George R. Merrill

Snapshots of Daily Life: Reminiscing by George Merrill

March 29, 2020 by George R. Merrill 1 Comment

For a diversion, lately, I’ve been rummaging through closets. Ever notice how their contents multiply over time and fill with surprises?

During a foray into one closet, I rediscovered an old file box labeled 1946. It contains random papers that my mother kept. I found vintage World War II memorabilia. My father was at war in Europe, my mother on the home front on Staten Island raising three children. She volunteered as a nurse’s aide at Halloran Hospital where wounded soldiers returning from the war were treated. There’s a snapshot of her in uniform. How young she looks, I think. In the box, I found some V-mails, censored and copied by the military for national security –– letters my father sent from the front. I found pictures of relatives, all of whom are long gone, uniformed Navy and Army officers. I found a few ration stamps issued during that period, a copy of the military journal, Stars and Stripes, announcing the Bulge offensive and a copy of Up Front, Bill Mauldin’s classic documentary depicting soldiers’ lives during WWII.

Of the national crises during my lifetime, I recollect two vividly: WWII and 9/1.

WWII thrilled me. I was nine. Traveling the Staten Island Ferry regularly I saw the energy of America at war –– uniformed military personnel arriving and leaving, troop ships in the harbor, the region pulsing with vitality. America’s relative safety –– bordered by two oceans –– and my boyish sense of omnipotence combined to leave me with many fond memories of what to me was a glorious adventure, not the tragic conflict it was. As an adult, I was horrified at the carnage of 9/11 but also shaken by what had never occurred to me before: that America wasn’t invincible as I’d always believed and it had become as vulnerable as the rest of the world. I went from years of feeling omnipotent and safe to being frightened and vulnerable, just as my country had.

It’s odd how our minds’ recall some of life’s signature moments by peripheral, even absurd details associated with them.

The morning of 9/11, I’d gone to the supermarket for eggs and milk. On the news rack, I saw one of the tabloids that print sensational rubbish. There was picture on the front page of a large frog lying next to a woman in a hospital bed with the headline: “Woman Gives Birth to Frog.” Too good to pass up. So, I bought a copy thinking I’d write some kind of goofy article about it. I arrived home and, with tongue in cheek, started writing a piece about this poor woman’s discovery. My wife came to my studio, looking frightened, and told me a plane had just flown into one of the twin towers. I’ve never forgotten either the silly frog or my wife’s terrifying disclosure.

One day in August of 1945, my father returned from the war. I sat on the curb, my back leaning on a sycamore tree. I couldn’t wait to see him. It was hot and the macadam on the street had risen in small bubbles, as if boiling. I stepped on them, making them snap like gunfire. The war was over. My father finally arrived in the car and he hugged me. I remember how the stubble of his beard felt like sandpaper against my cheek, the mottled bark of the sycamore at my back and the macadam bubbles under my feet that rose in the summer heat.

Thomas Aquinas once considered our perceptions of reality in this way: there was an ‘essence’ of things and then their ‘accidents,’ incidental characteristics that are peripheral to their essence. I think when we’re not sure of the essence of something, just what the very heart of the matter is, we often get to it by following the path of its ‘accidents,’ like playing Charades or like the free association that leads us to the essence of a dream. Strange how a sycamore’s mottled bark and heat bubbles in a macadam street could become the icons of one of my life’s most exhilarating moments; and how a mindless frog became symbolic to me of the first foreign invasion of America’s homeland since the war of 1812.

My father would periodically send packages from Europe. Receiving them was exciting. I remember one containing a German officer’s tunic, a helmet, bayonet, cartridge belt and a host of medals Nazi soldiers earned. The package also contained several K-Rations small wax covered boxes, containing basics (then) like canned chopped ham, malted milk tablets, fruit bars, sugar, instant coffee, chewing gum, cigarettes, water purifier, and packets of toilet tissue.
Toilet tissue, then, was more available on the roiling battlefields of WWII, than in today’s supermarkets.

Of the many civilian privations resulting from WWII, the consolation of touch was not one of them. Touching, recently, has been a volatile social issue. Because of sexual abuse, touching earned a bad rap. Now that abuses are being exposed, and perpetrators prosecuted, touch is returning to its venerable place in the connective tissue of human relationships. And no sooner has touching been given social clearance, and it’s been assigned sinister connotations again at a time when we desperately long to touch each other. A friend of ours who lives alone reports that, during this time of social distancing, the high point of her day is not any calls she gets, but the warmth she feels as her dog jumps on the sofa and snuggles next to her. And now we do what we can; make calls instead; it’s our ‘wartime” way of remaining in ‘touch.’

The coronavirus pandemic has been characterized as a war, indeed, a world war. Our enemy is invisible. This is a war like no other. Our enemy has no army, no tanks, no planes and not even a gun. Our enemy claims no national identity or moral purpose and is tiny like an atom; infinitesimal in size but terrifying in potency. The problem is not that our enemy hates us; the problem is that it needs us. It needs us to get a life. We see the virus as an adversary, while it sees us as rescuers. Without us, the coronavirus is lost, depending only on animals for its survival. In a strange way, it seeks the life force that vivifies you and me. It’s that life force that offers the virus a more prolific, if not necessarily, better existence.

Join me in praying that the coronavirus finds more benign ways to get a life and that we’ll all be touching soon.

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.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Homebound by George Merrill

March 22, 2020 by George R. Merrill 3 Comments

I practice social distancing. I thought it would be easy. It’s not.

Being introverted –– by which I mean that engaging with lots of people drains my energy –– one would think I’d welcome any limits imposed that would spare me extended social engagements. I found I am not easy with social distancing. It unnerved me at first. I wondered why.

It’s not that I have no fear of the virus. I do. The virus is scary. I understand the wisdom in being prudent and observing the precautions, including social distancing.

