Poetry, Photography, Nature
The Mirror of the Sky
Kayaking on Hosmer Lake
We slipped in amongst the shadows, where the tule reeds bowed their heads in silent prayer. The water laps with soft slaps against the matted detritus of summer’s abundance, now moldering at the shoreline.
My paddle slices the dark waters and rises again, sprinkling diamonds into the murk. And then we glide into the mirror of the sky, each stroke bringing us closer to the juncture where you almost can’t distinguish which is water and which is air.
Rhythmic as a beating heart, the paddle dips and lifts and we fly, like the loon, now standing knee-deep in his own reflection, contemplating flight into that other realm.
In places like these, the boundary between me and “all that is” slithers into the recesses of my mind.
My soul explodes into the expansive vacuum of “other,” and into the terrain of beavers adding mud to the walls of the teeth-gnawed halls of their home. And I swim with the fish, dappled with the same sun-warmed sparks that reach in, like fingers, to clutch at the last remnants of summer swimming through the lake.
Glitters of mica, like disco ball shards, hover in the waters, which were birthed from the bellies of glaciers to seep through the porous volcanic threshold of the toe of this land before emerging again into rivers so clear that they taste sweet to the human tongue.
I imagine the Paiute gathering those nodding tule grasses and also the tubers of the water lilies, protein for the long dark winter, and fibers for precious baskets and sandals and twines for trapping. They lived off of the offerings of the land. And they took no more than what they gave.
My fingers trail over that mirror, where the clouds drift through the boundaries between water and air, earth and heaven, then and now, and I wonder at the simplicity, the purity of the lives of those people who trod these forests, and who peered at their own reflections in the stillness.
And I think there must have been a pure spring of joy pouring into their hearts each morning, when they woke to the call of the osprey and the nudge of the seasons. A deep longing floods the recesses of my urban being.
I want to feel that too.
I long to glide over the cloud-slicked waters amongst the tule reeds, and to be content with just that, all that can be encompassed in that moment, and to be free of the worries of modernity, if only in my memories, when my eyes flutter closed and I’m floating free into the mirror of the sky.
This poem was composed after a kayaking venture on Hosmer Lake, near Bend, Oregon, on my birthday. Birthdays are rather epic times to muse about where we’ve been and where we’re going, and what we want to do with what is left of our time on earth. Like, Wordsworth, who wandered lonely as a cloud, when oft on his couch he laid, wandering with the daffodils in his mind, I’d like to close my eyes and remember what it felt like to float through the mirror of the sky.
Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).
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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.