Whether it was your first bike ride or your first ride on a merry-go-round, the most important piece of advice you were likely to receive was “Hold on!”. What we grab and hold on to . . . what we don’t let go of . . . that becomes the stuff that our lives are made of. We go through life with an understanding that if we open our hand, we risk losing our heart.
THE LONG EMBRACE
In 1968, Gordon Eastman directed and produced High, Wild and Free, a documentary filmed in British Columbia that presented a spectacular view of a northern mountain wilderness. Our local theater hosted a special showing and the images were forever seared into my brain. It wasn’t Alaska, but it was close enough.
Alaska has always been an iconic symbol for me. In grade school, the nuns had told us to listen for a calling to a vocation or career, but all I could ever hear was the call of the wild. For me, the Alaskan frontier that I imagined from that film defined adventure, beauty, nature, individualism and life itself. I had no doubt that I would go there someday, to spend the rest of my life in that majestic land.
But I was still in high school. I didn’t know how to be an Alaskan, so I set my sights on becoming one. I studied the natural sciences in school and spent summers trip leading and living in the woods, while working at various summer camps. Teaching emerged as a viable means of support and, after making that choice, a family soon followed. Somehow, Alaska had moved further away, instead of growing closer. I was beginning to realize a stark difference between my state of being and the art of becoming.
Without knowing it, I had embraced more than one Alaska. The usual one is crossed by the Arctic Circle, but I had discovered another that crossed my heart. How it got there, I don’t know. It might be traced to Gordon Eastman’s film or a story by Jack London, or possibly to some Scottish gene for wanderlust. Whatever the source, it changed my goal into the journey of a lifetime.
A few summers ago, I actually made the physical trip that I’d been planning for so long. While cruising up the Inside Passage, the echoes from decades of soul searching and imagining came bouncing back and affirmed many of those long held impressions. I finally made it to the land that I’d embraced so long ago in my youth, but only one journey ended. The Alaska that has always held me keeps calling.
What we embrace . . . it may be someone or something. It might even be an ideal that we live by. It may last for only a moment . . . or maybe forever. We are inclined to get close and hold tight, but if we embrace with everything we’ve got, the distance doesn’t matter. Then, neither time nor space will ever be great enough to overcome a long embrace.