Grafton, Ontario (2017)
In this piece, my son Caspian stares out across the crest of a small hill to the road and fields north of Lake Ontario, which is behind him. Seeing him there reminded me of all of the fairy tales of my youth in which the child allows himself to stare into the deep, dark woods just beyond the safety of his village. It’s a metaphor for coming of age, a bildungsroman, a life passage about which Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung loved to speculate. In The Edge, the border is what has come before and what is to come. Or, perhaps, childhood and adulthood. Or maybe, the known and the mysterious, the tangible and the numinous. Whatever the dividing line, I think we’ve all been there; we can all feel the gravity of his curiosity. So I snapped a pic, because that kind of wonder doesn’t end with childhood.
