Recently, a northwest wind combined with a tidal low, emptied water from our cove. Herons and gulls lit on the mudflat to feed. They lingered there while the water was out. As the water rose, the birds retreated. They’ll return when the flats are exposed.

We, too, are always searching. It’s a sign of life.

The Thames River snakes through London, England. Tides range anywhere from fifteen to twenty feet. Low tide exposes the riverbanks. There, mudlarks (people, not birds) scour and dig along its banks, ‘forebanks,’ in search of artifacts of London’s past dating from pre-Roman times. Mudlark and writer Lara Maiklem, seeks to nourish her spirit by feeding her imagination. She writes of mudlarking in her book, Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames. “Mudlarking is a quest in two parts,” she says; “the hunt for the object and the journey to identify what it is and learn more about it.” Her imagination is fed by the ways that her fragmentary discoveries might open windows into the lives and habits of those who once lived in London. Her story is haunting. She caught my imagination in two ways: in describing her own imagination and the way she satisfied its hungers. Imagination is the locus of the spirit. It has appetites as the body does. We recognize its hungers when we feel curiosity. When curiosity is laced with wonder, we know our spirits are ravenous.

Her portrait of her school days was similar to my own. She, too, was a dreamer. She lived a kind of alternative world in her classrooms. She writes, “… my school reports… they were in all honesty, dreadful… one overriding theme throughout: my ability to dream my way through class… inclined to be rather dreamy… must be willing to concentrate fully… would benefit with more interaction in class… does not seem to realize that she must concentrate at all times.” Hers was my story, too.

Her teachers were gentle. Mine played hardball. In an irritated tone, my mother would hear how “George is always daydreaming in class… never pays attention… will not apply himself… he doesn’t stay on task… I don’t know where his mind goes.”

As Maiklem described her own school days, I felt my past legitimized by this kindred soul. She also enthralled me with her descriptions of mudlarking, the curiosity driving her messy and tedious tasks of eking out clay pipes, glass, pottery shards, Roman coins, and pins from the mud. She was really after the story they might tell.

Maiklem is a self-confessed dreamer. Dreamers romanticize. I would offer that certain romanticizing is more than just wrapping a gauzy film around the stern realities of life. It’s more a hunger to understand, while living in the now, how it was for those living in the then. Like compassion, romanticism is a way of knowing, attended by a feeling of belonging to the lives of others and participating in their reality. Romantics and mystics try unraveling stray threads by which the entire human family is knit together. Maiklem describes her search as “grounding.”

When I was young, my father and I would search for Indian arrowheads. He had a large collection. Some seemed new, others battered with time. He said they belonged to the Lenni Lenape tribe who lived in the Mid-Atlantic, roamed the coast and hunted here on the hill where we stood. What were they liking? Did they see the same landscape I did, I wondered? How marvelous it was to stand where they once stood, at a time long before I was.

My kin rarely talked about family history. I regret that. I’ve had so many questions. I knew only that my mother’s family were in the marine trades around New York Harbor and the Hudson River from at least a turn of the 19th century, and that my paternal grandfather was an “oyster dealer.” As I’ve aged, my imagination has hungered to know more. I began my own mudlarking. I didn’t scour the shores of the island on which I grew up. Instead, I perused the contents of an old file box dated ‘1946.’

The box contained only a few artifacts of my family history. The contents were a hodgepodge of legal documents, cards, correspondences, a few yellowed photographs, birth, death, and marriage certificates. Like Maiklem’s findings along the Thames, I Identified some objects, but not their story. I found a yellowed photograph of a Victorian sitting room. It felt strangely familiar. Why was it saved at all? Was there a story for me? Would the corridors of my memory reveal anything?

The room was small, cluttered with bric-a-brac and there were pictures on every surface. Tapestries hung on two walls; doilies were placed on chair backs, and a table stood in the middle of the room. A tablecloth covered the table, and sitting on the floor at each end of the table were cuspidors. All I recognized for certain was the chair –– a platform rocking chair, the Morris Chair that I had in my room as a boy.

