It’s midnight in the Kootenays. I’m sitting awake in my son’s apartment, high above Windermere Lake. Thinking. A train whistles slow beneath me and the moon rests cozy in the sky, like a silver coin on dark velvet. Across the lake, mountain shapes loom black, and the small lights of Windermere fringe the shore.
Unlike earlier today, stillness surrounds the apartment. This afternoon whitecaps dotted the lake. Yesterday I noticed a sailboat and a windsurfer below, but no sails challenged today’s wind. It felt like the CP train passing—loud, determined, and powerful. The tall pines near the apartment swayed a good deal south, and an aloe plant on the sill of the open kitchen window toppled into the sink.
Bears—black and grizzly—frequent the nearby woods. Earlier this year, my son had to chase a black bear away from his truck. It had hopped up onto the box to fetch his garbage, which he’d placed there only moments before.
I often walk in the woods surrounding our son’s home. But no, I won’t go down to the woods today, or tomorrow, or anytime this season. The bears have picnics in the fall, that’s why. They raid gardens and meander trails, fattening up for coming winter. Trail travel is not recommended.
I have plenty of fat they could have, mind you. It’s the getting-it-out-of-me part that troubles me.
Deep thoughts come easy here in the Kootenays. High ponderings. Like the size of God. And how vast his love must be if it’s truly higher than these mountains, deeper than this lake, and wider than this sky. I read the first verse of the book of Job this morning. One of the most puzzling verses in all of scripture, I told my husband later. Job feared God and shunned evil. Did everything right, it seems. And yet…and yet.
Doesn’t seem fair to me. But then, neither does the fact that in spite of numerous inadequacies and failings on my part, I’m here to enjoy the moon spilling a milky way over dark water. To ponder, and never understand His Greatness. To sit in the dark and be. Still. Grateful for the mystery.