A Novel Idea

Thought for the Day:  Each time that you interact with another, and each time they with you, there is an exchange of energies which changes each of you forever.  What you give to them, and what you receive changes your energetic structure in that moment and theirs as well.  You may never know how you have affected others in brief passing.  Know this, in a much grander way, you may have changed their lives forever…

Meg Blackburn Losey

Island Light at Dawn

Dear Marjorie,

We met on an island in Rainy Lake in northern Minnesota a year and a half ago.  It is one of my favorite places in the whole world and, you, too, on your single week-long visit, found it magical.  Part of the magic was that we got to do anything we wanted to do all day long, and each of us, more than anything, wanted to write.  And then, to write some more.

In the daytime, holed up in Japanese House or Bird House or in an old wicker chair under a blue sky with water throwing off light in all directions, we experimented and scribbled until, like children, free as birds, we heard the dinner bell calling us to supper and laughter, and, with other artists at play, flocked to the Wannigan — the kitchen that once floated, bringing meals to the lumberjacks.

Since word arrived by motorboat from the mainland, mid-week, that somebody from your home state of Alaska had been picked as John McCain’s running mate, there was talk, too, about her.  And more laughter.  Odd that in a place with no media to speak of, we would get an insider’s scoop, before the rest of the world, on Sarah Palin.

It was only a week, but with the group of us gathering each night in Ober’s House — and, on one of them, drumming and chanting and clapping our way under the stars to one tip of the island, just for the joy of it — there was time enough to “exchange energies.” Days past our island meeting, I read your first book; it won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize, for socially and politically engaged fiction.  I found in the book, too — Correcting the Landscape — your energy in the words, your imprint on my life.

I know that for years you were a librarian in Anchorage and in Fairbanks.  And witnessing your delight in nature, it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve kayaked, canoed, skiied, hiked, and backpacked through a range of wild places.  You weren’t inclined to advertise that you also had hiked the pilgrim path, with your husband and one of your sons, 500 miles from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain and, two years later, another hundred to Finisterre.  Or that you wore so many hats – Benedictine oblate and banjo player; book-a-day reader and runner, several times, in the Equinox Marathon; passionate gardener and world traveler; student of scripture, halfway through a ministry education program, and founder of Call to Action Alaska.

Your obituary this morning told me that.  A friend emailed a week ago to say that you’d be moving on, probably within days.  And besides feeling a deep ache for your two sons, and your husband-and-true-love, and all the family and friends graced by your presence, here’s what came, barely past the shock of the news.  I selfishly hoped, Marjorie, that somehow the book you were working on 18 months ago and anything else you’ve written would see the light of day — all that inimitable Marjorie-energy in the pages.  Your obituary says it will happen.  There’s another novel, A Spell on the Water, and a collection of poetry, Inside, Outside, Morningside, to bring more of your inimitable light to readers.

I do believe in an inner energetic shift that comes of any exchange,  however brief the meeting and however brief a life — you now bringing the shine of your own to the greater light.  I’m thankful that we met, Marjorie.  I’m thankful, too, that, in the midst of all the amazing ways you embraced this world, you wrote.  Godspeed.

Marjorie Kowalski Cole

Postscript:  I pressed “Print” on my home printer to make a copy of the obituary this morning and out came a poem I’d already printed earlier in the week.  Thought Marjorie would have resonated to it as I do.   Perhaps still does.  So here’s a link to “God Bless the Experimental Writers” by Corey Mesler.

Rainy Lake

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