No, this reaction of mine to staying home is something else, unrelated to my essential survival instincts. I’ve noticed that as soon as something which I’d normally welcome and happily indulge places limits on me, it loses some of its magic. In other words, now that I have all the free time that I might ever have wished for, I have this urge to get busy using it up by going out to shop, see a movie, to eat and otherwise mix it up with people. It’s perverse: I wish for what I don’t have and don’t for what I have. I believe that I suffer from severe case of what I have diagnosed as Americhosis ––an American male’s atavistic impulse to resist doing anything that someone else has told him to do.

Do you suppose what I am experiencing is similar to what Adam and Eve felt when they first lived in the garden? Except for the one constraint imposed upon them –– not to eat the fruit from a particular tree –– they were free to do whatever they wished. They had a blank check, a surfeit of pajama days, sans pajamas. And sure enough, with all the freedom afforded them, the forbidden fruit seemed the more attractive. What they had, although plenty, was not enough.

One change in our lifestyles imposed by the pandemic is the request by officials to stay home. As if to sweeten the pot, in some instances, there are promises of financial compensation. Under normal circumstances most people would welcome such a break. Admittedly, the shadow of the coronavirus that hangs over us is disturbing, but for an undetermined period we have free time unencumbered by obligations to do anything or go anywhere, like the snow days we had as kids.

Who among us doesn’t recall waking up as a child to learn that school had been cancelled? Snow days were common during my childhood. When one occurred, I’d feel jubilant; I had an entire day and perhaps a few more in which I had nothing to do except what I wanted. Providence had no greater gift to offer kids than school cancellations. Whenever school announced one, I felt as though I’d been delivered.

With snow days, there were no restrictions. A snow day was a freebee with no strings attached.

I’m not so sure adults feel the same about free time being imposed on them, especially American men who have a reputation for being workaholics.

Mary Catherine Bateson, in her classic book, Composing a Life, treats the matter of how men and women tend to use their “leisure” –– the time they spend outside of their responsibilities. In my day, a woman’s role in domestic life was far more eclectic than men’s were at work. The task of caring for children, managing the household, dealing with kids’ crises, large and small repairs around the house, left her little if any free time. She yearned for it. She’d typically take hold of free time and luxuriate in it, filling her days with imaginative projects she’d put on hold for the duration of the marriage. Husbands, who functioned primarily as breadwinners, performed their work typically outside the home and for the most part their tasks were defined by much tighter parameters than were women’s. When men retired, Bateson observes, they were more inclined to feel lost and restless, as if something had been taken from them –– not sure exactly what to do –– very different from women who found retirement, liberating, a gift.

When circumstances remove us from the tasks and social networks that have traditionally defined our lives, we are left alone with ourselves. While the freedom implied in this seems attractive at first, the experience of it can be unnerving. Who am I, if I am not busy ‘doing’ something?

When I first retired, I felt this discomfort. I had all the time in the world to do as I wished. As a therapist, my professional day had been defined by hourly appointments. At retirement, I wasn’t sure how to reorient myself around my experience of time. How do I reconstruct a life? I felt unsettled for several months.

Like all crises can, whether social or medical –– in this case both –– they shake loose unaddressed spiritual matters. They surface deficits in the health of our souls.

Any crisis that forces us to be alone with ourselves for any length of time unpacks many unsettling issues. In the mid 17th century Blaise Pascal, a renowned religious philosopher and mathematician, made this prescient statement: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Social distancing may create opportunities, but the kind that, at first, are not welcomed.

I’d offer this thought for our troubling times: that the health of our souls requires us to manage ourselves flexibly in two ways. That we remain meaningfully connected with others while deliberately taking quiet time to be alone with our deepest thoughts, listening to what they tell us. The social distancing now being asked of us can provide the time and space we need for reflection and, the availability of an iPhone, the means of remaining connected.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Coronavirus by George Merrill

March 15, 2020 by George R. Merrill

A factory worker in China dies. Residents of Seattle become ill. A man coughs in Iran while a postal worker in Italy runs a fever. These are victims of the coronavirus disease. We’re reminded again how small our world is.

If this present pandemic of the coronavirus teaches nothing else, it demonstrates how intricately interwoven the individual lives of the worldwide human family are. The spread of the disease has brought home the ancient truth that poets, political visionaries, artists and even economists attempt to convey in their work– that providence “hath made of one blood all nations for to dwell on the face of the earth.” In the last analysis, our divisions, and there are many, are mostly artificial constructs, the way parallels and meridians designate discrete sections of one entire globe. We’re all made of the same stuff, all of a piece, of one blood.

This viral infection is creating fear and suspicion worldwide. It is rare that the majority of the world population would be having the same fears, simultaneously.

As I write this column, pop-ups constantly appear on my computer with breaking news, announcing that the stock market indices have fallen dramatically or risen slightly. It’s not unlike how in hospitals where the nurses regularly monitor a patient’s temperature and blood pressure, staying alert to any significant changes. I’ll bet any nurse today has a far better shot at stabilizing the erratic blood pressures or fluctuating temperatures of her patients than stock traders have in getting market numbers back into safe parameters. We are profoundly vulnerable, economically and physically, and although continually reminded of it, we typically dismiss it. Denial has grown more difficult living in the shadow of the coronavirus.

Genesis reads how we are to “replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” If indeed this is what we’re supposed to do, God threw us a curve ball. Strictly speaking, the coronavirus is not a “living thing” and so the divine rubric which appears to give us the luxury of complete dominance over our environment doesn’t work with the coronavirus. This virus is not something we are going to subdue, or a phenomenon over which we’ll have any significant dominion.

To manage the pandemic, minimizing the effects of the virus will be the major task. That will require that the world cooperate by sharing information, resources and safety measures. This also means world leaders speaking frankly to one another. Another concern the coronavirus exposed was how political posturing, in China and America has hindered timely managing the epidemic. It boggles the mind how, although we know that cooperation is the critical ingredient in solving problems of any magnitude, cooperation is the last thing, if it’s thought of at all, that is ever considered.

A curious thing happened only a few days ago when I went to have my toenails cut. I’d been to the nail salon twice before.

