There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. At least that’s what I thought until I discovered The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas last year. Now, I’m reading the second book in the series with my eldest son, who can read just fine by himself. It’s our ritual, our discovery, our adventure on the tousled covers of my bed before he sleeps.

Hugh MacLeod’s talent is being witty, clever and artistic on little business cards. And in his book, Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, he says you are responsible for your own experience. He’s not telling a new story – he’s just saying it in a creative way, selling a new product with a perrenially important message.

This morning, I ran in the rain. Drops spotting my orange be-present shirt I bought at a yoga studio in New Haven, Connecticut when I was embarking on a new life. The air was fresh and cool. In a neighborhood I know well, I noticed houses in a different way, a manicured yard with admiration.

Later, there was music as I worked and the children popping in to say hello. Summer is winding down and it is too cool already. I want to bask in the sun a while longer.

But we adapt to the changes put before us and cool temps are just another bend in the road. The calls have been coming in relentlessly, for help, for guidance and I am honored at the gift but burdened with the task of answering well. It’s just business, is a sentiment not everyone understands.

And then news of another diagnosis, of someone several steps from me but familiar nonetheless. Everywhere, I could see bad news, but I choose to see light and gift in every moment.

I am looking forward to the quiet and the focus of the coming weekend. To the sunshine and the early morning air. To the farmers market and the creativity pouring forth to benefit everyone who takes a chance on me and my nascent company so that they will, indeed, be pleased.

Have you discovered meaning in someone’s words or work or just a passing moment? If so, share them with me. I want to hear from others who look at the world as a half-full glass. Because in my humble opinion, that is the only way to truly live.

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After the last day of summer camp, the children returned home with bulging backpacks and tired smiles. Project after project emerged – a construction paper heart with shiny ropes of yarn glued in the center, a twisty lanyard, a popsicle-stick picture frame, a pinch pot painted “just for you, Mommy.”

Was it a good experience, they were asked? Did you enjoy camp?

Forgetting the complaints and whines of the weeks just past, they nodded ascent. Memory soon forgotten makes it easy to sum up a life in positive terms. And then there was the television as distraction and the call of the air outside the house and a chase of long-legged lean bunnies from the nature preserve. Another chapter in summer closed.

Some days are sculpted into vases of time, waiting to be filled with productive moments and idea-generation. Other days converge on themselves in minutes that resemble those just past and those yet to be born.

In the early morning, a weather front causes the morning to be cool. The window fogs over with condensation. The children huddle in the mother’s bed to watch cartoons. Three together beneath the blankets.

Soon, routine will return. Soon, every minute will be crafted into purpose and we will long for the free-run of summer days when bedtime paled in comparison to the adventures of the night.

In the dreamscape, porpoises nose out of the deep, deep waters and crest above the gleaming surface only to dive back in. Creatures of repetition and flow. The trees are singing and waving their branches along the footpath. The forest is full in late-season bloom and the farmers market has expanded its reach as the tomatoes become ripe.

All is well in the last days of summer. The yearnings, the dreams, the lurkings and hopes, all diminish with the setting sun.

Was it a good experience? Did you enjoy camp?

But that moment has passed and now the children are focused on something right beneath their feet: an ant on the sidewalk, a crack in the pavement, a stick that becomes a wand of magic, spearing at the rivulets in the bark.

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There is a phoenix on the road to eternity. And in the balmy morning of quiet, as the road bends and turns as it is wont to do, the phoenix takes flight and the moment breaks as the air crescendoes with possibility and the sky looks down on the rising flight and sighs.

It is a morning among mornings. One week ago, I walked amongst the photographs at an exquisite exhibit of father and daughter, of perspective upon perspective, of faces amid brightly colored cloth and on the opposite wall, moments in objects frozen. Photographs by Steven and Julia Tapper, at the Janice Charach Epstein Gallery in the West Bloomfield, Mich., Jewish Community Center. Work of the heart, art of the day.

I have a picture like the one that starts the father’s side of photographs – his hand juxtaposed underneath his daughter’s baby hand; mine is my baby boy’s tender fingers resting on my open palm. I know exactly why we stop to photograph that symmetry, to remember the perfect flow of early life and of love like a river, reassuring in its cool splash.

Like the Tappers’ photographs, I make a life out of celebrating the mundane. Singularity in being ordinary. Steven’s “Onions” portrait, his perfect “Palm.” Julia’s: “not wanting to miss a moment of opportunity…the seeker’s curiosity is powerful.”

