I’ve already expressed in this newsletter how much I believe gathering with friends in a focal practice to be one of the most authentic, and sacred things we can do as human beings. In describing the phenomenon of gathering, I worked through why it is so important to living a good life for me.
I just recently returned from an annual gathering I do with three of my closest friends and our daughters, and the idea of Being with Friends as the most sacred things I experience was seeded even deeper this year. When I thought through the phenomena in my previous piece, I was looking back. This time I could think about the phenomenon while living it, and I realized just how incredible it can be, and it helped me to see deeper into the idea of how well we do when we allow things to gather us. Thank you for allowing me to work through it here.
Every year in the summer I set out on the same classic adventure with my daughter. From here, all the way in the shiny Northern California vinelands we make our go at midwestern Summerland. The City of Big Shoulders, lakes, humidity, and a convivial spirit we embrace for a week or so. It’s a trip we anticipate all year, especially as winter turns and we cannot help but anticipate floating in cool waters. The planning is minimal as it’s a repeat effort from the year before, and somehow each year is better and better.
It’s starts at home when we drag ourselves out of bed with crusty eyes and foggy brains in the pre-dawn hours to get our car packed and to kiss and hug Mama in order to get to the airport early, headed east. She is always cold, despite the summer adventure, I assume due to her body being half awake as her spirit moves her forward. The most positive you’ll see an eight year-old this early in the morning.
The excitement and stress of travel runs through us like watts, keeping us charged through the early morning crowds and airport mayhem. Is everything charged, are the books bookmarked, are the episodes downloaded, did we get lucky and get in the B boarding group?
We are lifting off to meet with three of my dearest friends and their daughters of the same age, born under the same earth rotation around the sun (with the added and very special addition of one younger daughter as our pick-up spare). We set off to place ourselves in a summer tradition I’ve always been envious of as a kid and young adult, where lucky people whisk themselves to an ideal family summer location to just thrive in while making core memories.
We are flinging ourselves through a metal tube 30,000 feet up toward an old lake house in Wisconsin that is hanging on dearly to traditions, old plumbing, and its roots to the mid-century lutheran settlers of the area. It has been in one friend’s family since, if I can recall, sometime mid-20th century. Not too old, but might as well be ancient to the girls who picked up an old landline phone inside of a cupboard and asked us what they were looking at. A few modern updates certainly make life otherwise easier there, but no wifi or phone service is one of the most special pieces of the puzzle that makes up the long weekend.
During the four-hour drive from Chicagoland (with pit stops for cheese curds, of course) the girls are kept occupied with their last bout of iPad hypnotism. It’s an odd thing leaving the technological behind, I always have alarm bells going off in my head, “have I downloaded the music? have we made the last calls to Mama? do we have all the things we need to be disconnected?” I’m so accustomed to the technological life that the anxiety is triggered with the thought of being away.
Despite the long drive and stressful tones from the bad Netflix movies we allow them, it’s actually a great time with my friend who lives across the country from me. We get to reconnect and ask the deeper questions about how we’re getting on. It’s akin to a runway takeoff, getting the deep connection going before we go all out with the four of us around daughters, campfires, rafts, and cocktails.
Once we arrive some stress and technological mindset remains while we consider how best to efficiently get jacked into the experience. One of us plans to hit the grocery immediately, while others of us inflate the giant raft, get the kids in sunscreen, ice the coolers, and take the plunge. Eventually, though, with gradually less barking at the girls, the city and stress of the travel portion disappears like the best snacks in the cupboards when the girls have their way. We go from the dads, to The Duds, and we get into a cabin flow state.
In the way in which we converge at this place we are immediately set upon by a mood. As tired men seeking a place to simply be taken up by our surroundings and context, us Duds are stricken by this mood quickly—we call it vibes. Even the older four girls of the five, less interested in self-reflection and bromance like us, feel how the gathering focuses them too. Their language is more simple, or their vibes are reflected in a different language of joy, but they articulate it just as well.
In those early moments, I stop to listen to my internal will and realize I’m beginning to focus in a way that I’m not used to on a normal basis. I realized this time around that we’re kinda continuing to shape a practice that has become a tradition. Not just for us adults, but for these eager girls who reconnect like they’ve barely been apart. The tradition is precious, and focuses all of us in a way that is centering.
The travel to get there was a means to an end, purely a technological way of being focused on the most efficient way to accomplishing the goal of getting to our small Eden. But suddenly through the traditional practice we call Lake O’Clock, means and ends are fading into one another through mind, body, and soul. The typical everydayness of living a life, seeking an outcome of all of our output, slips right into a few days where most movements and decisions we make are just a reflection of the world and tradition we’re in. Everything we do through the weekend is an outcome, in and of itself.
One may point out this can be compared to any vacation. Perhaps, similar to a flight and arrival at a tourist destination a family readied for. This theoretical trip shares the attributes of escape, disconnection from everydayness, anticipation, and relief. But I believe what it does not share is how focal the practice has become. Focal in the sense that the practice has becomes central, clear, and articulate in our lives. Focal in that this practice of gathering here with these folks has a force of gathering our being, our mental states, our coping in the world. We are taken up by it in ways uniquely orienting for us.