Tiny fragments of life experiences, like the ancient shards Maiklem unearthed from the Thames, endure over time in the corridors of memory. The photograph revealed a room, but not one I recognized. Time had altered its looks, but the fundamentals remained intact. Would my imagination reveal the whole from the part? Eventually it did. I felt a thrill of discovery.

The photograph was the sitting room of my grandparents’ old Victorian house along the Kill Van Kull. I’d been in that room with my relatives for some fifteen years on Thanksgiving Days during my youth. Then, in the late forties and fifties, all the Victoriana, appearing in the photograph cluttering the room, had since gone. Like all ancient artifacts, time altered it.

I thought I saw the presence of what was absent in the photograph, the presence of my father. I remember him there in that room for the last Thanksgiving of his life. He died two days later.

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.

It’s not easy being green these days.

For many years my stepson had been an organic farmer in Vermont. More recently, he has become the sales manager for a large organic seed company serving commercial interests internationally. The company supplies home gardeners as well. When the pandemic hit, he told me how orders for seeds skyrocketed. The orders were not all from commercial customers, but from home gardeners as well, who began placing orders in unprecedented numbers.

This is not true only for the States, but also in Britain. Eight out of ten Brits have home gardens and today they’re finding seeds difficult to get.

Rebecca Mead, writing in the New Yorker magazine recently, discusses gardening’s significance.

Mead tells us about Sue Stuart-Smith who wrote a book called “The Well-Gardened Mind.” Stuart-Smith, a British psychiatrist and gardener, goes beyond the cliché of how gardening is “good for you.” She is intrigued by the unconscious dimensions of gardening, “the symbolism and the level of metaphor.” Stuart-Smith writes how she sees the gardening experience as profoundly healing for body and mind, and a source of spiritual sustenance.

Edward Steichen, the pioneer American photographer, in his last years, became enthralled with a single bush.

At age 90 and until his death at 94, Steichen focused his entire photographic activity on a shadbush that he’d planted years earlier at his home. Steichen photographed the bush in varying light, in all seasons, in snow and rain. He said, “Here was something in nature that repeated everything that happened in life.” Exactly what the bush repeated isn’t clear, but I’d venture a guess: if nothing else, gardening is an expression of hope in a future and classical photography is an exercise in expectation. As a life-long photographer, I live expectantly after I take any picture. I hope, but there’s no certainty a satisfactory image will emerge. Like gardeners do, I sow in hope while uncertain of what I’ll reap.

The shadbush belongs to the rose family. Poet, Robert Herrick once wrote how we would do well “to gather rosebuds while ye may –– old time is still a-flying and this same flower that smiles today –– tomorrow will be dying.”

Nevertheless, “When we sow a seed,” observes Stuart Smith, “we plant a narrative of future possibility.” Tentativeness is as characteristic of gardening as it is of classical photography and life itself. Hope is the operative word. Where there’s hope, there’s possibility.

My life plays out like fugues in musical compositions – different melodies weave in and out. As they cross, my life assumes distinctive tones.

I’ve been actively photographing since I was eleven. I’ve been an octogenarian for six years. The pandemic struck the world in March. The confluence of these circumstances has rendered a new tonal quality to my life. I now appreciate gardens and what they signify.

I’m not a gardener. My wife loves gardening; she’s a life-long gardener. During the pandemic, I’ve lived, literally, as “close to home” as I ever have. The house, the trees, the lawn and the gardens that my wife tends, define my daily parameters. As result, I’ve grown very conscious of being embraced by a green world (all the greener for the rain). I’ve never seen my world in quite the same way before. My world, grown smaller, is yet larger. I see more in less.

Pandemics bring the matter of our mortality home in an unprecedented way. For me, as I’m sure it did for Steichen, mortality hovered at the edges of our consciousness. What happens as we age? To use a photographic term, our depth of focus increases. We see the distant past, and also what’s closer, both with similar clarity.

Stuart-Smith suggests a similar dynamic. In the gardening experience, the gardener is in an in-between space. Gardening allows the inner and outer worlds to coexist simultaneously, “. . . a meeting place for our innermost dream infused selves and the real physical world.” To put this another way: gardening is one way of being fully alive…and feeling it in the moment.

