In 1998, I left a successful
career in search of a life my
soul could say Hell Yes to.
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I found it in Northwest Michigan.
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I’m F Kevin Wynkoop—author,
poet, songwriter, storyteller, and
school bus aide looking after kids
with special needs.
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The tribes of the Great Lakes
know water as an honored relative
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So do I
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Through poetry, stories, and songs
I invite you into the world of
Northern winds & Crystal Waters
that shaped me.
Northwest Michigan. Wonder lives here.
Summer Sleeping On My Couch
Advance Praise for Summer Sleeping On My Couch
“Kevin Wynkoop is irrepressible. As are these life-affirming poems.” Holly Wren Spaulding is a teacher, author, friend, and director of the Poetry Forge, an online Imagination School for poets & secret poets.
“Kevin’s poetry describing the world sounds at first like some trickster winking at us. But don’t be fooled. Through his eyes, literally everything is alive and whispering wisdom in our ears.” Chris Lane, Central United Methodist Pastor, and friend.
Paula Ciccone – by authority of the Trillium King. Read More
Northern Winds and Crystal Waters: The Story
In 1906, my great-grandparents, Alice and Frank Wynekoop, purchased 120 acres of dunes and forest with frontage on both Lake Michigan and Crystal Lake.
Alice and Frank were physicians, educators, reformers, and builders whose lives helped shape both Chicago’s civic life and my family’s century-long relationship with Crystal Lake—an extraordinary legacy later complicated by one of Chicago’s most infamous murder trials.
By 1908, four buildings stood on the property. The main residence, known as the Big House, is a three-story structure overlooking Crystal Lake. Behind it, nestled in the woods, are a barn and a caretaker’s cottage. Along the western shore of Crystal Lake stood a simple ice house where blocks of ice harvested from the lake were stored for summer use. Years later, the ice house was converted into a lakefront cottage where my grandmother spent her summers.
My family still owns the Wynekoop estate.
Except for the war years, my father spent every summer of his life at Crystal Lake. It was there that he met my mother. Her parents owned a cottage on the north shore, not far from the family estate.
I spent the first twenty-five summers of my life at the lake, where my father taught me how to sail and “read the sky” for something that cannot be seen: the wind. He taught me that if I learned to recognize the signs of the wind’s ever-changing direction and intensity and aligned our sails accordingly, we would move forward with exhilarating elegance. Crystal Lake is where my father’s love of sailing became mine.
Back then, the saddest day of the year arrived every fall when it was time to leave Crystal Lake and return to my “real” life.
During my college years, I like to say I painted my way to a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree by painting cottages around the lake each summer.
After graduating from the University of New Mexico, my relationship with Crystal Lake changed dramatically. On my way to graduate school, I accepted a five-dollar-an-hour job that quietly redirected the course of my life. What I expected to be temporary became the beginning of a twenty-year career in the membrane lining industry. I worked my way from field laborer to project supervisor and eventually into sales management. Career opportunities carried me throughout the American West, and for the next twenty years I was fortunate if I managed a weekend visit to the lake.
One of those opportunities took me to Page, Arizona, where, at age thirty-three, I successfully completed a wastewater treatment pond-lining project at Wahweap Marina. It was the first contract my startup company had pursued from bid to completion. Landing the job was exciting; finishing it successfully for the National Park Service gave my young company instant credibility and opened doors to future work. It was definitely cause for celebration.
We finished late on a Friday. To celebrate, I treated the crew to dinner and a few beers. By the end of the evening, spirits were high, and the crew decided they were too excited to wait until morning. They wanted to drive through the night and head straight home to Denver.
What the heck, we all agreed—we were only a few cases of beer away from being home.
What can I say, those were less enlightened times. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was only beginning to raise public awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving.
Sometime around three o’clock in the morning, high in the Colorado Rockies, we pulled over for a pit stop. I had been sleeping in the back of the van, where there were no windows, so I hadn’t seen the night sky for hours.