The salon is run by Vietnamese. Any communications I’d had with staff were always courteous but perfunctory. Language was a significant factor. While I was being tended to by a pedicurist, one of her colleagues came over to her. She had an iPhone in her hand. She tapped the pedicurist on the shoulder to gain her attention, and said something in Vietnamese. She pointed to the iPhone. They exchanged words that sounded like soft musical intonations I didn’t understand, but I sensed a hint of alarm. The woman with the iPhone, not wishing to be rude to me, showed me the face of the iPhone. I saw Johns Hopkins Hospital and two doctors speaking about new cases of the coronavirus in Maryland. The woman with the iPhone spoke English only marginally. She held three fingers up in the air and repeated the English word ‘three’ demonstrably to emphasize the number. She seemed to want to talk about it. I had trouble understanding her – and of course she had the same difficulty with me. She then smiled agreeably, turned and left the pedicurist to her task.

In the three previous occasions when using the salon’s services, I’d never before had conversations with any of the people there. Communications were token at best; ten dollars for cutting nails, thirty for pedicure, and my response to just cut; that was it. Those sparse communications constituted, except for services rendered, about all the interpersonal encounters that I had with any of the persons on staff.

This time when my nails were done and I was ready to leave, as I was paying my bill the woman with the iPhone walked toward me. She seemed eager to engage with me further. In all my visits, this was a first.

She was a petite woman, young with a pretty, childlike face. Her face seemed, not scarred exactly, but shaded lightly here and there in soft hazy blotches –– some disease? or perhaps burns that she’d sustained? I could only guess. What she wanted me to know was that there was now a fourth case and that Johns Hopkins had confirmed it. Again, she pulled out her iPhone, showed me the reporters speaking and seemed to want to comment on the information. “No good, no good” she said, as though she were pleading and looking to me for reassurance. I nodded helplessly.

In a strange way, what I would regard as the two scourges of our post-modern era driving people apart ––iPhones and a virulent virus –– were, in fact, drawing us closer. Virus contagion that would necessarily make us fear and avoid each other, and the iPhone, (which I always thought of as the devil’s workshop, keeping people from being emotionally available to each other) now converged, building a bridge between two people in a nail salon. The two forces merged to create a moment of mutuality, of humanity, between two people who had always lived in separate worlds.

In the shadow of the coronavirus I have thought about this brief encounter. I see in it something that transcends the particulars. I am a professional, a man enjoying the social capital that male ‘elites’ have in today’s world. The woman at the salon was an Asian immigrant, performing what we would regard as one of society’s more humble tasks. However briefly, we had been drawn together to share our concerns as equals around, of all things, the mutual concern everyone has: matters of our life and death.

In an ironic twist of fate, it may turn out that social media by which have been alienating each other, may now be the medium that keeps us connected until the coronavirus can be safely managed.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Girlfriend by George Merrill

March 8, 2020 by George R. Merrill

I have a girlfriend. Her name is Sue.

We have been thing about two years. As is the way with old men and their girl-friends, she’s younger than I am. We met when my wife and I we’re on holiday in Puerto Rico. As attractions often do, this one began slowly and grew.

I am a sucker for a New York accent. Sue has one. It’s as thick and chewy as a bagel and her accent is accompanied by a deep resonant voice that communicates no-nonsense. This is someone who commands your attention. For me, listening to another native New Yorker trying to speak real English, feels like I’m home again.

When I first met Sue, I was a prodigious walker. So was Sue and we walked together three times a week in the morning. She had been widowed about two years before and had cared for her husband through a long and difficult illness. They both had lived in Puerto Rico many years. She knew the island well. On our walks, I’d hear stories about the island, how it changed and about her adventures as a year-round resident.

Sue is Jewish. As I’m a Christian clergyman, this became the occasion for light hearted bantering about sectarian religion’s stereotypes and prejudices. Was I one of those mashugana goys that Jews find suspect? Was Sue a real Jewish mother, inspiring guilt in her maternal ministrations? We’d banter.

Soon the women who gather regularly mornings to swim at our community pool began to wonder whether Sue had a boyfriend. As the rumors were beginning to surface we decided to play along with them. Sue might even say to people in the pool that I was her boyfriend.

So, our relationship was no secret in the small community where we vacationed. Sue was among the women who exercised at the pool as my wife did. In the pool, when I’d occasionally walk by, I might hear her deep resonant voice brazenly referring to me as her as her ‘boyfriend.’ My wife, looking appropriately scandalized, would play along with the charade. Strictly speaking, I would have to say, Sue was our girlfriend; in fact, she was loved by many.

The community where we stay is mostly elderly, retirees. Some people who come here suffer a variety of physical diminishments. I learned that in this seasonal community of the elderly, she had endeared herself to many people who turned to her in need, sometimes in crisis. Sue is remarkably resourceful.

On a walk one day we met someone she knew. The woman had clearly suffered several diminishments. Sue had been instrumental in getting the woman desperately needed medical help. It became evident as I listened to both of them talk, that Sue was –– to use my word –– a godmother to many of the people in the small community where we stayed. It was touching to learn this. As we walked on, I commented causally that with all her tough guy facade, “You’re really a saint,” She blew me off, saying, “Hey, I’m Jewish, remember.” “So was Jesus,” I retorted. “Whatever,” she said dismissively is if I were mindless.

A small incident occurred. It involved Sue. For me, it was a moment of clarity, one of those fleeting moments in which something is said, casually, and it illuminates a latent thought that hovers in the shadows of my mind but never quite gets articulated. The thought involved hungers of the heart, kindness and generosity specifically, and how without them our souls languish.

When packing to come to Puerto Rico I had foolishly miscounted the pain medications I take for my back. The medication was a common one so that under normal circumstances there’d be no complications in getting the meds. However, here in Puerto Rico, if you don’t know how to work systems you can easily get lost in them. Transactions between doctors in the states and pharmacies here can get tangled. I only had a few day’s-worth of meds left and I was anxious. I would be in pain without them. How I might get to get the prescription filled for the medication without a long and complicated wait.

