A week ago I woke up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I had my cell phone, which is a little black rectangle the size of my hand, on which I do my banking, take my pictures, shoot video, get directions when I’m traveling, write poetry, and check updates from high school friends I haven’t seen in 30 years, right by my bed. When I woke up I saw I had text messages from my kids in Montreal: ‘when are you coming home?’ ‘I’ll be there in a few hours,’ I wrote back. Crossing the Atlantic in a few hours? ‘Oh, okay,’ they wrote back. ‘C U later. We weren’t sure if it was today or tomorrow.’ I had breakfast in my hotel, got on a train that took me straight to the airport, where I had to stand in a machine that whirred around me and looked through my clothes and probably into my body cavities, to make sure that I wasn’t bringing anything bad on board. Then I filed onto a metal bird weighing hundreds of tons, as high on its wheels as my three-story apartment, and carrying as many people as live in many Canadian small towns. We went really, really fast down a runway until we lifted up into the air and through it at over 500 kilometres an hour. About two thirds of the way into the flight, I checked on a little screen in front of me and I saw that we were going right over Greenland. I’ve looked down from a plane before and you can see, on a clear day, the glaciers of Greenland and the mountain peaks. It’s a perspective that the ancient Vikings thought only the gods would ever have: looking down on the ball of the earth from five miles up. And then that huge mountain of metal safely landed, and I got home, and a week later looked at the texts for this Sunday. And I thought: this will never work. I have nothing to say. These texts are all about miracles. And there are no such things as miracles.