In last week’s column, I described at some length how I’d become enthralled with black-eyed Susans my wife had grown and had arranged in a vase. The picture appears above. Like Steichen’s tree, I felt driven to photograph them. I told my wife I was planning on making a picture of them. She commented, innocently but prophetically, “Better hurry, they don’t last long.”

I’d not been actively photographing for some time. The natural beauty of the flowers was stunning and I wanted to create an image that reflected how they made me feel. I also think I wanted to immortalize the moment of my discovery. I felt fully alive in the process.

Sue Stuart-Smith was not surprised when the pandemic had led Britons to become even more consumed with gardening than usual. “Whenever there’s a crisis –– be it a war or the aftermath of a war, or natural disaster––we see this phenomenon of urgent biophilia (a desire to communicate with nature.) She notes how in the first World War, infantrymen created gardens in their trenches, growing not just vegetables to eat, but also flowers. Growth, itself regenerative, restores those engaging with it.

“When we sow a seed, we plant a narrative of future possibility,” Stuart Smith writes.

A dear friend of ours, a nun, died two years ago. She’d lived a simple life. She had two or three plants. Over thirty years ago she gave us two sprigs from her jade plant. They have grown large and generated others. Today would have been her 94th birthday.

I see the jades. I feel her presence.

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.

It’s raining, today.  I’m ok with it. It reminds me of those days when, as a boy, I went on summer vacations.

As a child, vacation months were times of freedom, of release. We’d do as we please, swim, play stickball, roam aimlessly through the neighborhood, free from the eyes of teachers and other  wary grown-ups whose ubiquitous presence cast a constant pall over our youthful exuberance. Their presence confirmed that we were not really free, as we’d been told Americans are supposed to be. Vacation was a blessed breather, living the American dream, within minimal constraints.

We frequently vacationed in rural areas of New Jersey. We stayed in small cabins. The cabins were crude but pleasantly rustic, their amenities assembled throughout the cottage like after-thoughts. Jackets hung on large nails, as did pots and pans; screen doors closed – almost. We’d walk on moth eaten scatter rugs barely covering undulating floors that bore remnants of food and water stains left long ago. I liked the cottages.

The cottages were small, built along lakes. I was always swimming and if not, I liked walking by myself through pathless the woods wearing my moccasins fancying, myself the Native Americans I’d read about. My father collected a massive array of Indian arrowheads which I would finger through, amazed at how they were both roughly hewn and still had a smooth finish like a turtle shell.

On rainy days, we would go to the Dry Goods Store as we called it.  It was similar to  today’s convenience store but with a more eclectic stock. It carried odds and ends, milk, bread, household items, clothing, yarn, kerosene, and kid’s stuff like model airplanes, a potpourri of arts and crafts, coloring books, and sketch pads. We’d stock up for the day, our stash easing the pain of our enforced confinement by the rain. My choices were mostly crayons and coloring books. Others were pads with blank pages. I suspect my affinity  was a metaphor of freedom, in the sense that the blank sheets of paper were open invitations to draw anything that might suit me. I even wrote little short stories with pictures and since it was the war years, I’d copy pictures of war-weary Willy from Bill Mauldin’s classic war documentary, Up Front. I once  drew a square rigger under full sail. It was beautiful.

On August of 1945, we were staying at a lake. On August sixth, I learned the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. My uncle, a chemist, explained to us the terrifying power it yielded and the insidious effects of lingering radiation. It was a first fall from innocence associated with a rustic cabin in the woods of New Jersey.

One summer we vacationed in the tiny village of Robinhood on the coast of Maine. I recall  distinctive smells  that summer; the ubiquitous aroma of pine pitch and the smell of salt water, lobster bait, and gasoline  mixed together. Mr. Dutton, a lobsterman took me out on his boat to pull  lobster pots. The motor was a small inboard, an ancient Palmer, one cylinder. Mr. Dutton called it fondly, his “one lunger.” He started it by rotating its external fly wheel:  on the first turn the engine just hissed at him; on the second and third turn it started burping and finally  turned over with a slow and steady cadence that thumped like a rapid heartbeat.