I mentioned my concern to Sue. She said curtly, “No problem.” In her years in Puerto Rico, Sue came to know a regional physician and how the medical network works. She was sure having worked with the physician before that she could arrange to have the prescription filled. She asked me to send her particulars. She texted me a few hours later instructing me where I could pick the prescription up. I felt enormously relieved and profoundly grateful for the fact that she was able to negotiate the prescription. I saw her shortly after that and told her how very grateful I was for her efforts. She looked at me impassively and said simply: “That’s why I’m here.”

My wife and I have gotten to know Sue better over the years and have learned more about her. Her pithy statement, ‘That’s why I’m here’ accurately represents the way she understands her life; she lives intentionally. Doing for others is her purpose. She has touched many. In short, I believe in those few words, Sue articulated the shape of her soul and a universal truth: this is why we are all here, to do for others. It’s heartwarming when I see the essence of our collective reason for being realized right in front of me.

I suppose some might read this and think: that dirty old man –– and a clergyman at that –– writing a paean about his girlfriend whom he flaunts under his wife’s nose (his wife edits this essay, after all), a girl friend who is not only a younger woman, but one who even gets him drugs.

But wait, it’s not what you think.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Seeing by George Merrill

March 1, 2020 by George R. Merrill

Is it mind over matter or is it matter over mind?

I’m thinking of how my world changes when my body does. Of course, in this sense the world does not change; it’s me that changes. I have considered that it may well be matter over mind. Everybody knows how our bodies have a way of both demanding our attention and then focusing it.

My own body for instance, over the last ten years has seen several changes. Most were unwelcomed but each took me, however reluctantly, to a new place. I’d like to mention my aching back again as this was the most unwelcome but the most instructive of all the disruptive visitations aging presented me with.

For several months walking was painful. As I mentioned in earlier essays I reluctantly took to using a cane although I would, occasionally. It was helpful. The realities of my compromised mobility introduced me to another dimension of walking that was governed by a different mentality: no longer was I pushing for how far and how fast I could walk but how carefully to move and how alert to remain. All this came home to me again recently during my annual winter holiday in Puerto Rico

Walking long distances, I fatigue. Sometimes it may generate pain. In that regard, a cane is a life saver. It assures me of a steadier gait and a leisurely one, all of which almost magically transform a world that before had been familiar to me, or even banal, into something new and surprising.

The other day I chose to take a long walk along a promontory I’m very familiar with. I’ve been walking it for fifteen years when on holiday in Puerto Rio. The promontory, on the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, overlooks the island of Vieques and the Caribbean Sea. It’s a gorgeous spot and although I knew this before, I hadn’t with the same clarity I had that day on this particular walk. For purposes of discussion I’ll code the name “BB” as the world my body lived before my back trouble–– and the world after the back trouble, “AB.”

My walking while in my BB stage was clearly to just get exercise, flex those muscles. I wanted to feel the energy rush that comes with pushing my body to the max while walking. During the BB era, I could walk the entire promontory in thirty minutes and with the exception of the sea and the island, I’d see almost nothing else in the expansive terrain around me. When I’d return from this walk I’d feel triumphant, as if I’d mastered my body. I felt a surge of accomplishment; I’d done myself well walking briskly and at some distance, and like all personal victories, it was short lived. As I look back there were, in the final analysis, no real takeaways from the BB walks –– nothing particularly memorable. It was just another practice driven more for the enhancement of my sense of physical power than by any desire for discovery.

Just the other day –– I’m talking AB now –– I took the same route, this time walking with a cane. My first impulse was to pick up the pace. Going so slowly didn’t feel right. But picking up the pace did not feel right either because I’d have to swing the cane like a rapier. So, I slowed down to a rhythm that seemed to accommodate the realities of my situation; that is, my body, my cane and the landscape under my feet.

I walked past a palm tree. Over the years I had to have passed it dozens of times. I don’t recall it at all. The palm tree was unlike any I’d ever seen here. It was about 20 feet tall and with a skinny trunk. The coconuts, however, instead of growing high up nestled in the fronds at the top of the tree, we’re growing up and down the trunk as if the tree had large tumors. I’d never seen anything like it. I went up close and sure enough, as large as they were, the coconuts were held to the trunk by what seemed like short stems like grapes have. The stems did not seem substantial enough to bear their weight. They must have been like iron.

In order to be careful of my steps I began walking with my eyes on the path immediately before me. During BB, this would never have been the case. My eyes would have been fixed to the distance, as though if I had any goal, it was always one somewhere on up ahead.

Along the path, under my feet, tiny flowers grew everywhere. Some we’re no larger than small spiders. They grew along the ground on wiry vines no thicker than string and extending over the path in all the directions I walked. They spread out like a Lilliputian forest, not of trees but of flowers. Some were white, some purple and others yellow. Had my eyes not been intentionally on the ground I was covering, I would never have seen them and in the fifteen years I’d walked the promontory I had no idea they were there.

In reflecting on the experience, I have to say that that my walks AB did not provide me with any victories or personal triumphs as I had known when I walked BB. There were no adrenaline rushes or stirring highs, which during my BB stage were always coveted. Then faster was better, longer was greater. The AB experience was entirely different.

I look at it now as though my BB world was subtly governed by one of winning, the mastering of things, like my body, through which, of course, many triumphs and victories are frequently gained. Such preoccupations are common to the ways of youth. These ways did not apply to me anymore. My AB world to which my body brought me was one of substance more than of accomplishment; instead of a sense of power, I felt one of intimacy, an acute awareness and familiarity with the space around me.

In our sublime moments of truth, nature will often mock us.

Near where I turned around to come back, the promontory is low and the beach only five or six feet below me. I saw a good-sized ghost crab emerge cautiously from his hole. These crabs appear to have both an entrance and an exit for their underground dwellings. He crawled out slowly, I’m sure eying me, and remained stone still. I didn’t move. Feeling safe, he started walking. I moved and he shot back and down the hole with what seemed the speed of light.

