When Magic Happens

Years ago, I leased a wilderness campsite where my sons and I spent most of our summers. It was on a small lake in the midst of an eighty-square mile private forest and wildlife reserve in Northern Ontario. For me, there is nothing like lying on sun-warmed granite, breathing in the scent of towering pines and listening to the long mournful call of the loon echo across the clear water of a small lake. It heals all the places in me that have become bruised and broken.

But life changed. The site was hit with a tornado (while we were there- and I can say it is a surreal experience to be, even briefly, in the very centre of a tornado flinging hundred foot pines around you like tooth-picks) and my sons needed to be in the city for summer jobs. And then, I married Jeff and moved out of the city to a place in the country in Southern Ontario. Although our home was not on the metamorphic rock of the Canadian Shield it was beautiful and quiet and surrounded by a pine forest. I still longed for the northern rocks and water, but it didn’t seem sensible to maintain a second place outside the city.

Now, things have changed- again. Being back in the city full-time I have come to truly appreciate all that Toronto has to offer. But I also have a renewed need for a place outside the city. But spots like the one I had- affordable, remote, private, on a lake etc.- are few and far between. I went on the waiting list for a leased site at the forest reserve, but did not expect to hear back for several years.

Two nights ago, lying in bed listening to the helicopters sweeping over the city during the G20 meeting, I could feel my heart and body ache for the wilderness. But with all of the logistical and emotional work of my recent marital separation, I didn’t feel I had the energy (or the heart) to do a lengthy search to find some place that would meet my need for privacy and rock and water. Lying there, I suddenly remembered how the original site had come to me: I had been visiting a friend who had a spot at the wildlife reserve, and I’d taken her canoe out onto the lake. I’d lain down in the canoe and drifted with the wind, watching the sky and allowing my deep and desperate need for a place of healing to fill me. And I let my longing fuel my prayer: “Please, I need a place just like this, and I need it now. I have no energy to search, to look at places that don’t fit, to figure out how to do this. Please.” And in one week a site on the same lake became available.

Two nights ago, remembering this , I once again allowed my deep longing for the wilderness, for the healing of the grey and pink granite and clear waters, to fill me. And I prayed a similar prayer: “I do not have the energy to look. I need a place like this again. Please, help me.”

This morning I called the wildlife reserve to see if they had any temporary camp sites available for August. To my surprise, a woman I used to know when I had a long term spot there answered the phone (I thought she had moved on.) She told me the only short term sites they had were for two weeks and were on one of the busier lakes. “But,” she said, “as luck would have it, a seasonal site on the lake where you used to be just became available this morning. Do you want it?”

And I said, “YES!” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

So, for some of July and hopefully most of August, I will be camping on a small quiet lake, surrounded by wilderness and lying on weather-smoothed rock. I will watch the herons, and listen to the loons and the wolves and the coyotes. I will sit by the fire and may even build a sweat lodge (used to have one at the old site.) I will take my heart and my body to the land that heals me. This might mean I miss a blog entry here and there (no electricity or internet) but I will see what kind of connection is available in the village nearby.

I feel. . . . so blessed, and so very grateful. And I also feel. . . . like I have been touched, not for the first time, by sacred magic. It’s not so much that I felt magic had left my life but that in my preoccupation with logistics and survival, with the grief of difficult change and intermittent anxiety about the shape of my future, I had lost my alignment with the magic that is always there. But pausing for a moment and allowing my heart’s longing to fill me I opened. And magic reached out and pulled me back into alignment with the sacred heart that holds us all. I am blessed.