There was always some water in the bilge and as he emptied his lobsters into the boat, chum would fall into the water and mix with the gasoline. Combined with the cool salt air, it created a scent I found pleasing.

Vacations in Maine differed from vacations in New Jersey. In Maine, we had to dig our own cold pit. There was no electricity. We had an ice box but ice was not always available. To ensure that our butter and milk survived the hiatus between getting blocks of ice for our ice box, keeping the milk in a hole deep in the ground insured its longevity. I dug the cold pit. The job was too much like the chores that I had at home maintaining our victory garden. Vacationing in Maine, tedious at times, was still a unique experience. My brief cruises with Mr. Dutton, motoring between the islands, with a boat filled with live lobsters, was nothing less than exotic.

I suspect there are those in the land today who know not the release one feels sitting in the legendary outhouse of yesteryear. It was very ripe place. Our cabin had no indoor plumbing and we depended on an outdoor well for our water. One summer I was assigned the unenviable task to rake level the mounds of effluence that piled up like small hills just below the hole where an occupant sat. Then I had to apply generous portions of lime which to this day I’m not sure why. So much for the good old days and being the older brother.

During this coronavirus, I am confined to a house in the country by the water, just like summers as a boy. I can do anything, as it was the case  in my boyhood summers with the added perks of refrigeration and indoor plumbing. Big boxes have replaced the homey Dry Goods Store and super markets have eclipsed  most mom and pop grocery stores.

After Hiroshima, I wondered what would become of us. I have similar thoughts today; what will it be like when the pandemic ends. Seventy-five years after Hiroshima, the world is still living anxiously. 

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.

 

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are”

Jane Taylor, with her sister, Ann, wrote this poem in 1806. It’s become a timeless lullaby. I must have heard it as child and to this day, I still “wonder what you are.”

For years I’ve wondered about stars, particularly their light.

I read a line by an American poet recently, William Stanley Mervin’s poem called, ‘For the Anniversary of my Death.’ The line read, “the beam of a lightless star.” It captured my imagination.

Did he mean that after the star died – that is, its nuclear fission having spent itself and finally imploded – that its light lives on, traveling through the vast expanse of the universe? Considering the universe’s size, will the light then travel to the end of time?

As a Christian, I grew up being taught that there is a bodily resurrection after our earthly death. I was a child when I first learned of this. I unquestionably assumed the concept as a part of my worldview. I remember when my great aunts and uncles died, one after the other in only a few years. I prayed for them diligently–– less to implore God than to instruct him not to forget to hold these loved one’s close until the day of the resurrection. Then we would all, like Jesus, rise again. I found the thought warm and comforting.
As I got older, the demands of the contingent world pressed me from all sides. It ultimately made rational demands upon my growing mind. I became less sure of a bodily resurrection although never wholly abandoning the thought of a life after death. What could this mean then if the matter was not to be understood literally ––did bodily resurrection say anything about the nature of life?

Entropy and deterioration seem the prevailing rule governing all of life. Scientific evidence grew convincing to me as I got older: when it’s over, it’s over, seemed the increasingly irrefutable judgement. As a young clergyman, I would proclaim the teaching of resurrection when preaching at funerals. I thought this was a proper courtesy to extend to the bereaved. I did not want to disturb any beliefs they held at such a tender moment. I knew that I did not know about bodily resurrection for certain and this was an article of faith in which I was the least confident to address. I found that it was a delicate matter.

To complicate things, resurrection, at least for traditional Christianity, was associated with rewards and punishments. Sinners would go to hell, but the righteous to heaven. I felt this had even a sadistic quality. There was an additional threat that sinners would burn in hell for eternity. It seemed macabre.

Most historic religions have some concept of an afterlife, a spiritual realm where life endures. Some teach reincarnation; that we will return to life after our death in another form such as a bird or horse. Whatever particular character afterlife beliefs portray, many people dismiss them out of hand as just wool gathering or wishful thinking.

For me, the matter of a life after death is more atavistic. I feel a kind of sixth sense about it: something I intuit about how I fit into this endless process. I am not to be terminated by annihilation, but will continue in some kind of transformation. That’s why I think the poetic line, “the beam of a lightless star” has stuck with me the way it has. It framed one way for me to understand this eternal mystery. Entropy may tell me a part of the story, but not its conclusion.

