Mom's birthday

Rehobeth Beach, 1972

Today would have been Mom's 81st birthday.  I dreamt about her just before waking.  I had a large jigsaw puzzle of a collage of photographs I made of the Tashkent ballet and the Uzbek President while I was there in 2002 - a huge red and gold-toned thing I was putting together and she was sitting to my right in her wheelchair helping me find the pieces.  We were in the living room at 10 Beth Lane, which coincidentally had (during my life there) a red carpet with gold and white furniture.  The puzzle was almost done.  There were a few pieces with images of pine trees that didn't seem to fit - they were on the floor next to the card table.  I bent down to pick them up. When I came up she was gone.

She always liked jigsaw puzzles.  I was reminded of her a few days ago for another reason.  While dining at The Biscuit-eater in Mahone Bay, both a cafe and book shop.  On top of a bookcase next to the table was a set of six thick Diana Gabaldon novels.  Mom loved these and other history-fantasy-series like them.  I think she preferred them because they offered complete escape from her life.  She often had three books going at once when I was growing up - one at the kitchen table for reading during dinner, one on the bedtable, and one in her purse for reading during her workweek lunch hours.  There was never any gap in her time that she didn't have a book to her face.  These last couple of years, reading and her other favorites--puzzles and needlecraft--faded as her eyesight began to succumb. She still liked having books, puzzles and crafts around her, but did not take them off the shelf anymore.  A week before she died she asked one of the nurses to take them as a donation...she was letting go.

She would have insisted on seeing the photographs from my travels this summer and hearing about the places I've visited, and the visits with my sisters and what it's like where they live.  And she would have also said, "well it's too bad you had to do all that by yourself!" I would have rolled my eyes.

It's true.  A lot of the time - especially of late, coming out of solitary retreat at radiant Windhorse Farm and traveling up the jeweled coast of Nova Scotia, the absence of a traveling companion has been there, sometimes sharply.  A lot has gone in and through my mind the last three months with the amazing places and people I've encountered, but it's been too soon to process a lot of it to post here; so the sense of you all traveling with me has flickered in and out of focus.  Having a partner would have changed the whole trip in innumerable ways - it would simply have been a different trip.  The result, perhaps, is a bit too much of a window into Susan's solitary life, which she sometimes wonders how it might change.

The eastern coast of Cape Breton from Cape Smokey (375 meters on the ocean) up to Neil's Harbour is beyond everything I could have imagined in 1988 when I first thought I would come here and hike the highlands.  Back then, I was attending Drexel's Hotel Restaurant Management program in Philadelphia and working as a night auditor at a downtown hotel.  I lived on Baltimore Pike just outside of West Philly and would eat at a Denny's there before driving in for my shift.  Another regular there was a cab driver, I think John, who was from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.  John was probably in his 40's, had black bushy hair and black square glasses and a round shape.  Funny accent.  I'm sure we struck up a conversation one night over sourdough turkey melts and another time he began to tell me about this magical place he was from.  So in August of 1988 I had a North American Road Atlas and my high school backpacking equipment in my car and two weeks off from the hotel and figured to wing it from there...but it wasn't in the cards then.   As was often the occurrence in Philadelphia at that time, my car was broken into and a number of things went missing...I was spooked and did not go.

Canso Causeway, Nova Scotia

So as I was driving across the causeway to Cape Breton Island and began my Cabot Trail journey around the island, I felt rather odd.  I tried to remember the 20-year-old that I once was and what it would have been like for her if she'd come then.  And how different my life would have been since if I had.

View from Cape Smokey on the Cabot Trail road.

What might have happened is I would have not made it back to Philadelphia - for it would take more than two weeks to drive up, hike around, and then drive back...along the way encountering a lot of fiddlers, fishermen, and the powerful mountain and valley spirits that are clearly present.  I very likely would have encountered Shambhala buddhism, although I may not have yet had the mind open enough to explore it.  Two significant Shambhala pilgrimage sites are on the Cabot Trail - Gampo Abbey, near Pleasant Bay on the western coast, and Kalapa Valley, a sacred landscape, on the east coast.  My inquiries into buddhist philosophy emerged a few years later instead - and my first encounters with Shambhala were in New York, in the late 1990's. Shambhala's founder, the Tibetan meditation master and yogi Chogyam Trungpa, had traveled from Boulder to Nova Scotia in 1979 with several of his students and toured extensively, noting several aspects of the land and culture here that would provide a stable and nurturing environment for Shambhala's 10-year-old organization to grow further.  Kalapa Valley was discovered at that time and eventually was bought by several practitioners and donated to the organization.  Gampo Abbey was formed in 1984 to provide a monastic path for Shambhala practitioners.

Both places have been in my mind to visit since 2004, when I became a more serious meditation student and was looking for inspiration and retreat locations in the Shambhala community.  Although the main Shambhala administration, it's "Vatican" if you like, is in Halifax, the heart of Shambhala is in Cape Breton.

The Keltic Lodge

 One of the places Chogyam Trungpa stopped on his travels around the island was the Keltic Lodge, a few miles north of Kalapa Valley.  There he dined and wrote poems.  After I settled into my campsite in the valley I drove up there for dinner.  The Keltic sits on the end of a sliver of peninsula flanked on the south by Ingonish Bay and the bluff of Cape Smokey and on the north by Ingonish Island and The Point at Ingonish town.  Driving along the single road I was surrounded by thick birch forest and did not realize the vista that would open up at the top.  I parked at sunset and observed newer buildings on either side of me - a spa, a restaurant, paths to the golf links, and a path leading further up the peninsula.  A wedding was about to unfold in the Ceilidh hall - a fiddler was marrying a step dancer.  A bagpiper played at the entrance enjoining those milling about to go into the hall.  A sign pointed me to the main lodge; I could see now that orange light illuminating Cape Smokey off to my right and Ingonish to the left.  Ahead was a hill through more forest, then the lodge came into view - white with red tudor trim, stately, and home to so much history.  The Highland room has light supper and free live music, so as was recommended to me I went in.  The room has doric columns and beamed ceiling; a large white fireplace, many upholstered seats; a small bar.  Cozy yet dignified.  I could see Trungpa and his students here.  After a while the room filled with vacationing golfers from North Carolina and Toronto, in t-shirts and shorts, drinking light beers and chatting about where they are from and how many years they've been coming here.  I wondered at the way you can sometimes be somewhere without a clue how much history is in the room with you.

The Highland Room

On my way along the path to the lodge I had stopped to look off the cliff at Smokey.  It was beautiful, and eerily familiar.  I once many years ago had had a dream about such a place in which Trungpa had appeared, I walking along the cliff edge behind him.  He had peered over his glasses at me and said, "If you have no doubt, you can fly..."  It was somewhere I'd never been - until now.

As I continue my practice and pilgrimage here I recognize I'm not alone at all.

Cape Smokey from the Keltic Lodge peninsula, Cape Breton