Then I stepped outside.
And there they were.
The Northern Lights.
Rare at that latitude, they stretched across the sky like a glowing love letter from Crystal Lake itself.
I miss you.
When are you coming home?
Standing there beneath ribbons of green and red light, something ancient and tender stirred within me. In the middle of beer-fueled miles across the American West, a longing I hadn’t fully acknowledged rose quietly to the surface.
The Northern Lights became more than a rare atmospheric phenomenon.
They became a loving whisper.
A call home.
That moment planted the seed that would eventually grow into my first love song, Northern Winds and Crystal Waters.
The song is both a love letter to Crystal Lake and a celebration of the magic that filled my summers there. It carries the longing I felt as a young man far from home and the enduring pull of a place that never stopped calling me back.
Crystal Lake wasn’t simply a place I missed. It was home in the deepest sense of the word—a living presence that had been in conversation with me since before memory had words for the conversation.
The aurora didn’t create the longing. It illuminated a longing in my heart that had been waiting patiently for eight years to be noticed. Crystal Lake had never stopped calling me home.
Shh.. Do you hear it?
There’s a poem sneaking
up on me.
1984 - 1988 articles by F Kevin
Wynkoop for Wind Surf Magazine
Wayshower
Wayshower-someone who lights the path for those looking to answer the call of their soul and to wake up to their true nature, their authentic self.
A Wayshower came to our men’s group and led us in a guided meditation to help us see our paths. She began by asking for a moment of silence. After a long pause, she asked us to recall a memory of beauty, whether visual, emotional, or personal, and bring it to heart. So I did.
Then, accompanied by the gentle rhythm of her rattle, she began singing softly. I closed my eyes and began breathing with the intent to temper my autonomic nervous system’s fight-or-flight response. Soon, the rhythmic sound of her rattle carried me away from the room and into an unhurried place, freed from my day’s worried thoughts and distracting experiences, which had been conspiring to keep me unavailable to the present moment. My awareness shifted in the darkness behind closed eyes as her voice trailed off. Slowly, I drifted into a dream state, standing amongst towering trees in an old-growth forest. The air was close and humid, a dusk-filled twilight that hugged me softly with the lingering warmth of late summer.
I could hear, and then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, see dozens of large brown birds running back and forth on the dry leaves of the forest floor. They weren’t running from or to something, just quietly scurrying around. Amidst their movement, I heard what sounded like drumming as they stopped here and there and called out. I drifted in the soft reality of this vision for a long moment, watching the birds weave back and forth in the growing darkness. I felt safe and included as the slow beat of a drum called me from my vision back into the lodge.
When we’d all returned to the here and now, each man had the opportunity to share his experience when the talking stick came to him. Not all chose to speak. When the talking stick came to me, I was excited to share my vision. The Wayshower’s eyes twinkled with curiosity as I shared my vision, and then she asked,
“How many birds were there?”
“A dozen or so.”
“What kind of birds were they?” she asked.
“Hmmmm,” I paused, realizing I didn’t know. “I’m not sure. I’ve never seen them before. They were large birds, but smaller than turkeys.”
“What were they doing?” she asked.
“Running back and forth across the forest floor, kinda willy-nilly, and I kept hearing a drumming sound when they stopped running.”
She smiled at me, and after a thoughtful pause, she said, “What you saw were grouse, the drummers of the forest. They drum with their wings to tell the world, ‘I’m here!’ Their message to you is to stop scurrying around so lost and confused. They are telling you to go into the woods for the next fourteen days and drum, let Creator and the world know you are no longer lost, and let them know you are here by finding your voice and song.”
“My song?” I wondered out loud.
“Yes, your song. Not the familiar one you sing every day about how worthless you are. Find the one Creator has written on your bones.”
I was intrigued and inspired; the very thought of this made me feel more alive.
The next day, I woke up excited to go out and find space in my schedule and a place to drum and sing. I eventually ended up behind the Grand Traverse Commons, where I climbed into the hills with my frame drum and began my journey. Each day, I awoke with a sense of adventure, excited to find time in my schedule to drum and sing.
