Passing Through

Issue #7

A Geography of Scars

part one of learning to travel

Day 3 in the past

Growing up I always saw people with shirts or bumper stickers with a M-22 road sign. A mysterious logo plastered everywhere, a reference to something related to Michigan I did not get. It seemed like there was a secret knowledge about this road sign, like how all the cool people went to a specific summer camp and played soccer. People would recognize the logo on each other's merch and shared some mutual connection I envied. I never bother to look up what M-22 is or what it means.

I was planning to capital T ~ travel ~ this fall, but I freaked out. I had too much work to do and am falling behind in every part of my life, overwhelmed by the daily to-dos. I decided to take an extended vacation around a cousin's wedding in Northern Michigan instead. I'm staying in a tiny house on someone's property. I won't have to figure out the transit system in another country and feel completely out of place. I grew up in Michigan. It's comforting and familiar. I arrived in Muskegon via the car ferry, welcomed by a beautiful sunny day with people hanging out on the shores of Lake Michigan. I kept driving towards the tiny house and realized I was on M-22. I get it now, this where people would summer (or take their summer vacations). It's beautiful.

I won't bore you with all the details of not having food, trying to figure out the efficient fridge situation or how getting into/down from the loft feels harder than it should be. (I think I managed to descend in a more easeful way on the last day, not without evidence of sacrifice on my bruise laden legs.) Lot's of driving around aimlessly to different places in the area and not getting out of my car. Now I am sick. Not sure if i should go to the wedding, have been sleeping most of the last two days. Pain in my throat, head and body.

I had one really good day and the next morning woke up in severe pain. People with chronic pain know this feeling very well. Feeling punished for enjoying your life. (And by enjoying my life, I mean go to a diner, take a nap, go for a hike and hang out on the beach reading, drawing, and looking for good rocks.) And I start to question was it worth it traveling all this way to get sick, spend an extra 100+ dollars on the things I forgot and remedies for my ailing body.

Before leaving for this trip I was flirting with burn out, desperately waiting for this reset where I hermit in the woods and magically everything is fixed. I think to myself "I could be a cute, healthy person who wakes up to greet the sun with a salutation, makes coffee, journals, does the "deep work" I just don't have time for in my normal life of daily chores and work duties. Yet, that's not the case. I struggled to get settled, understand my surroundings, and the days have flown by without much to show for it. Once I think I've figured it out, I'm sick, my body hurts and I can barely make it up a flight of stairs.

Right now, I am grappling with why am I here? Am I wasting my time? Was that one beautiful day worth it? And the answer is always yes. In order to experience something worthwhile you have to do annoying, challenging, inconvenient, exhausting things to get there. You have to learn how to adapt, pivot, change plans and accept disappointment. Afterwards you can decide if that was worthwhile and aligned with how you want to spend your time and energy. There are a lot of things that do not fall into the category of "worth it", but disappearing into the woods is not one of them.

This is the second consecutive year I have found myself in the woods to think, read, write and be. My favorite part is finding what books are in their library. Last year I stayed on Tomorrow River and read the entirety of Diane Di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik while swinging in a hammock between two trees along the river bank. They also had a book in pigeons which inspired me to research and write about my love and affinity with the special bird. This year I stayed in a tiny house in Frankfort, Michigan. I found a collection of Wendell Berry's writing and was drawn to the essay, Damage and Christopher Alexander's A Timeless Way of Building, both texts applying to my experience here and research interests.

Favorite lines from Damages

1. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place. While I've been writing about it (my subject), time will have changed it. Over longer stretches of time I will change it. Ultimately, it will be changed by what I write, in as much as I who change my subject, am changed by what I write about it.
2. An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
3. A scar is the landmark and mindmark that is the notation of a limit.
4. To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound.

I came here to work, to study, learn, walk wooded paths, submerge in water and find rocks. However, I did not accomplish anything, the writing wasn't coming, I took some notes and outlined some things. I found myself returning to the books here, noting how much I love reading people's words and frustrated I don't have my own. I called my girlfriend to talk about my problems with work-work (where I earn income) and my failure to do the work I came here to do. She referenced the refrain I have running in my head most of time. "If you are aren't doing the thing you say you want to do, maybe you don't want to do it?" And I always find myself challenging this because of the many ways human behavior interferes with doing things, like calling someone you love, moving your body or completing a project. So many people in my personal and professional life (including myself) struggle to do the things they care about, left distraught from this incongruence and how it impacts the people in their life.

Day 3 in the Present

It sucks to have the brain and body not cooperate with the self. There are so many tips and tricks to disrupt these mental traps of the creating perfect conditions, telling yourself "when I have this, I will do this" or I can't do this because of this. I kept hearing the message of how surrender becomes strength and what our limitations are trying to teach us. ( I am writing this weeks after these thoughts happened in real time so I am trying to piece together what I was thinking as if I am in that place right now.)

The Wendell Berry essay, damages is about trying to make a a change to the land, (i think a pond), doing the research, hiring someone with the machines and causing what felt like irreparable damage. He reflected the William Blake quote, "no bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings". Berry writes "A scar is the landmark and mind mark that is the notation of a limit". In trying to control nature by outsourcing power to change the natural ecology, use of machinery and magic that do not belong to us to give us what we want. That is when things go wrong.

There is power in surrendering to the outcome and learning how adapting to change changes our perspective. Noting the damage done and what we can learn, Berry warns "to lose the scar of knowledge is to reopen the wound" recurring damage. Of course I find myself making the same mistakes and repeating patterns, but as I was thinking about the bruises on my legs from trying to descend a loft ladder, I am reminded, this is the evidence of me learning, after days of wriggling, not knowing where to put my feet, things finally felt easier and then it was time to go.

I stayed an extra day and as I was leaving and packing up my car, there was a stick bug on the glass of the front door. I don't think I'd seen one up close before. It was incredible how real it looked, finding stillness, little shoots of green coming out it's of the knobby stick body. Phasmotedea,(the order of stick insects) comes from the root word phasma, meaning apparition or ghost, they have the ability to look like one thing, when in actuality they are something else. Moments like these feel like a sign that surrendering and adapting to an environmental changes and unexpected circumstances leads to new moments of noticing and being affected by and with nature and timing. Without imposing on what a place or experience should be, it becomes a stop before the next, a place to pass through, holding the memory of what I learned about this bio-region and myself. A version of healing and protecting took place here. And I can come back here to revisit the landmarks and mind marks in a geography of scars, like tracing the impressions left on a rock.