"Decrease combined with sincerity" is what this morning's I Ching reading suggests I meditate upon. Canada the mountain above, America the lake below, Myself the evaporation of liquid water into drifting clouds heavy with the bounty of the rain to be transubstantiated into the gifts of grapes and wine and, flowing with the river, love pouring into the simplicity of the vast and mysterious sea. Not hesitating to help when help is needed — but with sensitive awareness — is an element of this release of assertion. But to do so with one's dignity preserved — a stranger in a strange land — is also paramount when one's home is no longer separate but joined at the culmination of a long journey together that ends precisely at a new beginning.

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How to Move to Canada is the title of a book snagged from a Free Little Library and packed up with the thousand things jammed into my ailing Highlander and squeezed through the needle's eye of Sault Ste. Marie, mon amour in the passanger seat and navigating along the northern shore of Lake Huron through Sturgeon Falls, with a stop for lunch and to see her lovely tante et oncle. I am neither a rich man nor a camel, but I do have a heart full of love and many bright ideas floating in my head, not to mention an advanced degree or two and a fairly clean criminal record and bill of health to help make my case, gently and humbly, to the office of immigration as the sun rises at its northernmost point on the Montreal horizon.

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The border guards raised their eyebrows at the amount of stuff we were hauling into Canada from the land of the insane to the south. So we had to get out and make an accounting. A friendly interrogation ensued, since the mutual love between our two lands persists despite ongoing questions about obliviousness and drunken driving of the ship of state. My love and I answered their questions satisfactorily and continued on our way persisting in our own love mutually arrived at years ago and now reaching a turning point of stability between north and south, the compass of our combined attraction ceasing to spin as madly now as in the past, but still pointing us to each other.

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The Sleepy Hollow Motel, between the thumb and forefinger of westernmost Gitche Gumee, is where my love and I lie in the innocence of love and the guilt of humankind. We’ve dined on peanut butter and bread and the last few ounces of the Monkey’s Shoulder we brought with us from Washington State (a gift from a Spokane friend, now transformed to emptiness). And now, after making love, we sink into the innocence of sleep, with thoughts of Bob Dylan’s childhood home in the hills of old Duluth, regretting not visiting the typewriters of the Hunker Bunker and Mr and Mrs Peterson on the other side of the bridge. We wish them well and travel on in innocence and guilt to seek the next horizon.

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From Devils Tower in Wyoming to the Black Hills of South Dakota, arriving on the set of the old west Deadwood and tracing the footsteps of Wild Bill and Seth Bullock to await the dawn over the presidential district, we walk the gulch and gawk at fellow gawkers hearkening back to the 1800s and keenly felt in the inner truth of the present madness afflicting these United States and all of us teetering on the edges of our own souls' devil's towers' pinacles where flowers grow unseen and from where we repel back down assisted by the frayed ropes of a broken-down democracy, hoping that in the sunrise of love we might find our way past Mount Rushmore and on to Birchbark Books in Minneapolis where stories, poems, and truth reside.

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Sunrise off the interstate syncopates our Montana sojourn waking up in Billings to the music of regrets merging into a melody of love’s momentous consolation in the family of things, in shared memories and plans, in the motel breakfast buffet, in the foibles of friendship and the knowing what not to say when politics and friendship collide. At the Wyoming state line meadowlarks begin to sing in earnest with cricket chorus, and the smell of wild flowers — despite horrific history — triggers a beatific vision of yin and yang united like the rolling hills and sky carrying us past Sheridan through a landscape rife with ghosts to get the car washed in Gillette on the way to the Devils Tower.

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Sunrise separates the night from the day. And on this day I'm driving away from the gray with lightning and hail at my back and the music of the mysterious mountains before me, the imprint of the constantly changing dance of light and dark and meaning and chaos playing out like a piano scroll made of dark pavement and painted lines and rumble strips keeping me in line. I repent of my too harsh judgments of friends and loved ones in this election year even as I turn my back on them to drive away. I wish them well as I hold my lover's hand and smile at the golden glowing horizon calmly racing towards me at the speed of music, changing, changing, changing, changed.

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The family of all things, as Mary Oliver put it, is where we struggle to find our place. When I think of my father's love and the legacy of love he left, I see myself standing there. Then I think of my mother and her grief in the wake of him disappearing across the distant horizon where the river empties itself into the ocean and the sun sets for us all. But then I think of this dawn, this sunrise on the river where I stand among the wild geese and ducks who seem to acknowledge my place in a new way this morning, moving around me with ancient love and welcoming me even as they send me on my way to where every movement is a standing still in the family of things and where I will claim my proper place to give love and receive it.

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Early morning traffic

under the brutal comfort of

the unangry orange and gold

sunrise, vermillion and scarlet, pale

pink and cobalt mauve moving into

a deep and infinite blue.

Something heavy being

pulled along the unforgiving

solidity of the highway,

the driver listening to right wing

radio conspiracy theories

and taking gulps of coffee.

A sedan with headlights

befitting five a.m. gliding

in the opposite direction

heading to the hospital to see

her dying father, listening to

the music of misery.

In this captured moment

time stands still and the sunrise sings

a song to woo the distracted

from their distractions and back into

the flowing river of love and trust

reflecting every color.

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Inwardly free of sorrow, the sun radiates its fullness to the sheltering morning as the verdicts of wisdom shine forth and the dull-wittedness of the deceptive is revealed in the sudden early light of summer speeding into spring, and the location of dawn on the eastern horizon inches to its maximum point in the land of the midnight sun. I wake from a solid sleep with the aching bones of old age hinting at my youthful mind that I, too, am approaching that point where the fullness of life turns back to glide towards the grave and the pigeons of morning celebrate the alternating sun and cloud and wind and rain as one journey ends and another begins, as poetry speaks to marrow, free of sorrow.

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