At night, after I watch TV –– usually old movies or some TV series –– I’ll read for a while in bed. I’ve been reading Vanity Fair recently. I found the novel in an old bin in my closet. It’s lingered there unread since college. Reading it, I was entertained by the snobbish social airs of Victorian England that the author, William Thackeray, lampoons. Especially I’ve enjoyed the graceful prose and how the twinkle in his eye is evident in every word. The book is thick, the print small, so I read only a little each night.

One night I finished reading a few pages. AsI started to turn the light out, I thought how Thackeray had died in 1863. Here I was in bed, and here, a hundred and fifty-seven years later, I was entertaining his thoughts, even though he had long since turned to dust. I was sharing his wit and humor, as if he were alive and present here and now. It seemed to me just another manifestation of how a life has ways to live on after a death, in the way the beam of the lightless star streams through the universe after its extinction. It was as if this author was speaking directly to me. While he was at once a victim of entropy’s relentless assault on matter, the immortal quality of his soul carried on transformed. It traveled through time by means of an assembly of written words. It is always human nature to want to talk with others –– curiously, that’s what his book is all about –– our insatiable appetite for conversation, however banal.

“We tell stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote. Despite the constraints of contingent time, and the claims of entropy, Thackeray wanted to tell his story. I hear him now, line after line. Those who may have read him, are, in a manner of speaking, following in his wake.

I remember some things my grandfather said – not to me directly, but something I overheard, some opinion or thought. He was ship captain. One particular thing he deplored, which prefigured one of the pollution issues of today, was how ships entering New York Harbor would empty their bilges within harbor limits, dumping oil and chemical waste. I heard this seventy-five years ago. It’s alive and well in my own thoughts today.

I wonder how much of my own life is an accrual of generational hand-me-downs, which I have both knowingly and unwittingly appropriated. Those lives once lived way back then, live on right now, and many of them in you and me, as do the beams of lightless stars.

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.

Boredom is epidemic, today. Diversions are particularly welcomed.

My wife and I regularly have breakfast on the front porch. The previous day we’d arranged sprinklers to water the front yard. As the sprinklers slowly oscillated back and forth we watched. Our heads turned from side to side, following the spray, like spectators at a tennis match. We usually chat over breakfast, but didn’t speak for several minutes, engrossed with the sprinklers. Eventually we looked at each other, laughed and I said, “We really need to get a life.”

Diversions are important to daily living. Several come to mind; healthy and unhealthy diversions, one that defies any category and some necessary for sustaining our sanity.

As frivolous as watching lawn sprinklers may seem, I consider it a healthy diversion. It’s environmentally friendly, hurts no one, takes our minds off the COVID-19 world, and for unknown reasons has a soporific effect on me like those times in Maine when I’d watch waves breaking on the rocks. I would rate bird watching as a top-of-the-line diversion. Serious birdwatchers might be offended that I regard it as a ‘diversion,’ but this is not to dismiss the practice as frivolous. It’s definitely recreation, a healthy diversion that’s fun, reduces stress, is frequently instructive and can leave its devotees refreshed.

Unhealthy diversions, while having distracting qualities, are more driven. At a dinner party, you may have had the misfortune to be seated next to a non-stop talker –– ‘motor mouths’ as they’re called. They always speak with absolute authority, never have questions and can’t listen. They pause their monologues just long enough to chew the food they’ve just taken from their plate. The respite is painfully brief. Dinner party conversation should be pleasantly diverting. This kind is unhealthy, never fun. It’s fatiguing for everyone except the principles, who, remarkably, are the more energized for their windy excursions.

I occasionally engage in a diversion that defies any category. I fidget. For no apparent reason, I get up from my chair and go to the window, look at my iPhone I’ve just put down, thumb through an old catalog I’ve seen several times or go to the fridge. I’ve learned how to manage that fidgetiness better than mindless diversion. I simply sit still with my feeling of edginess. I don’t try diverting the feeling with pointless activity, but instead watch my thoughts as they come and go, like viewing slides. Our own thoughts, when caught newly hatched, are amazing.

