There are those of us who, through life’s exigencies, are forced to temporarily leave the sanctuary of Tilghman Island and regions surrounding Saint Michaels. We travel to the big city as some might consider Easton or the outlets in Queenstown. Personally, I find the drive a drag.

Still, it falls the lot for us to spend enormous amounts of time in a car. Household and personal needs will require us to go beyond this haven of tranquility in which we live. If we are young and strong we might like walking the road, at least partially. Some local health nuts and exercise freaks may be seen garbed in florid colors, swinging their arms with rigorous determination. They resemble boxers, not with gloves, but with water bottles firmly in hand, taking determined strides, and defiantly heading to unknown destinations. I’ve seen stalwart souls walk the road, not for exercise, but out of necessity. They carry shopping bags from Grauls back to town – some occasionally walk in the rain. I’ve picked up some. In any case, the St Michaels Road is a busy stretch.

I find driving the road tedious. It demands my full attention, or more accurately, numbs it. For an aging man who, for starters, has a limited attention span, and concentrating on the road takes all I’ve got. But in rare moments of deliverance, there are stunning exhibitions of natural beauty that dazzle me and make it all worthwhile. Driving early one morning to make an appointment in Easton became one such occasion.

Getting beyond the Philistine monuments to commerce that block the periphery of St. Michaels, and proceeding just beyond Grauls, the land begins opening up and I can still see the remnants of the region’s agricultural past. Its simple charm is the openness; its expansiveness has a way of reverberating through the spaces of our hearts, those interior regions where Buddhists tell us we find the boundless space of our being. For some, this might seem an overstatement, but I’ll still stand by it: being next to wide open fields is a liberating feeling. It evokes a sense of freedom and possibility. And It sure beats looking at big boxes.

For the season, it was warmer that particular morning. The sun was edging its way above the trees as mist began materializing maybe thirty feet high on either side of the road. I was driving southeast into the sunrise. The developing moisture in the cold air, precipitated by heat from the sunrise meeting the cool earth generated the early morning mist. The mist was illuminated by the sun’s back lighting, so it glowed the way light shines through translucent glass.

The trees, which of course I knew full well were rooted in the earth, I now saw otherwise. It was as if they were growing like hydroponic vegetation, not from somewhere rooted in the earth, but levitating from the surface of some water in which they’d been floating. Their branches appeared as though they were lines drawn from a charcoal pen on a silver canvas.

I proceeded along the road. These ghostly apparitions came and went, but why they appeared in one field and not another wasn’t clear to me. The display did this much for me that morning; the normal tedium of that drive dissipated as some of the mists did, but alternately enchanting me all the way until just shy of the Easton bypass. Unexpected differences lend spice to life.

If I had to abandon the wilds of our rural shore and trek to the big city, this was the way to go.

The drive from St. Michaels to Easton, although it varies some, is effectively a west- east trek, or the other way, an east-west drive. Coming east in the early morning points me directly into the rising sun. I’ll find myself frequently flying blind since such brilliant light obscures my ability to see the scenery in detail or even see it at all. Coming west towards the evening sun, the same sort of thing occurs; creating moments when I can see nothing but a sheet of pure light.

It’s curious how light’s properties are associated mostly with what they illuminate for us; ‘shedding light’ on things is common parlance. How this same light is just as able to blind us as it is to illuminate our path is paradoxical. I have thought of this before in other connections; that is, how darkness and shadows we think of as obscuring our landscapes, keep us from seeing what we wish to, but in fact reveal what we do well to see. Experience has led me to believe that in the last analysis, shadows are as important to seeing the big picture and to apprehend the whole landscape, as is light.

I’d note here that the regulation of climate differences forms the mists that delight us. Mist is tiny droplets of water suspended in the air, formed when warmer water in the air is rapidly cooled, causing it to change from invisible gas to tiny visible water droplets. Temperatures must have sufficient differentiation for the phenomenon to occur.

I see immigration for America in a similar way; peoples of sufficient differences –– whether they are color, nationality, ethnicity, language and unique skills –– when brought together in common cause create a new and vibrant landscape for us all.

I suppose it’s a little like the day I had to leave my usual and familiar comfort zone –– my sanctuary just outside of St. Michaels –– and travel the road to another place: then I could see clearly how the regulation of differences creates new and infinite possibilities.

It’s a beautiful thing, really.

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.

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I am a creature of darkness.

