I rise with the sun today.

Move slowly. Stretch gently. Talk quietly.

Carrying words and songs, we returned to Calgary last night.

This morning, the house braves the evidence of our journey, the markings of an epic tale.

It’s a real mess. Piles of essentials and non-essentials we squeezed into the Subaru: sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses, clothing for car travel, canoe travel and the outside world; plastic zip bags labelled with the names of our dehydrated-from-home dinners: thai curry, yellow curry, spaghetti, mexican.

Powdered oat milk. Powdered coffee. Powdered peanut butter. Cravings worthy of twenty-plus portages.

Two bags of art tools and materials: an audio recorder, paper, fabric, beads, thread, watercoulours. Also, memory-objects of my family (stones, bracelets, a small wooden carved owl, books, a poem copied from John O’Donohue.) All the kids are represented by an object, my mom, sister, brother, friends old and new: I brought them with me to help me keep my promise: create, moment-by-moment, through love. I call my summer process: Experimental Documentation of Experiences. The gathering before the telling.

This is a tale of warriors and brave knights, modern and ancient. I smile at the feeling of one story ending and another starting. What calm. What wonder. What peace.

I didn’t know what to expect.

I’d been asked to document the journey.

“I’m wondering if you’d contribute a piece to the Danger or Not-Danger theme…” The invitation came days before leaving. The knot in the thread I pulled through the past seven weeks came from the publisher of a forth-coming compendium I describe as: Life Experiments, inspirations and invitations.

Danger or not-Danger. I sensed danger before I left. I dreamed, over and over, of our canoe tipping in high wind and tall waves. I dreamed of Athena swimming, terrified. Of me trying to help her, terrified. Of not being able to find Tom. My dreams, it turns out, were not prophetic. At least not of this trip. We didn’t tip. Other things happened. Painful things. Worrying things. One day we got lost in the land of the beaver and had to muck our way through it. Lilies bloomed around us, until we accidentally stepped on them, trying to keep ourselves from sinking in past our knees. Before we turned around, re-paddled our route, lifted the canoe, again, over two beaver dams and barely a trickle of water, I contemplated how things might get worse. I had dozens of possibilities. None of them happened.

This morning I sit in my writing chair, an antique-Ikea Poang chair. My back rests against a sheep skin. I pick up Mark Nepo’s book, The Book of Awakening:

September 15

Questions put to the sick- III

“When was the last time you told your story?”- Question put to the sick by a Native American Medicine Man.

Mark Nepo writes about fear, open hearts, wisdom, and pain– 365 experiments in experiencing the depth and vastness of aliveness. He compares his invitations to glistening rocks he’s picked up along the way. Glistenings. Experiences. I’ve heard something like this before.

“Glimmers. You’re trying to be aware of glimmers,” Cheryl Strayed said in a workshop I took at the Esalen Institute in 2016. The day before, memoirist and essayist Pam Houston, invited the writers in our small group to make a list; any list, any title. My list was Things I Would Like to Forgive. My final line, as I remember it, was “The Fear.”

Here is Nepo’s first paragraph of the September 15 entry: Questions put to the sick- III

“When was the last time you told your story?”- Question put to the sick by a Native American Medicine Man.

Stories are like little time capsules. They carry pieces of truth and meaning over time. Whether it is a myth from 4,000 years ago or your own untold story from childhood, the meaning waits like a dry ration; only by the next telling does it enlarge and soften to become edible. It is the sweat and tears of the telling that bring the meaning out of its sleep as if no time has passed. It is the telling that heals.

I’d been telling and retelling stories from my life during our whole journey, especially in the waters near Michigan where my ancestors lived- my mother’s father’s people- the Sauve’s, long ago associated with healing. I practiced forgiveness. Letting go of the narrative. Living from one experience to the next. Letting go. I was often afraid, agitated, confused. I also felt great joy and aliveness. I remember both at the same time.

A day is unfolding right now.

I welcome stillness. I sit, with feeling. Forgiveness. Healing.

Athena noses me, walk? walk? walk?

“Yes. yes. yes.” We walk in morning air, more clear than at our arrival last night. Our Tuesday, September 14, 2022, started in a fully-clouded sky (Moosimin, Saskatchewan) and ended in Forest-Fire-Filtered-Orange sun. Now, gold sun highlights the deep-copper tones of Athena’s black fur, so dark she lit up the forests at night with a bobbing brilliant-LED light on her collar. She, so dark, we startle at the double-vision of her shadow in the light of the full moon. In the day, she is much easier to see.

A block from our house, just across 6th street, we run in the dew-wet grass, a long rectangle bordered by low berms, designed to be flooded in the winter for an ice rink. We play hide and seek in the pocket forest planted along the north and east sides of the tennis courts’ fence: trees stand tall, bushes nestle close and reach farther each year, groundcover creeps into grass. Athena waits at the base of one of the trees– the-tree-of-many-trunks-as-if-growing-from-the-palm-of-a-hand. Athena, guest-goddess-apprentice of grasslands, forests, lakes and rivers from here to Northern Ontario, waits. Her head rests deceptively on her front legs. She tracks my movements.

“Where’s A-thee-na? Where’s A-theee-na?” I call.

I move closer. I look high and wide. I wander away and back again. Athena tracks and tracks.

Finally, finally, I stop. I lift my hands in the air. I look at her. She looks at me.

“There she is!” I shout.

Athena hears. She rockets away, her feet a-blur. I am joy-in-the-moment, exactly where I need to be and what I need to be doing.

As if a spring inside Athena tightens and releases, happy love collects and expands, energy builds and propels in each of her long strides. She defies gravity.

We both fly when she runs. I feel the lift and descent of each bounded stride and the g-force-pull of rounding the circle. The resistance. The flow.

When Athena tires a bit, she sniffs the forest for signs of rabbit and squirrel and dog while I sink my feet into the ground and circle my body in a spiral, settling when I sense a center. From here, I exhale long and attend to the feeling of gravitational force.

Everything-here-now is comfortable and familiar. I have not known comfort-like-this for weeks and weeks of travel. I have known resistance. Fear. Pain. Athena, too, suffered. A dew claw injury meant she was under watchful observation for a few weeks. A day of letting her run and play resulted in a re-injury and an experiment with the healing potential of comfrey.

This is the beginning of the telling of a story of Danger or Not danger.