The thing here is that not only was he able to move with extraordinary speed, but he could see everything around him while he did. He’d never miss a thing.

Some critters have the best of both possible worlds.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Forest by George Merrill

February 23, 2020 by George R. Merrill

I went forest bathing this morning. It refreshed my spirit.

I am in Puerto Rico on holiday. Nearby where my wife and I stay, there is a small Pterocarpus forest on the estate nearby. The forest exists as a preservation effort by the community. An ancient tree native to the island, the Pterocarpus has been known from antiquity to have mystical and medicinal properties. Natives call its sap, ‘dragon’s blood.’

Like taking showers, forest bathing can be hot and steamy, but not here in Puerto Rico. The climate is temperate. Unlike when showering, there are all kinds of critters bathing with me. They are not really bathing; they live here. None seem offended when I bathe. Whenever I come they’re always discreet as we properly expect of others when we bathe –– remaining well out of sight. Salamanders are the exception; they’re voyeurs; they eye me the whole time I undergo my bathing ritual.

I don’t bathe in the conventional sense – buck naked under running water with soap, basically cleaning up. Instead I walk very slowly, fully clad while remaining especially alert. I’m not watchful for fear of predators, but eager to hear messages. You see, the forest speaks, but only in a still small voice. It’s barely audible.

Forest bathing is more ritualistic than any showering or even the legendary Saturday night bath. Every step is intentional. It’s a way of keeping one’s ear to the ground to listen what the forest and its inhabitants are saying.

I begin this bath by sitting on a bench at the forest entrance. The bench overlooks a pond where I see a turtle surfacing. I sit quietly for five minutes. Trees sway in the breeze. A lounge lazily on a grassy patch. He’s sunning himself while a white egret stands close by. Except for trees, everything is still.

I enter the forest, walking on a boardwalk, inches above the dark waters of the swamp. The walk extends three quarters of a mile. The boardwalk sways slightly like a rope bridge. The forest soon swallows me up. The water is dark and filled with detritus. It has a distinctive smell – – dank, a little like the crawl space under my house; this smell is slightly sulphurous, but oddly pleasing. It’s earthy, something like our Eastern Shore’s marshes at low tide.

There are two sounds that prevail as I bathe, both welcoming. One is the soft and hushed cooing of doves and the other, the chirpy and exuberant peeps of the Coqui, the charming little frog that lives on the island. Coquis are often heard, but seldom seen.

All around me the Pterocarpus trees grow, some large, all with their distinctive root systems that extend out from the base of the tree like fans. Natives say the roots look like hens’ feet. The tree gets its stability not by digging in deeper, but by spreading its roots outward into the shallows of the swamp. For enduring stability, reaching out frequently works better than just digging in deeper.

Speaking of reaching out, I see the gossamer threads of spider webs laid across the boardwalk, from railing to railing. There’s one after the other, each about twenty strides apart. If I’m the one that must gently undo their night’s work as I walk by –– I don’t like to –– but I do it as reverently as I can. Putting webs aside tells me I am the first one to walk the forest that day. Not all the forest’s inhabitants welcome forest bathers. We just make more work for them.

Forest bathing is well known to the Japanese. It is one of the ancient practices related to the Shinto religion and today is called ‘shinrin-yoku.’ It’s predicated on knowing that our own healing necessarily connects us to the community of life. Our disconnect from nature today –– inner and outer ––is considered a significant factor in the prevailing ennui that our culture suffers. The phenomenon is beginning to be identified as epidemic. As nature is continually violated in the consumerist culture, there’s a growing awareness of how fundamental our relationship is to nature and how it contributes to our mental health and spiritual awareness.

I think that our casual use of metaphors in language and the images that appear in the decorative arts are drawn mostly from the natural world. Awareness of the depths and beauty of things is expressed in metaphors. Numbers are how the consumerists express their values. In that world, one’s attention must remain focused on the bottom line. The total, however grand it appears, is always one dimensional.

M. Amos Clifford is the founder of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs.

He writes: “Forest bathing can have a remarkably healing effect. It can also awaken in us our latent but profound connection with all living things . . . It is a gentle meditative approach to being with nature and an antidote to our nature-starved lives that can heal our relationship with the more-than-human- human world.”

The cellular reaction that vegetation has to our prevailing attitudes and feelings is well established and scientifically verified. Plants don’t like people with an attitude.

My walk in the Pterocarpus forest was not my first. However, it was the first in which I brought attention to all my senses as I bathed my way along its path; the sounds, the smells, the sights, the colors, the shades of light, the scampering critters and the breezes as they rose and fell. I would say that, before I just walked the forest and thought it was a pretty place. I would say this time, by inviting all my senses into the experience, I felt a part of it. I suppose I’m describing that feeling of intimacy and connection that poets describe.

At the end of the path, I walk out of the forest into a clearing. A bench sits there. It’s surrounded by tall Royal Palms. They don’t seem to belong right here. They’re too showy. I take a seat on the bench a few minutes to process my experience. About twenty feet away there’s a huge iguana. He slowly raises and lowers his head, as if performing some form of ancient ritual prayer, exposing a large pelican-like pouch under his neck. He’s a fearsome, primal looking creature, but I take comfort in knowing that iguanas are vegans.

When I took time to listen to the earth that day, what did I hear it say to me?

Come back!

Snapshots of Daily Life: Creativity by George Merrill

February 16, 2020 by George R. Merrill

Talk to yourself? I do. It may not be as ditsy as some think.

It occurred to me recently that perhaps talking to myself is not so much something to be ashamed of but an occasion to feel blessed. I say this because the first time we meet God in the Bible, he’s talking to himself. Of all people! And when he speaks, it’s not sotto voce, but a resounding voice of command. For someone who is all talk, he’s remarkably creative.