Friends and relatives tell me that they regret seeing the days of lingering sunlight ending when daylight savings time ends. They have happily basked in long days of the late spring, summer and early fall light, and now mourn their passing. Not me. I find refuge in the cover of darkness

It’s not as though I’m a goth person who likes sinister things. I haven’t worn black clothes since my early days a parish priest. Yes, I have a melancholy streak but I’m not creepy about it. The darkness is different for me, a positive thing. It’s like this: there is nothing I find more satisfying than, in the latter days of October, laying a fire just after sunset, mixing a libation and sitting by a blazing fire with only one lamp lit in the room, a light just bright enough to read my book. Then I feel as though I’m in tune with the world. Indeed, I may well be. Darkness serves our well-being as much as light does: we are diurnal creatures. Darkness doesn’t usually get the kind of favorable press that light does.

In this regard I’m in good company, if not necessarily everyone’s favorite company; a vast variety of our planet’s other inhabitants like insects, bats, rodents, opossums, badgers, many birds and turtles, and certain kinds of vegetation find refuge in darkness. For them, too, it’s a positive thing. They go about their business in the same way I do, only spending their nights as if they were my day, traveling about from here to there with daily chores. In the case of many plants, they grow mostly at night. I remain sedentary, fixed in a chair. Each of us, in our own way, is glad to be under the cloak of darkness. Darkness, however, is coming under assault in the postmodern world. The assault is called light pollution.

Light pollution is now encroaching on our precious darkness. Excessive night-time lighting that’s misdirected (up and out rather than down) and artificial (think large parking lots and stadiums) lights that appear in many quarters of population centers, disrupt the diurnal rhythms of the natural world. Too much light pollution also washes out starlight in the night sky, interferes with astronomical research, disrupts ecosystems, has adverse health effects and wastes energy. The ubiquitous presence of streetlights has become a significant factor in light pollution.

Whoever could have imagined that light shining in the darkness could become a liability. Any good thing when in the hands of man, is often made toxic.

I recall how the streetlights of my boyhood were unlike today’s streetlights that cast mostly cool light. Back then, the streets threw a light that had a soft, orange hue, different than the lighting of today’s streets, office buildings or big boxes. There’s a cold chill to present lighting, perhaps reflecting the less kindly milieu that surrounds us, today. However, I must say that the gentle ambience of softer light did little to temper my boyhood social conduct.

Neighborhood street lights consisted of large, disc-like shades that were metal, round, scalloped and with a large lightbulb in the center. They provided neighborhood boys a vulnerable target to practice our marksmanship. Which of us kids could hit the bulb first; it was a matter of honor among us. It was total misbehavior, to be sure, but in the passage of time, I can see where my malicious conduct may have, in the big picture, served a greater good. Actually, I may have been, although inadvertently, an early activist addressing the evils of light pollution.

It was not that I set out to do mischief every night or to address the problem of light pollution. Popping streetlights happened randomly, like weather, and for no reason I can identify. It would predictably occur on hot summer nights when a few of the neighborhood boys would roam nearby streets not initially to do harm, but just wander around aimlessly as I’ve seen bats and insects swarm in circles around the streetlights. Then, during one of these casual sorties, one kid might suggest we try to knock out the light at the corner down the street. That streetlight, while in the vicinity of our homes, was far enough away that we felt sufficient anonymity existed there to get away with it. The attempt organized itself sufficiently so that each boy took turns – one rock per person – while the rest of us watched.

As I recall this, my actions may have been inspired as much by the allure of the darkness we created as it had to do with my fascination with spectacle of dying light. In a perverse kind of way, my actions were preserving the integrity of the night.

In any case, what followed was thrilling: after several attempts, my rock hit the light. The light actually grew brighter when hit. The bulb flared up for a matter of seconds, sputtered, and in its death throes, sprayed sparks into the night like fireworks, and then slowly went out, hissing all the while as it finally surrendered to the darkness of the summer night. I was experiencing how the thrill that being intentionally malicious is pleasurable; misdeeds may reverberate through the human heart like the tremulous musical notes that shiver along our auditory faculties. There’s something neat about being bad. Forbidden fruit is sweet.

We remained momentarily still, awed at the strike. Then we scrambled and ran in all directions, like cockroaches fleeing for the cover of darkness after the kitchen lights are flipped on. The streetlight episodes remain imprinted in my mind as does the recognition of how willful wrongdoing can be a thrilling business, and paradoxically may even address an evil that has not as yet been identified.

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.

