Author: Michael Delp

Getting Back to Simple

Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Michael Delp muses over the notions of home and possessions only to find that home is not necessarily about what you own:

Transcript

Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Michael Delp muses over the notions of home and possessions only to find that home is not necessarily about what you own.


For years I’ve lingered around home most of the time. Given the choice to go to Paris or South America, I’d opt to stay home. In fact, at 52, my notions of home seem to go much farther than the actual structure, wandering into the considerations of rooms, smells and the plethora of information which signals I am in friendly territory. Over the years, I have sometimes confused a sense of home with the accumulation of possessions. I have accrued massive collections of objects and artifacts, which fill my home and storage shed.


Lately though, I seem to be heading for a definition of home which is marked by the ideas of simplicity and forgiveness. Home for me now is a refuge from the noise of this culture disintegrating around me. Sadly, confusingly, I carry the psychic shrapnel of living in an acquisitive age. My home is a temple to the power of credit.


However, there is hope. Almost every six months I grow tired of all my things. I imagine myself dancing out of my life, giving all my worldly belongings gladly into the arms of my friends, stepping out the door one last time, naked.


When I really drift down inside my darker self and think about home, I think of my friends Nancy and Dave Lemmen who literally lost everything they owned in a forest fire eight years ago in Grayling, Michigan.


I was there the day after and stood with them in the smoke and chaos of what was once their home. In the darkest reaches of my heart I see us sifting through the layers of debris in the garage finding the charred bodies of their three dogs. I knew their grief and seem to carry it now in my bone marrow. And I use this grief, this charred knowledge to help me jettison the “stuff” of my life, to help me re-define my own life in terms of home.


Now, a powerful organizing force in my life is that I know what it’s like to sift through the ashes of home, bring the smell of memory up out of the blackened ground. And I know everyday what it means to run my hands through my wife’s hair, my daughter’s braids, then down over the soft fur over a dog’s ears.


For what it’s worth, I haven’t given enough away lately and I’m reminded daily that Dave Lemmen once told me before he died of cancer how happy he was thinking of the things from his life he gave away before the fire.


Now in my imagination it seems I am always tending a fire. I still have fits of simplicity, I call them, probably some dire chemical reaction to owning too much stuff: mostly fly rods and high-tech jackets, and enough fishing gear for a theme park. So I stroke a fantasy fire. I imagine going down to the beach some black night carrying everything I own. I know I should give it all away, but in the fantasy I need the purge. I’ll douse the pile with gas, touch it off, wander back upstairs, then gather my wife, my daughter and the dog at the window. I’ll sift my hands through their hair and then settle back to watch my life burn down to simple again.


Michael Delp is an author and poet who teaches creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan.

Commentary – Winter Meditation

  • Michael Delp's most recent book is ''The Coast of Nowhere: Meditations on Rivers, Lakes and Streams,'' available from Wayne State University Press.

High in the latitudes of fly-over country, Great Lakes Radio Consortiumcommentator Michael Delp contemplates the effects of heavy snow andfrozen lakes on the soul and the psyche:

Transcript

High in the latitudes of fly-over country, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator
Michael Delp contemplates the effects of heavy snow and frozen lakes on the soul and
the psyche.


From up here in my house twenty feet above Green Lake, I can look out
across three miles of ice and lose track of the following things: Time,
Space, Speaking, Self. This is my hill on the world every winter. I’ve
abandoned all my fantasy pursuits, giving my life over, as Tom McGuane
says to ” a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.” The poems stacked in the
basement and arranged in a few “slim volumes” as the critics say, are
barely a hedge against mortality, much less this bitter cold. I suppose I could
take a few hundred pages, rip them out, cover the windows and hunker down. But
I’d miss what I’m looking at right now.


My flyrods are idle in the corner next to the window. Outside, the wind
and sun make the lake seem more like a great salt flat. I imagine the men
camped on the lake in their spearing shanties not as the perpetually
unemployed, the bored, the marriage-wrecked, the early morning beer
drinkers they probably are, but as priests of silence. Their shanties, some of them
looking like the back ends of house trailers, seem more like outposts,
hermitages. More than once I’ve been out on the lake at night, wandering
past frozen holes in the ice covered with whole pine trees, and stood near the
doors of these shelters. Inside, I can hear voices, muttering, and see the
thin light slipping out around the bottom. On these nights I trhink of men
hunched over their fishing holes, their eyes glazing over, bending closer,
looking into that other world as if they were looking into God’s eye
itself.


Later, when I’m back home I fall asleep dreaming that the inside of my
head is like one of those ice-bound asylums. I look down into the half-lit
abyss of myself and see the abyss staring back. Nietzsche was right. Sometimes
in the dream I’m holding a spear, terrified that what’s below me will not
kill easily. Other times, I dream I’m the fish and there is a world of madmen
above me.


During the day I hear anchor ice chocking up against my bone marrow and
feel the lake inside every part of me that is still alive, every part not
blasted out by cold and numbness and the constant lack of sun in these
latitudes. So I follow the same pattern for weeks: staring for hours
into the vast whiteness of the lake and then dreaming the lake all over again
at night.


There are no maidens in these frozen waters. No anima figures surfacing
in the spearing hole between my boots. No kisses offered up to warm even a
cubic inch of my frozen heart. This is deadly territory. This is the winter
place where your soul either sleeps and dies or rises, almost in individual
particles on the first surge of spring.


I know, in the midst of a mayfly hatch this summer, I’ll make the moves
just as I’ve done thousands of times: flicking my wrist, the flyline arcing
toward nymphing rainbows. The old ice of December will rattle down from
my skull and lodge in my wrist before it melts away. If I could I’d walk out
of here, burn my winter clothes at the end of the driveway, ditch the snow
shovel under the wheels of the first snowplow I see, then hitch-hike to a
someplace in the jungle where ice is still a mystery.