Consider this: “In the beginning when God created the universe, God commanded, Let there be light.” And there it was light. It continues; God enjoyed what he said so much he went on to, “. . . name the light, ‘day,’ and the darkness, ‘night’.” God continued –– as though on a roll ––commanding that “the water below the sky come together in one place so that the land will appear.” And on and on it went. No one was around to hear the foundations of the earth as they were being laid, or more accurately, talked into becoming. it’s clear from Genesis that these commands were issued verbally and in this manner a whole universe was created but created by someone who was comfortable talking to himself. If you’re antsy about this habit yourself, take comfort; you’re in good company. Talking to yourself is next to godliness.

When God says to himself, “Let us make man in our own image,” he really does mean man since it’s Adam who appears following the command. This might have caused God grief –as even to this day feminists can take umbrage –– but not to worry; God quickly recognizes that without women, the entire universe would fall apart. Thus, Eve arrives on the scene, but, curiously, this time not from the commands God has been issuing while talking to himself: she materializes very differently. Perhaps the first scientific miracle before cloning ; Eve shows up through some kind of divine orthopedic procedure. Good call, I’d say. Best not to start off by telling our first woman what to do.

I certainly mean to be playful here but not disrespectful or impious; reading scripture with a legal mind leads only to a scramble for the high ground, creating the stultifying trap of who’s right and who’s wrong. A fanciful mind is open to nuances and seeing other possibilities. Being literal would trivialize and marginalize the spiritual depths of meaning implied in the ancient story. Genesis is a parable, a myth that our ancient forbears devised as they struggled to understand our essential nature and the nature of God and the universe. That we were created in the image of God is particularly vital, here. If Genesis is only a static description of original prototypes it wouldn’t teach us much about our essential nature. The product here is less the issue, than the process. Great acts of creativity begin deeply inside of us, and often when we’re alone, as they did for God.

Artists of all descriptions will often speak of this. Some, like my wife, an artist, when painting by herself hums instead. A brilliant preacher I know told me once that he first goes into his study In solitude, walks the room talking thoughts out loud. Soon latent creative energy of significant magnitude is released. Inspired thoughts are brought into being, like imaginative images in art are, or music, writing, sculpture, medicine, architecture and new strategies for the practice of compassion. All of these contribute to the healing of our world. I understand the Genesis story as shaped in such a way as to show that we are and can be co-creators with God and active participants in the divine force that inspires creative goodness. The same creative forces operative in divinity also operate in humanity. That’s the image of God within us.

It grieves me to see how religion loses its way, today, while its scriptural teachings are coopted for secular power and gain. Religion has allowed political values of pride and dominance to define its mission. Politically driven, religiosity is necessarily divisive. I see this divisiveness as a perversion of the inspiring myths of historical scriptures and particularly the implicit message of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Genesis story, with various interpretations, some, admittedly troubling, has nevertheless been a formative myth in western thinking and has at its core this primary vision; that goodness is greatness are connected and that humanity was conceived in divine love.

When creation is finally completed, as one account in Genesis reads: “ God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” According to the account, God, does not articulate this while talking to himself. Some editor of Genesis wrote this, convinced of the creation’s fundamental goodness.

And maybe that’s the point; After the creation is established and evolves and we make our transitions from the innocence of Eden into the complexities and paradoxes of life east of Eden, it remains our responsibility, and the fundamental task of our humanity to revere the goodness in each other and act with gratitude toward the planet that sustains us.

While making a case for the creative potential of talking to oneself I should add a couple of caveats. On those occasions when I strike my thumb with a hammer, I speak commandingly, and loudly and to myself. Fortunately, no one hears it. It’s typically one word, hardly redeeming and never creative.

Grumbling is another variation in this business of monologues. Grumbling is usually a direct response to someone who irritates me and with whom I have unfinished business. To the extent that my grumbling may resolve the matter happily, it can be redemptive. I’ve noticed when I grumble a lot, I’m really not resolving anything. I’m only fueling the indignation with my sense of my righteousness.

I say if the true spirit of creativity seizes you and you find you are talking to yourself, go for it. You really can’t go wrong. After all, It’s next to godliness.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Change by George Merrill

February 9, 2020 by George R. Merrill

Life’s the passage we make through one change after another. Impermanence is the name of the game.

On Halloween 2012, shortly after hurricane Sandy had ravaged the East Coast, Carol Pruitt Moore, a life-long resident of Tangier Island motored by boat to see what was left of the island’s tiny village of Canaan. Earl Swift, in his engaging book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, writes an elegy for the disappearing island and its way of life.

Tangier Island will soon be claimed by the Bay.

Swift writes how Moore made a melancholy discovery that day as she went ashore near Canaan; the family gravesites that once occupied the ground beyond Canaan had been inundated by the Bay. She discovered a grave and, “. . . a few feet away the second grave and in it a complete skeleton . . . partially exposed with hair combs held fast by clay on either side of its skull . . . a third grave containing a tiny casket inside a bigger coffin and in the middle, the skeleton of a small child perhaps no more than the toddler, its shroud had long since succumbed to rot but two white buttons that held the garment closed were aligned on the child’s breastbone.”

In only 40 years, one quarter mile of the island became inundated by the Bay, including the many who had been interred on their beloved island.

I am not writing this with the matter of global warming necessarily in mind. Indeed, it may be exacerbating the inundation of the island, but I believe in this case the process had been underway long before climate change had accelerated in the way it has recently.

I write with the reality of impermanence very much on my mind. Perhaps more than any other certainty dictating the nature of my life and yours, none is more compelling or is more actively denied than the fact that everything – and I mean everything – is changing. Being an octogenarian helps bring the matter home in even more immediate ways. I learn daily of contemporaries that have died. “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away,” the scriptures tell us.

Forever and ever is, in fact, mutable.

But why does any discussion of impermanence matter at all, that is, having a conscious awareness of inevitable changes? I believe that awareness is highly influential in how we live. The knowledge shifts values. What really matters becomes a lot clearer.

