What the Lake Teaches
This story begins and ends on the water, and our life at the
lake is a theme threaded throughout. The water continues to
be, for me, an enduring spiritual image.
This book, if it wasn’t told in words, could be told in a
map—zigzagging all over, coming home to Chicago, and
then a solid blue line to the lakeshore town we love, 80
miles across Lake Michigan.
It’s at the lake that I realize how far I’ve come, or how
far I have yet to travel. Both, maybe. It’s at the lake that my
priorities reshuffle, aligning more closely with my true
nature.
I’ve wondered from time to time if we should move
here, permanently, to this small Michigan town. But it seems
to me that we’d bring our bustling and hustling here, and
pretty soon we’d need a new place to escape to in order to
recalibrate. Part of the magic of the lake is that it isn’t home
—it’s away, and away allows us to see the rhythms and
dimensions of our lives more clearly.
So it doesn’t necessarily work for us to live here at the
lake, but I do want the way of living that I’ve tasted here to
inform and ground how I live everywhere, all year long.
The lake gives me something to aspire to—a reminder, a