There is another kind of diversion. This diversion isn’t for escape, but for gaining perspective and maintaining our sanity while living in a mad house. Today, we live in a madhouse. Don’t think so? Consider this –– a typical news item we might read.

“Sinclair Broadcast Group recently published an online interview with a conspiracy theorist who claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci created the coronavirus using monkey cells.”

Fox news runs “ideas that scientists consider false or ideas that question the seriousness of the virus.”

Breitbart claims that “masks were unnecessary and that the drug, hydroxychloroquine, could now cure the virus.”

What are we to make of such mindless claims; what kind of people make them up?

Here is where we need a special kind of diversion, not for escape but to keep our sanity while others around us are losing theirs. This kind of diversion involves drawing back from the madness for a while to ponder the great spiritual myths of history. Myths are not factual accounts but stories that reveal what is always true.

There are religious myths that shed light on today’s tragic suffering –– racism, the coronavirus, and economic disaster including all the posturing and ignorance that has compounded it? The biblical epic of Job provides a broad perspective.

The story tells us that Job is a good and god-fearing man, just and generous. He is suddenly stricken with a terrible sickness. Then his house burns down, his children are killed, his cattle stolen; in a brief time, Job has lost everything. While he is writhing in pain he can think of nothing he’s done that would have caused him so much tragedy. He is totally bewildered and in constant torment. What’s happened to him makes no sense at all. Three friends come to comfort him, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar.

All three confidently tell Job why he has been visited with so much tragedy. Eliphaz insists that if Job was such an upright man, as he claims, god would never have afflicted him. Job’s suffering is deserved because he thinks he’s more righteous than he really is.

Bildad tells Job that there has to be some reason for the tragedy and suggests it must be that some of his children sinned and that had to have been the cause.

Zophar is pretty much of the same mind as the others, but he offers this formula to settle the matter: he recommends that Job just tell God what a terrible sinner he really is, repent and say he’s sorry and God will restore him to his former bliss… with perks.

Job will have none of it. Job knows these theories are insane. He is not a haughty man by any means, but he has integrity. He knows for certain that he has no idea why all this happened to him nor do his friends’ conspiracy theories. Job finds them empty and pompous, like we react to sound bites. Job knows that he does not know. This is humility. Job also knows that his friends don’t know anything either. That’s wisdom. His friends cling to their conspiracy theories. By so doing, they create the illusion they actually know something. For some, creating such an illusion is habitual.

I take comfort from the wisdom of Job as I try to negotiate this mad world of glib sound bites and relentless doublespeak. Job teaches me to trust those who can say they do not know why things happen as they do, and that that’s ok. It teaches me not to trust those who offer answers to matters of which they know nothing. But best of all, it assures me that who those who feel safe enough to tell me they don’t know, when they tell me what they do know, I can trust it.

Reading Job again, offers me the kind of diversion that helps me stay focused and sane in a mad world.

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.

Our home is a one-story building. It looks like a bunkhouse –– weird I often think –– but it suits its present occupants, well.

The house’s exterior is finished in sheets of T1-11 panels, painted brown –– cordovan brown –– according to the paint can. The T1-11 panels have vertical ridges. Mud wasps love to build both single dwellings and row houses, and even occasional high-rises in the vertical ridges running up and down the T1-11. The results are tan colored mud nests that mar the deep brown color of the house. I find the mud huts unsightly; they look like tumors growing from the walls.

The presence of the mud wasps is aesthetically offensive to me, and then, too, the mud wasps sing a lot. Well, maybe not exactly sing, but they get noisy when making their house repairs. I’ll be sitting inside and suddenly I hear a high-pitched whine like a dentist’s drill. The mud wasps are busy fixing things up. The sound persists; it reverberates through the interior of the room. I first thought was I was developing tinnitus. It was annoying.

Over the years I like to think I’ve been magnanimous, tolerating their unsightly homesteads on the walls of my house. I’ve tried to ignore any noise they generate.

One day I watched yet another mud wasp homebuilding and I decided that was enough; they had to go. I did not make this decision lightly. For heaven’s sake, I thought, the wasps have an entire forest around the house with lots of natural home sites that would easily accommodate a new housing development.
I began to raze the huts.

