MARCH 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Do the stars yell at you across the cosmos? NASA says they do make sounds. Shrieks actually. And the Earth hums. Makes me think the firmament is warming up like an orchestra. But for what? The harmony of the spheres? Something more sinister on the way to cataclysm? And in local news, scientists say the Earth’s core has changed shape recently. It’s done this before, in fact, leading to polar switches – glaciation in the Sahara, tropical remains at Spitzbergen. GPS kaput. Very unsettling. Hold your beer. Could be that nations will become like musical chairs.  

If it happens that quickly, and on my watch, it will happen in March, say I. “Beware the Ides of March.” Earth-shifting things have often happened to me on or about March 17^th since the mid-1960s. Good or bad, they sort of balance out. The first one was missing my event in the NAIA swimming nationals when I was favored to win. And the best one was on March 27^th a couple of decades ago here in Minnesota. In fact, I believe a certain sense of destiny drove me to come here, a literal journey on ever narrowing roads and trails. I guess everyone has a sense of destiny – a journey. What’s yours?

Just for fun, place some map tacks in the memories of your odyssey. Did you start out on a 10-lane expressway? Many choices and you drove like a maniac? Maybe your jalopy was loaded with peer group buds, maybe you soloed, or maybe you hitch-hiked. Did you opt to get out of traffic at some point? Took that job in Peoria; bailed for the right spouse; or maybe you just inched along in grid lock each day of your life, negotiating rush hour and dealing with road rage. Could be some little passengers you sired or birthed along the way became your journey. Heirs-and-assigns necessarily commandeer your travel route, a re-do of your childhood to one extent or another. “Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.” You answer their itineraries, supply the logistics, and sweep up the pieces when they finally roar out of the garage. Down curtain Act 1.

So, did/do you stay in that lane? Was/is it a one-act play, a time to join the audience for forever encores and applause? Maybe you liked the matinee so much that you’ll make it your evening performance. Firmly insert map tack.

Or else hit your marks for another curtain rise. Act 2 in the atlas of your life. All new scenery. How different the world looks when you get back up to speed! The 10-lane expressway in the rearview mirror may be gerrymandered with potholes and dreams warped by lingering gas fumes, but the journey seen through the windshield has exit ramps, interchanges, and a fork in the road. Once again, so many choices. Only now you know the joke, and it’s on you. Success chased you, but you were too fast for it.

My advice? Puh. Different strokes for different folks. You could call AAA for the package tours. Or do your own bucket list of the 7 Wonders of the World. Or go for the trifecta with the Grands. Or just chill. Me, I went off-road, home to who I am.

I follow no tracks, leave no tracks. That could be because I had lived in a dozen countries by the time I was six. Different cultures and different languages may have birthmarked me with a stamp of impermanence or wanderlust. On the other hand, I’m invariably the last to give up on things. So, being lost isn’t a craving to stay lost; rather, it is a perpetual state of becoming. Like quantum, perception and emergence are cause and effect.

The alleys of Detroit were my highways growing up, and the landmarks were rock piles, trees and fields. Fields especially. Even sixty years on – by then in Minnesota – I wandered parks like Elm Creek and Cro-Hassan, journeying in fresh dimensions, sometimes even lying down on a path and pressing my ear to Mother Earth. Amazing how tuning into microcosms within macrocosms expands your perspective.

And I remember an epiphany that happened in Cro-Hassan. The trails and the park and the woods were intimately familiar to me by then: each season’s dressings and undressings; the high watermarks of ponds, lakes and a serpentine river that crossed a highway separating a small dog park from miles of sprawling wilderness and marshes; as well as the dryness of late summer and the great sleeps of winters. I knew the animals in their seasons too, dragonflies and snakes and turtles, the deer in their ruts and sheds, and the coming of swans. You never see the swans depart – they just vanish on the wind as if into a magician’s illusion – but you see them return every spring. Same pairs. And that epiphany, the epiphany I was telling you about…that too was nature’s legerdemain.   

I traveled the trails forward and backward and bisected them, hiked them all by day, then by night to make them seem new again, but eventually it was totally familiar. Except for this one time. Stranger still, it was broad daylight, a little rainy, and suddenly everything seemed different. The old thrill seized me. Was it the leaves trembling in the rain? Lattices of shadow climbing up from the hollows? The verdant earth holding its breath to cue my thoughts? Lost, lost, lost…until I realized that being lost was itself my home. ‘Tis where I belong. A re-engaging of so many theaters of life all at the same time, so rich with associations and discoveries that the present is overwhelmed. Bittersweet and wonderful. Home is simply where it all comes together: time compacted, a journey within yourself.   

There have been other things in Minnesota that called me here, though it was never a conscious destination. Fly-over country, I thought, drive-through, sometimes with my son, Sean-Shane, the lad, the boy-child. But when I realized that Minnesota outside of St. Paul/Minneapolis was where middle America fled 30 years ago, the deal was sealed. I was taking care of my father at that time, and the doctors said he had a stomach aneurism that would kill him in a couple of weeks. The weeks became months, so I told the lad that if he wanted to come with me, I was going to Minnesota after his grandfather passed. He actually went first, and when dad died a year later, I went house hunting in the land-of-sky-blue-waters. It was the lad who told me about the lake where I finally settled.

March madness. The stars are yelling at me across the cosmos, NASA says the universe shrieks, and the Earth hums. A symphony in cosmic movements is underway – “Musical Chairs in the key of A-pocalypse.” And if you want the last seat, you’ll have to sit on my lap.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan