenting advice in a nutshell is that I need to be more firm, more assertive. “You are too soft.”
I hang up the phone, thinking that maybe she’s right, feeling ashamed that it isn’t so easy for me. “Who was that?” asks my husband, looking up from whatever he is watching on television. I tell about the conversation Barbara recommends that I have with Katya in which expectations are outlined clearly. He looks skeptical.
“Let the words flow.” Inside nothing flows. But outside this afternoon, I felt free as the spring breeze kissing the frozen mountains, walking up and down, round and round, spotting a loon on the lake just as I dropped my legs into the cold water, standing up to be splashed by a young beaver’s tail slap. I wanted to share something of the magic of these sights, and I tried to tell them to one who could be a new friend. My words produced merely the smallest ripple of a reply—a brief exchange with little feeling about these things. I longed for the music of the fountains. For the mournful wail of the loon. “Here I am. Where are you?” Husband’s on t.v.. Katya’s under her blanket reading Facebook. I’m working my way through a heavy article on the Reformation’s attempt to kill the Sacred Female, but I put the article down to dip into poetry and find these lines that capture the stark contrast between freedom and constraint, between natural and human worlds.
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs.
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music, lest it should not find
An echo in another’s mind,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
I read these words and forgot about the lonely feeling of not being able to share the joy of a simple walk or the love I feel for my daughter. My own mind supplied the echo. I was the answering loon.
But I’d like to try to tell you, really tell you, if I can, what my walk was like: It was like coming out of hibernation. There was the initial sweet confusion of immersion as the senses try and fail to take in the sounds, sights, the light, the feel of the air. As I moved along the trail, the thought formed that a walk is really a musical experience. The translucent white-yellow beech leaves, dried and shivering in the wind, looked like notes on the staff of branches. The hills, speckled with last year’s leaves, lay in the light waiting, I suspect, for all that is alive in the humus to stir and sprout. Long before I see the dark ponds of meltwater in the crevices between the hills, I hear the chorus of frogs. My dog stops and cocks his head to listen. It is as exciting as the cacophony of sound an orchestra makes as it tunes up and each musician prepares to play his heart out. Trills, croaks, cackling, chirping, humming, and the sound of a finger running along the teeth of a comb. That is the northern leopard frog. All the frogs are tuning up to draw mates. Alive with sound, these creatures are sensitive to the subtlest vibrations. I walk toward the edge of the dark water to search for skunk cabbage, and it’s almost as if some frog conductor gave the sign: all are silent. Do they see, feel, or hear me? The further I walk, the more sensitive I become to my own tonal shifts. I exult on the ridge, I search the lake’s edge, I fall into reverie on the peninsula and, as I hoist myself up onto the granite outcropping, I remember how he looked over my sunglasses and into my eyes. Eyes seeking the response of eyes, bring out the stars, bring out the flowers. I am solitary now, and it comes as something of a revelation that my eyes still make things happen. New things appear everywhere I look, and the most wonderful things happen during rests. In the heavy yellow grass along the lake with Panda, I take off my boots, unroll my wool socks. The water is icy cold. Perfect. I examine my unshaved and scaly legs, and, as I stroke my own “fur,” I promise to take better care of my body. Then, when I look up and out across the surface of the water, I see a black head in elegant profile darting from side to side. A loon! I can’t believe it. Here?! I see them all the time at home on Adirondack lakes, but we are in lower Michigan, not too far from Flint. Maybe this place is further away than I thought. And this loon probably landed here to rest on his flight from a faraway winter in some tropical paradise. Come back to the peace and solitude of this little lake, looking for an echo. He dives and disappears. Later when I’m at the end of the lake, up high on a ridge, I lift my eyes to see the single pine tree reach for the sun and catch a glimpse of a turkey vulture riding the air. That’s when I hear the loon call. It’s an unmistakable wail that carries. Oh for a voice like that! “Honey, let the words flow.” But if they don’t flow, the whole natural world instructs me to croak, hum, bark, screech, peep, and cry them out. My favorite Latin word for the Holy Spirit—the Creator, the giver of life, is “vivificantem.” And in Bach’s great Mass in B Minor, the Bass soloist, makes his voice sound like a thrush in deep woods, trilling up and down the scale, falling like water, rising like air, and he stretches that word out in no less than eleven syllables. Somewhere in that vocalization is the engine of life.
Mary Jo Kietzman is a writer,professor at University of Michigan. You can view Mary Jo's blog at http://livingwaterinflint.blogspot.com/2018/04/