Now, with today’s increased longevity being the norm, issues of aging and death are more frequently discussed. A familiar story goes something like this: we learn from a physician that a loved one has a limited time to live. Our initial reaction is shock even though the person is well up in years and it’s obvious they have a limited time to live. I think the shock is because we live with the subliminal conviction that things are, after all, forever. We don’t do endings well, especially as endings inevitably force us to change the way we live.

In managing losses, we go through a period of anticipatory grieving and then feel sorrow and sadness. However, I have heard more and more such stories and how there is also a kind of psycho-spiritual shift that takes place when people are confronted with the highly personal realization of impermanence, of loss.

The value of the person we are soon to lose increases. They become even more precious. We become exquisitely conscious of this perhaps in ways we never have been and the time we have left assumes a character different from before. The loved one emerges in our hearts with greater clarity and with more profound appreciation than ever before and the quality of the remaining time spent together often becomes the most rewarding in the history of the relationship.

In the peculiar way life works, it’s only as we confront losses that we can appreciate the full measure of what we have and have had all the while.

The naïveté in the assumption that everything will remain the same has ramifications well outside of human interactions. It affects how we relate to our environment and to the natural world in general. The assumption that the environment is a static agent, something that is ‘just there’ and will always be there regardless of how we may regard and deal with it, has led to much of the chilling abuses and their resulting consequences, which the world is reaping today.

The environment is not permanent at all, and constantly changes as other forces interact with it. Nor, for that matter, are we permanent. How we accommodate to that change is our challenge.

The cornerstone of Buddhist spirituality is its insistence that to fully come to terms with the reality of life’s impermanence – like we’re going to die – is the requisite for living our lives abundantly. If it’s not forever, then each moment is something to be savored. It’s in those transient moments of life that we see glimpses of heaven in the wildflower and find eternity in the grain of sand. These moments are transient.

Impermanence is vigorously denied in daily life. Understandably so. Confronting its realities is painful. They create grief and mourning. I think of Carol Pruitt Moore and her kin on the tiny island that’s inching away day by day, and so she is losing not only the remains of her kin, but an entire way of life. For over two hundred and forty years this island was home to a way of life shaped by the rhythms of the Chesapeake’s winds, waves and the sea creatures that have lived in it.
It will soon be over. There’s nothing anyone could have done differently. There’s no one to blame. It’s the way it is.

What’s left is sadness and the memories that will eventually find their way into the lore of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States I call home.

It’s all about change.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Compassion by George Merrill

February 2, 2020 by George R. Merrill

It’s painful enough to suffer. To suffer alone is excruciating.

For many years in my professional life, I worked with recovering substance abusers and their families. The road to recovery is a torturous road. Anyone who has had an experience in dealing with victims as well as their families knows. One of the qualities that a victim of substance-abuse loses very quickly is his or her sense of personal worth. Underneath the defensive façade of bravado and grandiosity there is a deep-seated feeling of worthlessness and self-hate, of personal failure and almost all of the negative traits that being human can produce. One of the things that I’ve noticed in the years working in this field is how important it is that someone sees in them qualities of goodness. I don’t mean by that lavishing a person with inappropriate praise. Imputing goodness to others is more an attitude than words. What is communicated here is the sense that the caregiver really does care about the person. They see something in the substance abuser that is inherently good. The perception may not be expressed in so many words like ‘I love you’ or ‘you’re really fine person’ or ‘you’re destined for great things.’ It’s subliminal. I suppose seen one way, the ability to impute goodness and worth to another reflects the inherent goodness and sense of worth of the one attributing the goodness.

Years ago, in a clinic in Connecticut where I was working with recovering people there was a social worker. He was very disagreeable man. His years in the field had jaded him and he treated his patients with a contempt that made me cringe. I remember how he would make statements like, “You know, you see one of these guys and you’ve seen them all; they’re all the same; chronic misfits.” The inability of this particular caregiver to see anything but the ravages of a person’s disease was more a comment about the poverty of his own soul than descriptive of the person of the recovering alcoholic. I don’t know why the clinic kept him on. Nonetheless the damage was being done all the while. In the eyes of a recovering person he undoubtedly saw in his care givers eyes, the same debilitating contempt that the recovering person had for himself.

That we might admire goodness in others, inclines us to want to appropriate the same goodness for ourselves, prompting the feeling, “I’d like to be the way they are.”

Is essential goodness latent in all of us, the way the oak abides in the acorn, waiting for its time?

I suspect it’s there, eager to be called forth.

Caring is one of humanity’s oldest instincts. It has languished at times, but it’s never been lost. The golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” popularly associated with Christ, is in fact a teaching that long precedes Christ. It has been preached and taught, if not always practiced, for thousands of years. It’s indelibly impressed in human consciousness, and in weal and woe, the desire for acting compassionately surfaces periodically.

In some instances, the desire for goodness is institutionalized. I’m familiar with Talbot Mentors, one such organization here in Talbot County. I have mentored a young man for twenty-four years. I met him when he was eight.

The reciprocal nature of goodness is relevant here. I believe my decision to be a mentor was to do good. I also knew it was reparative –– I mean by that, I wanted to help, but also to heal something in myself in the process. I was acutely conscious then of having not been as available to my own children as I’d wished. I was making it up to them through the boy I mentored. That did not mitigate the good that came from it. The boy lost his way in his late teens through drugs and criminal behavior. He pushed me away for a while. Eventually it became clear that the relationship was important to him and recently we reconnected. It turned out that my presence in his life had been useful. Caring carries a lot of weight in the human equation. It goes two ways.

Perhaps the simplest way to make the point about goodness and caring is to invite us to review our lives and to recall the people for whom we’ve felt an intuitive sense of gratitude. It’s typically teachers, but may be others with whom we’ve had minimal contact. Whoever they may have been, they left us with an indelible impression of their goodness, and in a reciprocal way, communicated to us something of our own.