I have found that being surrounded by the authenticity of life on the edge of what is possible … provides the canvas for the most powerful innovation and opportunity.

That phoenix. Rising on the wind. Cresting over treetops so full with summer they have nothing more to say. The word authentic bandied about like a tennis ball, still believing in itself. Something hidden, a secret master – powerful forces of change are at work always, and what is achieved is a profound secret held close like whispers to the moon.

It is Sunday morning and all is quiet. Hemingway has gone to bed. A candle flickers, music plays. I am proud to know people who yearn to make a difference in the community around us.

As you rush along on your trodden path, consider taking a half-hour out to view this exhibit. It is exquisite in its simplicity and the fact that a community icon like Steven Tapper and his beautiful daughter Julia are willing to put their hidden talents out there for all to see is a gift we should accept without question.

And hear the message: that there is more than meets the eye in every circumstance; that the people we think we know, we only know a portion of; that there is beauty in the mundane, and meaning; that every moment is worth celebrating, and every fixture can be art if you look at it the right way.

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As the cormorants crest along in the surfactant layer, inches from the water’s surface, I glide easily, creating little wake. In my canoe, I channel the earliest explorers in their intrepid journeys.

To paddle a canoe on a calm stream denotes perfect confidence in one’s own ability to conduct profitable business. This is part of the folklore of canoe symbolism.

And it is in the hull of the perfectly crafted vessel, of birch bark and spruce, held together by sap and gum, that one sees the wisdom that inspires toward resolution or containment, toward futuristic posturing amid the calmest waters.

I hated canoeing when I was a girl. Too much work and the river bored me. I far prefered windsurfing or waterskiing or learning to sail on Lake Pokegama, where there was virtually no breeze.

And it’s not now that I will push off from the sandbar and paddle my way downstream or up. I’d still far prefer the quixotic excitement of a constant kayak paddling in windy bay waters or the firm breeze of a long careful sail under bright sun.

But it is the canoe which calls to me in its symbolic reference to freedom and exploration, to uncharted discovery along tree-lined banks and even in storms.

It is the symbol of military, of migration, of trade relations built over time and conversation. A canoe paddle’s cadence on the meandering waters of a stream or a lake, the need to hoist it overhead and portage from waterline to waterline, the logic imposed by early canoe routes.

All of this, it’s a simple understanding of the formation of place and presence. Of borders determined not in arbitrary lines but in deliberate examination of the benefits of both sides. The canoe conveys a sense of wilderness and past success, a symbol of navigation, of alliance, of grandure, of expansion and frontier.

My moorings fastened, my dawn broken, the air kissing cool in the dew, the canoe turns over to rest on the banks and I stretch my arms toward the sky.

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Driven by angst, observer of the utmost details of life, the man drank in culpable amounts of fresh air and waxed philosophical about the necessities of human interaction. His books, they move me in their simplicity. And when I read a passage like: All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes, he thought. Yet they are still good. In the evening I can look straight into it without getting the blackness. It has more force in the evening too. But in the morning it is painful.

When I read a passage like that, and there are many, one after the other, in all of his works, I turn them on my tongue and read them twice, maybe three times, just to savor the simple profundity of his words.

Ernest Hemingway was a singularity. In Victoria this past June, I found an old careful copy of The Old Man and the Sea and I had to have it. And now, it sits beside my bed and I linger over the pages at night, just because I can, marveling at the wonder that he turned out in words.

I was a journalist and a poet simultaneously and I do believe that one informed the other. On Peg’s farm, as the chardonnay spilled over the top of the flute and softened the shaggy carpet of the farmhouse, Peg would tell me that my poems had the eye of detail because I was a journalist.

And I can only imagine that my magazine stories contained little crafted nuances hidden in the back windows of my sentences. But I have yet to be like Hemingway, though I warm to the notion and would honor that evolution.

Most days, I rise with the sun or even before it, to attend to the many tasks at hand. Inevitably, one or both of my boys careful-creep down the shadowy stairs and into my office, where they climb into my lap, sometimes both at once.

And then I am a juggler of dualities until either I am supplanted by a babysitter or the children’s father or my work makes way for a day in which I wholly notice the hot sun, the still air, the screamy-splash of children in a pool, the after-quiet of their breathing in the car.

Last week, I worked four days and spent one in the blueberry orchard. The berries were heavy on the branches, the bushes taller than all of us. We filled our buckets and paraded in the grass. This week is even better.

Life is like that, you know. It’s in the details, in the moments, that huge awareness is born, and in that swirl-wave of knowing, I step a tad higher. Have a great day.

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