Northern Lights

An epiphany is a singular thing.

Dear Republic,

We're delighted to have the wise and wonderful Terrance Lane Millet back in our pages, where he has previously written on veterans, the men who lost their lives building dams, and Jung. This piece reaches even deeper.

-ROL

NORTHERN LIGHTS

That Tuesday, I opened the messages on my phone and listened to my sister’s voice. Her long recording was like a conversation as I sat alone in the pub with a glass of IPA in my hand just pulled from the tap, where I’d secreted myself for an hour in the middle of the day, lying to keep the world out for time enough do the work I love, the shaping of sentences and ordering of words that may nurse a ghost to life, time to look at my thoughts, to peer into the world, to look at who I was and where, in those shadows at a bench by a window, the cherished solitude a hand on my shoulder with the filtered light falling through the glass to the table and gathered up in the amber beer, and the voice of her talking through time as though she were across the table, as though she had not been away for a long while.

We’d been entwined through the fierce years of love and rivalry where even indifference had been passionate. Spouses, houses, and careers had come and gone, the parents too, and now, in this moment by windows made of colored glass as wavering as my memory, old, imperfect, and rolled out long ago, I was suddenly as aware of her presence in my life as I was of my own acute solitude in a dark public house where a tentative light fell faintly on my fingers from the sun.

I thought of the greens and reds wavering in gowns of soft folds across the winter skies of our childhood, the high curtains of the borealis snaking past the Great Bear where the heavens were pinned to its star-tipped tail above a cold so hard it rang and split the skin; starlight falling on layers of snow high as man and more, on ice creaking and groaning over the gelid waters of the river and falling into the deep silence of the forest where eyes of the sleeping bears dreamed and the wolves chorused and trees exploded.

And in the summer, the bright stars over the trees, the little black lakes and dark streams bitter with tannin snaking their slow way to the northern seas, the Abitibi River dun brown and opaque with silt, flowing to Moosonee past swamps of cattails looped with speckled frog’s eggs and beaver ponds and stands of tamarack and little brooks filled with trout and moose pasture with waving grasses wetly rooted in thick black mud alive with seventy-five species of mosquitoes, and the spilt gold of sun on our skin, soft as honey.

I know that healing must be a looking ahead to a state of greater encompassment, not just a looking back to remedy wounds from the past, but a growth through recognizing and embracing what we have experienced, assimilating all of it, owning it all, becoming something more than we were, a process of picking up our attributes and assuming our powers in the Hindu sense. It must be toward a goal of light and knowledge and love and fundamental self-integrity that calls, that pulls, and not just a flight or fight from the past.

In childhood we share a world; as adults, the world shares us. By then we have shaped our worlds according to our natures and experience, and they grow increasingly different and shape us correspondingly. That is why, I think, when siblings get together, they talk about old times, and the belly-laughs happen over shared memories, over foibles or events in the past and the connections there, when closeness was easier and more effortless—as we remember it.

It has been said that you never dip your toe in the same river twice. It is a cliché I do not believe. It’s limiting to think of water flowing and therefore disappearing downstream. A river is an entity that exists in its totality at any moment and in all moments: from its headwaters all the way to the mouth of it emptying into the sea. All of it at once.

I think a life is like that. The moments exist all at once, though we experience them as direction, a series of toes in the water, to acknowledge that reductive comparison. I think, in that moment in the pub, all of it hit me and I felt the grief of loss, the entirety of my sister’s life, her river, from the time that we were in the same current to the later times after our lives forked. There are those who love us for who we are, and there are those who love us for who we were but not for who we became. For her, it was the first.

The loss of a younger sister drives itself deep inside you for a long time. John Donne had it right when he talked about the bell tolling, and Hemingway had it right when he wrote about grief, the type of grief, he says, you feel about losing a child or the persons you love above all others, the kind of grief you never get over, and if you do, it is not true grief. And if it is not, then you might look to yourself for the reasons.

Jorges Borges writes of a character who encounters an “Aleph”, a portal through which he sees the entirety of existence. It is, course, too much for him to take in. I do not claim that such a thing happened to me, and while that afternoon remains as a visual in my head, I do not go back to the physical place at which it occurred, perhaps because these experiences can never be recaptured, or because the experience is complete in and of itself, or because the clarity of the vision would only dim by returning to what is now an empty room whose portal is closed. Take such things, internalize them, and carry on with life, advises The Portable Dragon. You do not have to throw the I Ching to determine a course of action if the I Ching is within you.

That afternoon in the pub is always present. The similarities in atmosphere and experience between it and that of a darkened church of stone and long ago is not lost on me. Something happened there that retains a hint of mystery, of epiphany, of partially seeing a whole of which I do not understand, of, I suppose, in the greater sense, of seeing something revelatory, but only, in the words of one writer, through a glass, darkly.

But one thing I did see clearly that day was the image of her on the winter mornings of northern Ontario when we were very young. She is little. When winter comes our father puts storm windows up where summer screens once were. At the bottom of the frame a wooden flap seals off three ventilation holes, and in the morning, she pushes up the window to lift the flap and press her nose against the holes and breathe cold winter air that smells (we know) of ozone. She holds her hands up to the patterns of thick frost upon the glass and melts small handprints there, then scrapes frost off with fingernails to place upon her tongue and taste the winter melting in her mouth.

Terrance Lane Millet is a writer, carpenter, educator, & other things. He writes on subjects on both sides of waking—whimsey, literature, and random speculations.