I love to paddle out to Victoria Island on Lake Superior and nestle down in a cove looking out to Isle Royal.  The sun crosses over the entrance of the cove, waves surging in have formed a marvellous rumbling cobble beach, and not much of anything happens.  I just sit.  I don’t work.  I don’t read.  I don’t think.  I just sit and watch and listen and feel.  I lose myself into the world around me.  And people are not part of that world.

I also love to hike out with a keyboard to a sand beach at Prince and Jarvis on Superior.  As I look out over the waters, and look up at the cliffs, I wonder what it was like living here three hundred years ago, when only a handful of Europeans had visited the area.  I wonder what their world view was.  And then I play Bach, and I wonder what his world view was.  And I marvel at what he created and what baroque music in general might have meant to people who went to the ends of the earth, so very far from Europe’s churches and courts.  I wonder how my own family felt, at that time leaving the courts of England for the first time in many hundreds of years, for an alien life in Barbados.  I wonder if they felt that music spoke out to the land and the water saying I am more than an isolated animal, I am humanity in all its history and structure and wonder.

When I end my solitude and return to my friends, I find myself treasuring them, as if I am encountering them anew.  They are all so very precious.