A River to Eternity
Summer Memories on the Magnetawan
"Unable are the Loved to die for Love is Immortality" ~ Emily Dickinson.
It is the heart of glorious summer in Ontario’s cottage country. Swimming in the meandering Magnetawan River epitomizes for me one of my richest summer delights. I traverse our narrow part of the river to the purple band of pickerelweed and spiked fir trees on other side.
I find that I experience an intense desire, in every natural body of water I swim in, be it a river or an ocean, to somehow spread myself into every part of the water around me. Imagining that my soul, if not my body, can do this, works fine for me. There is no end to where the soul can spread!
While going over the final typesetting recently for my book Death Finally Stopped For Me: A Book of Poetry Inspired by Emily Dickinson, I came across one of my ultrashort poems which reflect these water-inspired soul feelings perfectly:
Let My Soul Slip into Oceans
Let my soul slip into oceans
Pierced by sunlight from on high,
Comforted by creatures gliding
Glad at home where mollusks lie.
My soul travels with sea clans,
Sleek dapper dolphins, octopi.
My soul skips in riotous splendor
Through dimensions of the sea.
Corey Elizabeth Jackson
(Btw, don’t even ask about that word “octopi”, lol.) The splendiferous sea-soaked illustration created by Daniel Schmelling to accompany this poem is a testament to his ebullient conception of the human ability to revel in the fluid beauties of our three-dimensional world.
The long and creatively looping Magnetawan River empties into the massive waters of Georgian Bay, far to the west of the river’s docile branch in front of our cottage near Burk’s Falls. The even larger bodies of the famous five great lakes beyond the bay are more breathtakingly grand in size than many of our world’s seas. The more populated shores of these lakes are most definitely different in ambience from the mysterious “sunless sea” of Coleridge, especially in the shimmering, languid days of a resplendent southern Ontario summer.
As always, I find a connection for my feelings in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, in this case in her exuberant lines below:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea –
Past the Houses –
Past the Headlands –
Into deep Eternity It seems to me as if what the speaker is experiencing in her description of “deep Eternity” here is very closely akin to my own speaker’s soul in my poem above, skipping “in riotous splendor/ Through dimensions of the sea.”
Imagination can play a magical role in visualizing the delights of Eternity at the end of a journey. The journey might be that of the bluebird flying beyond the rainbow (see the video taken in our river cottage with my granddaughter Maeve below.) It could be the journey of two celestial horses pulling an otherworldly carriage to the timeless realm of unceasing Eternity in Dickinson’s poem Because I could not stop for Death. Or it could be the journey of one’s soul, spreading through any of our worldly rivers to far distant seas. For me this summer, I became a fractal part of the journey of the slowly chugging Magnetawan River, ambling comfortably to the far distant magical waters of cerulean Georgian Bay.