altars of ritual? For me, our Friday night rides to
the Dairy Queen and back have become just that,
a ritual.
Joseph Campbell calls a ritual the enactment
of a myth. Though not as obvious as the rituals
performed in a church or temple, the repetitions
of our days contain as much. Life is full of them,
these subtle mythologies. All the rides to
Grandmother’s house, coffee with a friend, suppertime, the seasonal chores of taking down
storm windows or raking up leaves—we are forever performing the rites of life’s disorganized
religion. Each routine itself is a constellation of
even less notable tasks: pack the car, set out a
plate, push down once more on the bike pedal.
Yet however ordinary, they too would remind us
that in the midst of a chaotic life, in the common
sweep between our formal rites and ceremonies,
we are living a deeper story. It’s whispered in the
tale we intuit in the face of a loved one walking
two corners of a laundered quilt to our open
arms, or there at the evening window where we
pause with our hands in the dish suds and a feeling we cannot quite put to words. At such times,
we might sense an awareness coming together,
that we’re at the edge of an epiphany, not only
concerning what life is about, but what life is.
But then the insight scatters—like starlings
when the bread is gone—leaving us with nothing more to relate than clichés. These trickster-like moments remind us that we live at the
surface of extraordinary depths. Our
inability to will our way into the inimitable, grasping it as we might a fossil
or an idea, produces an abiding ache.
At such times we find ourselves in the
strange position of seeming to know
more than we understand, and so tantalizing an insight has pushed us in
every direction, from madness to
poetry. The anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of
Unknowing observed the existential
loneliness these inklings inspire and
called it our longing for God.
I once thought that embarking on
a self-conscious journey was the best
way to unveil and engage these
deeper insights—to travel to another country, for
instance, to be a pilgrim on the long road—and
indeed such travel has awoken me to astonishing perspectives; but I’ve found it’s not the epic
journey that makes the opening possible so
much as an attitude that it’s likely to happen,
that it’s happening right now. There’s that
famous story of the man who wished to sit in the
presence of a gifted rabbi, not to hear what the
man had to say, but just to watch him tie up his
shoelaces. That is the challenge: to learn to spot
the exceptional journey in those routine trips
down to our own untied laces.
RIDING NORTH, we follow the train tracks to
the 694 bypass. The sound baffles, chainlink,
and semis make a formidable border between
our neighborhood and the marsh beyond. On
the other side, just past a deer fence, lies a popular trailhead. For years, official access to this
trail required a trip to an overpass about a half
mile away. Most people, however, preferred the
direct route, which includes a hike up through
some poison ivy and then a bold trot across a
busy train trestle. Finally, the county put in a
pedestrian bridge that opened with a ceremony
just weeks before the collapse of the Twin
Towers. At that time, my oldest boy, Mathieu,
was barely a year old. The Friday following the
tragedy, I’d taken him out on one of our first
rides, and we stopped on the new bridge. I set
