The Great Migration

by Jeff Giese, Diamond Approach student in the Upper Midwest Group 1
 

I've been working on my tombstone for some time. It’s unusually large. It’s slow—this work of chiseling words in stone. One needs to be patient while keeping a sharp edge on one’s writing tools.

My main tool is an empty mind. How can this be? How can one sharpen an empty mind? Something else takes over, this “something” does the sharpening. I can't do it myself. In time I will return to the source of this sharpening, what then?

Some time ago while resting, out of the periphery of my internal vision arises a pair of moving fur moccasins. What is this? The other intelligence I carry says it's my father, a hunter, apparently still so, somewhere else. My heart immediately opens in recognition. He’s stopping by to see how my mother is doing. She was not well at the time.

As I finished a hunt on the Mississippi River on a cold December day with an incredible sunset, everything bathed orange, ducks flying everywhere in the middle of a great migration, it seemed like I remembered a place like this from sometime before my last tombstone, maybe a place I will return to. I loved that place too.

Just now I remember the love of those who sent me, which I had forgotten. 

While traveling up the Muskegon River before daybreak, heavy current, and sandbars ice snow cold weather you have to be careful. Subtle voices, I pay attention, they’re murmuring their love of this place which I also feel.

Another year, finishing an excellent duck hunt on the same river. The sound of the water flowing into the peaceful emptiness on my ride home. I went to bed and still the water was and is flowing through me.