Each day I drummed and hummed a growing tune that invited words to join. I never wrote the words down. If they came back the next day, they stayed.
On the sixth day, I was drumming and singing when people appeared along the ridgeline, not too far away. I became embarrassed and quit singing until they were out of earshot. Then, in a flash, I realized why my voice was missing and who had stolen it. Oddly enough, in part, it was The Beatles.
When I was a teenager, The Beatles sang about all the magic and mystery this thirteen-year-old longed to experience, like kissing the lips I was missing, or holding your hand. Did I want to know a secret? You better believe it, especially about all the intriguing mysteries The Beatles’ songs were lifting into glory and tormenting my thirteen-year-old soul. So, of course, I started singing along with my cracking, prepubescent voice when they came on the radio, and was promptly told by my mother, “Oh, please, stop; you can’t sing. You’re tone-deaf, just like your father!”
Looking back, I understand her statement was not just an observation of my singing abilities. It was in part fueled by her hatred of my father. They would soon be divorced.
However, the story I told myself from that experience was that I couldn’t sing and should leave singing to the professionals, like The Beatles, which I did for decades. So, yes, in a way, The Beatles stole my voice because they were so damn good I shouldn’t even try. Obviously, this was never their intent; it was just the story I told myself, my limiting belief.
Meanwhile, back on the wooded hills above Traverse City, I drummed and hummed and let the words come. I never wrote them down. If they stayed and came back to play the next day, they were mine.
On the thirteenth day, I couldn’t drum and sing until after 10:30 pm because of our men’s meeting. Oh, did I mention it was February? And that night, one of the wildest snowstorms I’ve ever experienced in Northern Michigan was rolling in with gale-force fury.
Did that stop me? It would take a lot more than that to stop me. I knew the storm was part of my process, so I eagerly dressed for the conditions and set off. As I climbed the trail uphill to where I’d been drumming and singing for the last twelve days, the howling winds created little snow tornadoes on either side of me that raced me up the path. From the top of the hill, the lights of Traverse City looked blurred and obscured by the roaring white frenzy of the storm. When I arrived at the top of the ridge, I pulled my drum out of its bag, took a stance looking back down the trail, and began drumming and singing.
The roaring winds ripped the words out of my mouth, muffling and devouring them, and I swear I heard Creator laugh and say,
“I can’t H-E-A-R you!”
A blast of arctic air ravaged my face with snow. So I leaned into the wind and my voice and started singing again.
“I still can’t H-E-A-R you,” Creator said. “What’s your excuse tonight? Nobody’s up here, so go ahead and let me hear you sing, LIKE YOU MEAN IT! Now’s the time to let go of the dreary song you’ve tied to your soul about how worthless you are by singing the song I gave you.”
I put more into it, but the howling winds still devoured my words.
“Oh, please, if that’s all you have, then why did you bother coming up here tonight?”
Angered, I mustered everything I had and roared the words until the snow tornadoes started dancing to my song.
I am powerful
sacred and beautiful
wild and wonderful
yes I am
yes I am
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
I am powerful
sacred and beautiful
wild and wonderful
yes I am
yes I am
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
The standing nation stands with me
the golden winds are dancing free
upon the lips of mystery
when I sing my song
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
I am emotional
fierce and devotional
playful and original
yes I am
yes I am
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
I am vulnerable
crazy and sensible
sacred and sexual
yes I am
yes I am
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
The standing nation stands with me
the golden winds are dancing free
upon the lips of mystery
when I sing my song
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
I am powerful
sacred and beautiful
wild wild and wonderful
Yes I am
hey oh hey hey oh hey
hey oh hey hey oh hey
Yes I am
On the fourteenth day, I climbed the hill one last time into the calm, cold, hard blue sky, the kind that settles in after a winter storm. Drumming filled my heart with the silent peace of the snow, then I sang my song.
