There was a time when I was young, I must have been 3 or 4 years old, when my parents would take us to the inland sea.

We lived in Michigan, on the Upper Peninsula, a short detour north, as it happened, in the long run of our lives; we lived in a rambler whose color I can't recall, with a field out back that was huge to young eyes, and a cherry tree that bloomed in the Spring and gave fruit in the summer. The snow was deeper than I was tall. The drifts of snow collected by the trucks were small mountains which tried their best to hold out til the next winter season — like snails caught on the flats between tides — and some times they thought they would succeed, and sometimes we did, too. The entire world smelled of pine, or a certain kind of grass, or a temperature of air. And my parents, who were struggling to raise four children, to keep a house in the high north, and be part of a community whose first language was Finnish — they went in search of a vista, of wind from elsewhere, of open space.

The mountains on the shore of Lake Superior are decorated with the ribbons of tannin-brown waters, rivers whose desire to meet with the sea is so great, they have cut turbulent pools and rushing cascades, ravines and rock sculptures as they fall and fall from the heights to the lake. The Lake was the inland sea: it had no waves on those peaceful days when we would visit, but all the same it had no farther shore. From the level of my gaze it went on forever. The riverways were cut deep and musical, while the beaches were paved with weather-rounded stones, smooth as if machined, that made the sound of grown-up gravel, a sound of walking in a bed of marbles, while the cool wind played in with your hair.

And there, under pines as tall as the sky, and further around than my father could reach, if he tried, the world was a fragrant walkway of red-brown needles, and bright wintergreen leaves and berries, and pitch-glazed cones that the summer's sun had opened. Almost every step was a discovery. Every breath was a discovery, and that is what youth is, that is what youth was, there on the shore of the inland sea, where my father walked along in a respite from his efforts, and my mother walked along with us at once freed and further tied to her watching, teaching as we went, the names of birds and of flowers and of silence.

There is a place where we first learn that the world is large. It is not our first deception, or disappointment, nor the first time one of our race abuses our confidence: no, that makes the world small, as small as a person or a moment. There is a time when every stone we would climb was growing our minds larger, as our muscles grew strong so our confidence as well. And then there were times when you stopped throwing stones, when the northern geese flew overhead with their traveler's song, when the sun touched the line of water beyond your reach, when the first starlight appeared…

And all at once you heard in your heart what you had been hearing in your ears and in your eyes for so long, words you had not understood were words, suddenly the meaning was clear, and the great distances between one body and another was achingly, beautifully real.

There was a time when my eye reached outward, far was not far enough, another state was not far enough, because always you arrived and there was something further still; you reached the inland sea and in the same moment you learned the word in your heart for distance, you also learned that beyond the line of water there was still more land. Beyond the land there was larger water. And on the other side of the sea, another people, and yet people. Another day, and still connected to this day.

I looked at the sky and in the permanent twilight of the suburbs saw some stars. Once someone lent binoculars, and those stars were suddenly, impressively accompanied. I walked out into a Midwestern night, ion the small field-towns of North Dakota, and in the light of the moon the railway lines gleamed away to the east and the west like laces of silver, while a dozen soft streetlamps made an island of the town… and the ocean grew wide above me. After a few steps, the port of light leaves your eyes, and the silent acres of corn stand as though listening to your footsteps. The nighthawks draw lines with their electric voices as they chase their insect meals; a breeze moves through a wheat field like a wave upon a shore that you can't see. And everywhere above you, the world ends, and the expanse begins.

With time I found better instruments. It is the same intention, if with a child's abilities, as that of the proudest astronomers with their cameras' aching eyes pointed at infinity. From a single blue point at the top of the sky, the whole dome of heaven draped itself around me, until I was the smallest mote on a dark-green sea, a child in the center of a circle a thousand miles across, as though the only waking human on the vast prairie, while all of heaven beamed down.

And the stars were so many that they blurred into white, into a single wide tapestry of light that no one had sewn. And the child who is opening into whatever will be shown is given millions upon millions of suns like his own, on whose planets some other form of thought sparks a mind, with a similar kind of question: but why am I alive? Then the stars become galaxies of stars, like islands of light, while the blank waters between them beg equally to be defined.

Until finally you know, if you have the tendency to be kind, you are small as that very tiny moment in the world, and everything won and everything merely tried is your humble best; if you have the tendency to be kind, at times you will be kind. There is some comfort, even if the present is not always so refined.