August 25, 2022

There are no edges.

I was reading Katherine May (again; I am nothing if not consistent), a post about how her people are “edge people,” about how she’s drawn to margins as a result of growing up far from the centre, and it made me think about how growing up smack dab in the middle of a continent (I didn’t see the sea until I was 10) might have informed my own tendency to adhere to the status quo, to centre my own experience instead of seeking a broader understanding (though I think a lot of people do that; though isn’t that just what somebody with such tendencies would think?!?), but also how it has truly left me hungry to know the edges of places sometimes, which is why—in my most pivotal moments—I find myself so drawn to the Great Lakes shores, to their infinite horizons.

The lakes more familiar to me, however, provide a very different sense of being in the world, instead of edginess, immersion. (And maybe this is what you love when your people are middle people?) The lakes of Haliburton, ON, in particular, just north of the Kawartha Lakes I grew up with, and different too, more rugged with such rocky shores, self-contained instead of each lake merely a conduit to another place, water instead of a waterway. The cottage we’ve rented there for the past three summers does not have a beach, instead a dock with a ladder at the end, so you’re either in or out, there is no in-between, and when I’m in, I feel like I belong to the world in the most peaceful and meaningful fashion.

There are no edges, the lake a giant rocky basin that turns into trees that turns into sky that turns back into trees again as you trace the shape of the visible universe, everything a circle, leading back to the lake, leading back to me there, buoyant and held, connected to all of it, grateful to be one with these waters, clear, silky and cool.