The tumult of the presidential campaign frazzled me. For a while I believe I lost my soul. During the campaign, I was raging, criticizing, judging and oddly, feeling ashamed at times. It was depressing. I’m ready to nourish my soul. It’s been hungry for a long time.
To feed my soul, I try to surrender to the simplicity of being. I do this by settling into the moment, inviting awareness only of the now.
At the moment, I’m in my studio sitting in a chair, facing the windows. I spend at least half my days reading and writing here. My gaze wanders past a model of a square-rigger, outside to a large magnolia, then a good-sized crepe myrtle and finally to a statue of St. Francis. It’s late fall and Francis is compassed about by withering flowers that dallied cheerfully with him through the spring and summer. From there and beyond I can see across the creek to the opposite shore where a sailboat is docked. It has not moved in the twenty-seven years I’ve been here. Perhaps, as its sailors aged, the boat became too much to handle. It’s kept in sight though, like an ornamental seashell left to the life once lived. Here is my sanctuary.
Everything I see seems to stay the same. Yet. to say it’s not changing is illusory, for in fact it is changing and changing constantly. This is a littoral landscape, littoral meaning a shoreline, one that defines boundaries – the boundaries between the land and the sea, or in our case, the Bay. These boundaries are in constant flux.
Rachel Carson once described the shore as the “marginal world,” that shifting line that defines and redefines topography while functioning as the generous womb birthing an extravagant abundance of living creatures. Some hunker down in the mud, others move inland, or in the cases of the dipper ducks and turtles – inhabit both sides of the littoral divide.
I know the sea level is rising. Once the outer perimeter of my studio view was defined by a stalwart line of marsh grasses. The water rarely, if ever, rose significantly up their stems. Now it does. It’s as though the land has sunk (I think it has), but the tides are also flooding higher than they normally do. Change is the way of the world.
I know I’m living in a new era of social as well as ecological forces. I must learn to accommodate to them, to understand. If the reed bends, it won’t break.
My studio is my sanctuary, a place of safety and refuge. I dream there and wonder about things. The inmost recess or holiest part of a temple or church is also called a sanctuary.
There are two sanctuaries that I know of. One occupies time and space where I can take refuge and dream, like my studio. There is another. It’s a holy place that abides in the innermost recesses of every heart. It’s deep within me. When I’m fussing about everything, I forget it’s there. Of the people who retire there to take refuge and find safety, some return to tell us about what it’s like. I’ve gone there from time to time for refuge, as I am doing now.
While inhabiting that space, the natural world to which I’ve become so inured suddenly springs alive. It looks different. The familiar contours of the littoral landscape, or the thought of the fomenting of life seething in the muddy banks of the creek now seem like a fresh discovery. The effortless flights of raptors above and even insects going about their inscrutable business suddenly seem exotic, miraculous as if a spell had been cast over me and altered my vision. I enter a heightened state of awareness. I am finding my soul again where all things are made new.
he effortless flights of raptors above and even insects going about their inscrutable business suddenly seem exotic, miraculous as if a spell had been cast over me and altered my vision. I enter a heightened state of awareness. I am finding my soul again where all things are made new.
I leave my studio to take a walk. I feel alert, expectant. On the road I have a brief moment with a wooly bear.
As I walked the road, she was wiggling her way across it. We met in the middle. I stopped. We spent maybe two minutes together. She never acknowledges my presence, but just keeps going. I walk along with her, but I must go slowly. It’s good to slow down and not feel driven to go faster to keep up. I often lose my soul that way.
The wooly bear makes her way across the road and I’m sure she hasn’t noticed me at all. Her’s, as I considered it, is a hazardous journey. A passing automobile could stop her dead in her tracks. She is living her life to the full – living it in the simplicity of her being.
Fat and furry, she crawls along while undulating like Jell-O. She is colored deep brown with a copper stripe. Her destiny is simple. Once she’s crossed the road she’ll nest somewhere under a leaf or in the hollow of a log and spend the winter. As temperatures drop she will literally chill out – freeze for the winter duration and then in spring, thaw out and warm up to be transformed into a tiger moth. The reed that bends never breaks.
As I finish writing my thoughts (after feeding my soul), I look out my studio window. There’s St. Francis, as ever, holding a small bird in his arms and still surrounded by the remains of his loyal cadre of flowers.
This, for now, is the simplicity of being. It’s a good place be.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Mary Byrnes Bollinger says
Thank you for continuing to share George Merrill ‘s inspirational musings .
He feeds my soul and inspires me to pause and enjoy the beauty of my life here
on the Eastern Shore .
Mary Byrnes Bollinger