Travel Log Sojourn Scenes, A Poet’s Diary 

The Spirit Message

I heard somewhere the clear book title ‘Silas Marner’ and looked it up. It was a George Eliot book and reading the summary I knew I wanted to read her book someday. It looked like Silas had a difficult go of it but was deepened and maybe even somehow redeemed by his life experiences. I paused, breathed, and meditated, said a prayer of thanks and one of protection as I was travelling that day north. 

The Journey to the Place by Winter Waters

I had cleaned off my vehicle and made sure I had washer fluid and gas. I would take my time and go through small towns after the highway, places where people and structures were more, well, few and far between. I knew those types of people, more rugged, honest, more ‘salt of the earth.’  I went and went and sometimes it was a struggle as other folks drive too fast or too slowly and there were transport trucks unintentionally throwing slush all over my own little truck. If I hadn’t filled the washer fluid I don’t know how I would have managed. I eventually I made it to the place by the waters, the place near the northern ferry and the white and grey-blueish ice, the view of the vast lake wind-swept and raw. I never knew if it was a friend or a foe, and maybe that’s because it was complex, and both. 

The Lands Reinstated After Colonialism’s Avarice

Looking around, I remembered a place I used to know that had two willow trees and a fine balcony, and in the summer you could sit and hear the birds and view wonderful waters, waters that glistened a bit for the strong sun that travelled by the clear earth having gone through azure skies. But that place was not really any more for me, and I wasn’t there…geographically or in time. I looked around. Many souls seemed to know one another and have a task,- understanding the world and their place in it. Hmmm, I thought, I am a lost soul, like a piece of parchment paper upon the winds or a bird that has lost its flock,- like an outcast wolf, far away from a pack. 

The Way Back to the Other Towns

Going back, I imagined aquamarine tropical seas but had to snap out of this and pay attention as the snowstorm had begun. I wanted away then from the rural and back to the south of there, and I went steadily along skipping coffee and food and only eating a cookie I had brought in case I got lightheaded. This all worked, this break in daydreaming and the cookie and the timing. I just made it back to the more populated towns and organized infrastructure before the roads became dangerous,- for when a big storm does descend, it really takes at least twenty-four hours before it’s sorted out again. That’s to allow plowing and salting and the clearing of air and all. 

The Trees and Lees and What the Poet Sees

Back safely, I took a bit of a rest and went and got a coffee and bagel. Then I walked by large evergreens and in the snowy fields. I had made it back to where I sort of belonged and took deep breaths and thought of many things such as Silas Marner and George Eliot, of pancakes and diviners and even of Jesus and the Gospels. I walked for longer than I had to, enjoying the outward silence, the fresh air, and the robust and deeply verdant Evergreens…

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. His most recent work, The Book of Love and Mourning, is his third collection of prose poems and landscape photographs.