I started with water and a hose. It was like a military strategy, where one army softens the enemy’s resistance with a preliminary artillery barrage. I soaked the mud huts thoroughly for a few minutes and as I did it I had uncomfortable thoughts. Still, I pressed on.

As the water began soaking into the mud huts, they began dissolving and streams of soft tan liquid ran down the T1- 11 like blood from deep wounds. I began feeling predatory, like a sheriff who evicts residents for unpaid rents.

Mud wasps erect remarkably sturdy huts. They initially resisted the water barrage like cinderblock huts in a Caribbean hurricane. Thoroughly soaked but still standing, I took a long pole and began scraping the huts away. In the eight huts that I demolished, I saw only one wasp. Their huts we’re rock solid and built to last. I soaked them still again, scraped more, took a brush to the residues, and finally their huts knew the place no more. My house looked much better.

The truth is that my complaint with the mud wasps was not that they did me any harm, or were damaging the house, but that their habits offended my aesthetic sensibilities. My decision to get rid of them was based primarily on appearances which begs the question of how many of my judgements are based on appearances, appearances that either offended or pleased my sensibilities. We are seduced by our illusions, tricked by the way we assume things are.

I remember standing in a line, BC, (before COVID-19) at the supermarket. The line was longer than usual. A large man stood in front of me. He wore a dirty tank top, stained shorts, built with a huge frame, was covered with tattoos, and held two big boxes of Coors Lite, one box under each arm. His beer belly protruded significantly.

In front of the man a frail woman stood, her grocery cart apparently serving as her walker. The line moved along, and finally she shuffled up to the cashier, and prepared to check out. She first had trouble finding her check book and I could see that she was now having a terrible time writing the check. Her hands shook as if palsied and as she tried to write she’d hesitate, start again and again hesitate. This slowed the line down but the man behind her seemed unconcerned. Finally, he spoke to the woman in front of him. ’Scuse me, mam’, can I help you write out that check– I’ll fill everything out and you can just sign it.’ He put down the beer, she moved ahead, relieved, while he wrote the check and handed it to her to sign. She thanked him and seemed to struggle less while writing her signature: I imagine it was the long familiarity with writing her own signature that made it easier.

I did not for a minute peg the man as someone who would behave this way. I had him relegated to a skinhead, a hard, angry man who would act defiantly and aggressively. This man was a sweet guy. He just didn’t look like my image of a sweet guy

We live in a celebrity culture. Appearances are everything. Titillating drama, florid showmanship and reality shows are the coin of the realm where entertainment becomes the reality, our regular source of alternate facts. Presentation is everything, they say, unfortunately in places where it should be anything but.

In July of ’19, I remember reading a headline in Vanity Fair when the Mueller Report came out. The headline read, “Robert Muller tries to be as boring as possible in Capitol Hill Testimony.”

“Former special counsel Robert Mueller opened his highly-anticipated Capitol Hill testimony on Wednesday by throwing a big wet blanket over the entire media spectacle, reaffirming in his opening statement that he would not veer from the text of the report his team prepared on Russia’s election interference and apparent obstruction of justice on the part of Donald Trump.”

Mueller and his team worked on the report from May ’17 to March ’19. It was long, excruciating detailed work, executed by a man of great integrity and skill. It produced hard evidence with no fanfare. The article in Vanity Fair’s column was troubling, a sad commentary on how entertainment and showmanship occludes the fruits of hard work. Mueller was accused of being boring “throwing a big wet blanket over the entire media spectacle.” We prefer spectacles to learning.

About the mud wasps? I’ve never felt easy about getting rid of them. They remind me that I am not in that state of grace I’d prefer to be in; living gently with differences, even with minor offences and not judging others by appearances.

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.

“The guy’s bats, he’s really gone bat sh-t.” These insults are serious misnomers.

They’re insults directed to someone who doesn’t get it, someone we regard as crazy. But bats are not crazy and they do get it. They have an unerring eye –– more accurately, ear ––for the big picture while skillfully maneuvering the minute details of their immediate tasks and, I might add, all managed in total darkness.