Heidegger had this idea of a focal thing being something more special in its attributes than, say, the technological device that we use instrumentally. In his later works he spoke of a truly simple but meaningful thing gathering and disclosing the “fourfold,” or the interplay of the crucial dimensions of the earth and sky, mortals and divinities. Without diving too deeply into his specific and complex mysticism, I can say that this model works well for understanding how certain things or practices or places become meaningful. It has helped me to think through my own life and define what is a real thing that centers my focus and my self, vice a device simply used for producing a commodity.
In this case of the lake house, we see the convergence of these elements. Not as a thing, so to speak, but as a focal practice. The earthen land of the home in its simplicity, as well as the lake, brings us to it, and teaches us what it is to behold a location and to dwell with gratefulness. This place gathers the sky, whose sun and clouds and open view is always present, bringing us the open opportunity of the day and how we navigate it. It refreshes and animates us in our mortality, as we focus on our children’s well-being and future, our friendships, our struggles and anxieties in life, and reflect on how few moments we may have like this together before death. And in the awe of it all, it causes us to bear witness to the divine glory reflected in nature and human relations.
The fourfold of the trip gathers us, pulling us into the dwelling in this place, focusing us completely to these four things and what are contained within them, whether we are conscious of them at any moment or not as they flourish in the margins of our attention. As we fight for authenticity in our everyday lives, wrestling with our desire to control time, resources, and relationships, the fourfold at this plot on a random Wisconsin lake shines even brighter.
But what really tops it off is the people. For without the people, there is no focal thing. Without us there to share it, Duds and Daughters, we have no human practice. Our humanity is the unifying piece of the puzzle. Without it, the fourfold does not exist. We are the entities the fourfold disclose itself to. And we certainly relish in it.
This trip, I think, the experience of this focal practice, really hit me as something very intensely related to how well the moment and place discloses itself in almost complete counterposition to our most typical technological way of life. Lake O’Clock is an enclave, heightened by the context of being walled off from the technological world. The vibes of Lake O’Clock are beyond technology’s hold, and the way we all respond to it takes us beyond consumption, into something rarely felt in everyday life. Such experience is particularly vivid when we have come upon it after an abundance of working and traveling and anticipating and living a normal life to make this happen. The typical distractions have fallen outside of our peripheral vision.
It is in this context where the attendees are thoughtfully and traditionally summoned, the tools of the vibes have been carefully set about (inner tubes, coolers, food, etc.), where the food is an amalgam of what we enjoy, and the outcome of the local tastes and skills our main chef-dad uses with full love and joy, where at nearly every stage there is a reference to how sacred the focal event and connections we make during it are.
Lake O’Clock gathers scattered but connected people from all over together, it presents a tradition not just of our own recent making but one of people long before us who gathered together for community and survival, or of the family that built and sustained this place decades ago, whose ancestors welcome us all there. Lake O’Clock brings into focus the relationships, trials, memories, and love we’ve all shared, and hangs it up around us at all moments, similar to the old-timey lace window covers dangling around the cabin.
What seems to be simply a long weekend full of activity for one thing or another in this focal setting is actually the enactment of generosity and gratitude, and the affirmation of our most humanly authentic obligations to be on the land convivially.
As friends we get together more often than at the cabin. But they are never as fully focal as these four days are, in this context. Without this context, it is simply an experience that one may seek to mimic or recreate through technology somehow elsewhere, as so much of modern capital is bent on creating for us these days. But for this to be a focal event, it cannot be recreated outside of this place even among these people.
As such focus and tradition touches us deeply, it is also quite fleeting—even in moments while we are there. We have young children that need care, personalities that disagree, the occasional jaunt into town to catch a signal and check text messages, movies that need watching to soothe a long day. The technological way of being is pervasive and consistent, even here it can invade. But at least here its performed in order to get back to the main event, the focal tradition we are taken up in. The occasion when we allow the girls the enjoyment of a movie in the evening creates a truly helpful answer to some of our needs in the moment, and we cannot help but use our technological culture to seek a result here and there. But even they resist it, calling out from the porch at us, “Can we enjoy an evening swim?!” YES, they get it!
But through the focal practice that we cultivate on the lake, we are doing our best to challenge the drain and distractions of our hypermodern society of empty things and actions. Through our focal practice, the opposition shows itself in a clearing, placing itself almost wholly counter to the vibes we are working within. Put simply, this means that the focal practice of Lake O’Clock, I think, helps us all realize that the draw of devices and the pull of work and life demands must be countered by these strong social commitments in the world. To make the technological universe hospitable to focal practices like our gathering may just be the heart of the reform of our world, and the way to survive its pressures.
With full reflection and realization of how we are gathered by these focal practices, it’s easy to see it fading away as we depart. Quite quickly the stress of packing up and getting out on time to make a good evening in Chicago starts to set in. The devices begin to ping again shortly out of sight from the land, and everydayness sneaks back in. All of the things we bracketed out of the experience show their prominence again, the anxiety, stress, and next steps that our technological life requires pulls us in right away. The closer we get to Chicago, the more my phone is back to being an organ of my body, my work creeps in, our troubles center themselves again. But it’s the realization of this flood that highlights how much more amazing our focal practices were there during Lake O’Clock, and how important the tradition has become. Through the poverty we see the wealth of what we are taken up by.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said quite clearly, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” I feel this deeply during Lake O’Clock. And I’m forever grateful.