As I write this, I recall Herr Raichle, my German teacher. He would address us by name; “Herr Merrill,” he’d say and then ask me to say or read something in German. There was something in the way he looked at the students –– communicating profound respect and regard –– that made us feel important, cared for. Somebody’s there for me.

It’s encouraging how in today’s cynical world that a man who tells us he does nothing, wants only to be kind and compassionate –– that’s all –– captures the hearts and imaginations of millions. There’s an aura about the Dalai Lama that is convincing. What is it about compassion and kindness that stir the heart and change people’s lives and how what’s so seemingly insubstantial and fragile as those qualities will move people deeply, often to tears? I believe what people see in the Dalai Lama’s eyes is a clear affirmation that they are not alone. Someone cares. Kindness and goodness are there. We need only look for them.

A footnote: The word compassion, from its Latin origins means: “to suffer together.” In Aramaic, the word derives from “rehem,” the word for ‘womb,’ suggesting an attitude of primal care and unconditional concern for another.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Shadows by George Merrill

January 26, 2020 by George R. Merrill

The other day I was out walking. As I went up the driveway, my shadow extended before me at a remarkable length, twice, maybe three times my height. I could not believe that I looked so tall. I enjoyed the feeling that, at least for the moment, I was ten feet tall. The feeling was short-lived. I must confess I was enthralled with my own shadow.

I’ve seen my shadow this way hundreds of times in my life, but perhaps it made a greater impression on me now because at my age I’m growing shorter.

There’s a little boy living in me who does not want to grow up. He doesn’t want to grow shorter either. On my walk that day I met this little boy once again in my shadow, and although I’ve aged, I knew right away my little boy wanted to play. So, I began playing. I tried to get the shadow to look like Darth Vader, the character from Star Wars.

The challenge was to position my body with the sun at my back to produce a shape like his; particularly to replicate the helmet on his head that identifies Darth Vader. Raising my arms near my head I could get the bottom part of the helmet visually contained within my shadow, but suddenly, postured this way and that, the entire shadow became a monolith with two burning eyes created by the light escaping from the raised arms near my elbows. I got into the game, but couldn’t get my shadow to do my bidding. My shadow had a mind of its own.

I’ve been wondering recently about the shadows we cast, but shadows of a very different kind.

I watched a Trump rally once. For an hour, he relentlessly vilified a host of perceived enemies. He denounced them as, liars, cheats, fakers, schemers, traitors, bad people, crooked, dishonest, conspirators, spies, despicable but to quote some. Trump, of course, was describing his own character traits.

The shadow knows.

Attributing to others our own undesirable traits is an ingrained human characteristic. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, identified the phenomenon naming it our ‘shadow side,’ that darker side of our personality that we unconsciously disown.

Jung tells us that the ‘shadow side’ contains all those ugly attributes we possess, but we cannot admit them to our own consciousness. Instead, we impute them to others.

For people who may be influential, like high-profile celebrities or others who may enjoy social status and public confidence such as clergy, care givers and political leaders, their shadow can be very destructive. Here the matter of an unacknowledged shadow side becomes potentially ominous because such people are widely recognized and have credibility and authority. Their shadow side, if they are unaware of it, can wreak havoc on all those others upon whom this shadow might fall.

Recent disclosures of sexual abuse perpetrated by both Protestant and Catholic clergy disturbed Americans. How, we asked, could men sworn to virtue and commissioned by the church to serve others faithfully, maintain a façade of moral righteousness while actively engaging in sexual abuse? Even though the clerics may have turned their back on their shadows, the shadows never went away. Know thyself is more than a cliché. In the human family, this knowledge of self can avert a lot of pain and suffering.

Frederick Douglass wrote about his experience as a slave. He mentions two ordained clergy who were his slave masters. They were preachers and followers of Jesus Christ. They had spiritual authority invested in them by their denomination, and enjoyed the economic and social status the state granted them as land owners.

“All the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.” Douglas writes. “I have found them the meanest, basest, the most cruel and cowardly of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in community with such religionists. Rev. Daniel Weeden owned a woman slave . . . this woman’s back was literally raw, made so by the lash of this merciless religious wretch. Rev. Rigby Hopkins was even worse than Mr. Weeden. Both ministers were ordained in the reformed Methodist Church. The peculiar feature of Rev. Hopkins was that of whipping slaves in advance of ‘deserving it.’ He always managed to have one or more slaves to whip every Monday morning. He did this to alarm their fears and strike terror in those escaped.”

What would Jesus do? He certainly wouldn’t do that. What did these ministers think Jesus would do, anyway? I don’t imagine they gave it much thought. If they had, Weeden and Hopkins would have to know that Jesus made it clear how he didn’t want anyone to be his servants or slaves, he wanted them to be his friends. It’s right there in the Bible, in the Gospel of John.

Their shadow side had been successfully hidden from them. They kept it behind them and out of sight. To acknowledge their shadow side would jeopardize business. Free labor (slave holding) was a money maker, labor was costly to get (slaves weren’t cheap) and slaves were very hard to keep (they often ran away.)

We all have a shadow side. Our own shadow side contributes to many of our petty prejudices and aversions. In the normal course of events, it causes no great harm.

About my own shadow, then?

In this column, I choose not share the shadow side of my personality that I’m painfully aware of. The reason is simple enough; it’s embarrassing. To redeem myself some I will say this: I have given serious consideration to its nature and have tried diligently not to let my shadow side intimidate my better angels. Of course, I’m talking only about the shadow I can see, like the shadow falling in front of me on my walks. I know I’m sure to be blindsided by the one I can’t see behind me.

Certain shadows we cast may lead us to believe we’re bigger than we really are. For those of you who see just such a shadow and believe it’s an actual portrayal of you, I offer this caution. Tell those closest to you about it; a spouse, partner, especially your children, the older they are, the better. Be careful not to intimidate them, and they will tell you, not what you want to hear, but what you need to know.

Nothing but a passing cloud makes that long and grandiose shadow disappear as quickly as when your kin tell you how they really see you . . . including your shadow.

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