Late last fall, as I stacked my woodpile, I lifted a log to place it elsewhere. Under it I saw a tiny bat hunkered down between the two logs in a space that would ensure a safe and warm place for him to hibernate for the winter. I must say I thought he was a lovable, cuddly little guy, and except for his teeth (I didn’t see them, but I knew they were there) I would have picked him up to have a closer look and just to feel the warmth of his furry body.

Once his habitat was exposed he twitched a little. He fussed at me with high-pitched hisses, protesting my intrusion. I replaced the log carefully over him out of respect for his space that I’d inadvertently violated.

In our previous home in Timonium, bats lived in our house, along with us. Occasionally one or two would fly through the house late at night. What will always amaze me about their excursions was that in pitch-darkness, sound asleep in bed, I’d wake for no reason and know they were there. They were soundless, invisible to me in the dark and I can’t imagine that I would have felt any breeze from their flapping wings; inexplicably, I simply knew they were there.
One of the remarkable things about the way bats get around is the way their intuitions guide them: how in reading their own echo, they are able to remain in touch with the big picture even while in pursuit of the tiniest of insects. Actually, if they lost sight of the big picture, they’d go all over the place or crash into a wall . . . or worst still, get tangled in someone’s hair. They never do.

I have wondered about myself –– about all of us –– how much of the big picture we do know, but don’t know that we do.

I’ve read about educational theories that hold that the task of the teacher is more like that of a midwife than an instructor. This is to say, that the skillful teacher calls forth from the child’s mind what the child already knows. in that part of the brain other than the reasoning, judging and analyzing part.

Writer, Maggie Ross, who has explored the nature of our interior life identifies one way by which we know that she calls the “self-conscious mind.” This is our psychic warhorse that manages information so we can get around. It directs our daily chores. Ross tells us that we have still another way of knowing. This part doesn’t play by the same rules as this self-conscious mind. She calls it our “deep mind;” it comprehends the incomprehensible which is to say, it gets the whole picture in a flash even as the self-conscious mind is still parsing and struggling with the details. The self-conscious mind works twenty-four seven, figuring things out. The deep mind just perceives.

I have been in the middle of a sentence and can’t recall a familiar name or place. “It’s gone from my mind,” I say. But it’s not. Frustrated, I finally let it go and then, as if out of the blue, I remember. The data didn’t go anywhere; it was there all the while and I needed only to stop trying so hard to recall it (self-conscious mind) so it could be freed up to come back to me (deep mind.) This phenomenon is related to the folk wisdom that advises us when trying to solve an intractable problem, to “just sleep on it.”

The most important things in life are rarely tidy, black or white, up or down, fast or slow. Whatever is of consequence is always paradoxical; such matters are typically both/and.
This self-conscious mind tries to parse things into bite-size pieces. it takes a microscopic view. The deep mind is more like a wide-angle lens; it sees not only the mountains of the scene, but the streams and shrubs up close and everything all around. This comprehension transpires outside of conscious awareness. Our eureka moments are often a product of the deep mind

Bats are scary, people say. They’re spooky and go about their business under the cover of darkness. Their wings have a kind of angular configuration, sharp edged, not soft like an owls’; they seem formidable, and a few bats, with needle-sharp teeth, like the legendary Dracula, drink animal and human blood. They’re called vampire bats. And then too, what does one make of creatures, many of whom sleep (daytime) upside down, hanging from rafters or from ceilings in dank caves? Like locusts, bats swarm from caves by the thousands. Not an endearing profile.

I’d argue that going batty is not a bad thing. Some days I’ll be obsessing about a leaky faucet, fretting about the minor inconveniences of social distancing, harboring old resentments, or fuming about still another insult tweeted from the White House to the American people. Then as if from nowhere, out of the dark, from my deep mind, I sense a larger landscape around me, the big picture. I see the good people inhabiting our land, its beauty; I become alert to the healing properties inherent in nature and, at least for a time, I stop going batty, or more to the point, I really do go bats.

Regarding the other misnomer, the crude reference to bat guano: in Asia, bat guano is highly valued fertilizer. In the big picture, it helps feed people.

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.