Courtesy today is an arcane word. Its practice is a lost art.

Society has grown combative and crude. Expressing opinions is a blood sport. We live in a culture of incivility.

Julian of Norwich lived in the 14th century. She is one of Christianity’s revered mystics. In her writings called Revelations she describes moments in which God “gives to her understanding” of his deep and divine mysteries. Many of her revelations are obscure and hard to grasp. One revelation she writes about, is her understanding of courtesy. This revelation is clear. Who would have thought how significant the matter of courtesy was for her and for her spiritual life? In the hardscrabble life of 14th century England, it’s a wonder that anything like courtesy could be so important. Here is the passage roughly paraphrased:

“For our courteous Lord wants that we be close (intimate) with him as our minds and hearts desire. . . For our Lord, himself . . . is very courteous.”

I’ve wondered what she might be getting at. She describes both intimacy and courtesy as divine attributes, saying in effect, this is what God is like.

As a boy, I liked listening to the Sherlock Holmes series on the radio. He called his housekeeper “Mrs. Hudson.” I thought he was being gracious and acting very courteously. I imagined a man of his social status might well have addressed her by her first name. He instead addressed her with the respectful title of ‘Mrs.,’ suggesting that his social status did not entitle him to be dismissive or condescending.

Courtesy and kindness, while important, are more than good manners. They communicate esteem in which we wish to hold others and signal to them our desire to have them be our friends, or at the least, agreeable acquaintances.

I enjoy feeling respected. I like respecting others. This desire finds it expression with the first greetings I make so casually when I meet others. In fact, salutations worldwide vary remarkably in style, but their meaning stays the same. The intent of a greeting has been expressed eloquently by the late Mr. Rogers (of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood fame) who regularly extended courtesy to his viewing audience by his iconic salutation; “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

Worldwide we greet one another so differently.

In New Zealand, native people put their foreheads together and look each other in the eye to be neighborly. It reassures the two that they wish no ill and want to be friends.

In Japan, greetings are extended with a formal bow from the waist and with lowered eyes. The deeper the bow the more respect the greeting communicates.

In India, they say “Namaste” and place hands together in a prayerful way. Both Indian and Tai salutations imply that he or she is acknowledging the divine in you. A Christian might think of it as acknowledging that you and I are made in the image of God.

Expect an unusual greeting in Tibet. Should a native stick out his tongue at me, not to worry; he’s only saying hello. While alarming to Westerners, it’s a goodwill gesture. It takes westerners a little getting used to. The greeter wishes to show you he does not have the black tongue of the evil prince who once, in ancient Tibetan lore, brought suffering and evil upon everyone. It’s a Tibetan’s way of reassuring you that he’s okay and you’re okay.

How different we are and how easily we can misunderstand each other. On one side of the world we’d say this salutation was another Bronx cheer–– on the other side, we’d say it was courtesy.

Jews say “Shalom,” meaning peace be with you, as Muslims greet others with “As-Salaam-Alaikum” extending a similar sentiment. The more libidinal French and Spanish characteristically launch social relationships with a kiss on the cheek. For them there’s no question that it’s okay to kiss when meeting for the first time and I suspect this extends as well to kissing on the first date.

All this to say there is a primal desire in you and me for a “courteous” relationship with others where we can enjoy, however briefly, a measure of closeness and intimacy. In these days, the hunger for this is growing – I believe it is being felt as a kind of longing, a craving for something to sate a pervasive sense of loneliness, an unsated appetite deep within us for feeling we’re cared for.

The need for courteous and close relationships is not just a social nicety. Here in the States the need has reached epidemic proportions and even aroused the concerns of the medical community.

According to AARP, about one-third of U.S. adults age 45 and older report feeling lonely.

We are a lonely people, disconnected and yearn for belonging.

I’ve noticed that asking strangers for directions is peculiarly satisfying. By reaching for help I bring out the natural inclination in others to assist. I believe people genuinely want to help. I understand this inclination as one variation of courtesy, which I’d also call kindness. We enjoy knowing we can be of help to others and when the situations present themselves, that is, when it’s clear that we can actually make a difference, we welcome the opportunity.

It’s common today to see bumper stickers that exhort us to “Practice Random Acts of Kindness.” These statements bring out the best in us. They remind us to be more courteous.

Another encouraging development is emerging in our time of incivility.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor is a recent film exploring the legacy of Fred Rogers and his radically kind ideas. Rogers stood firm in his belief about the importance of protecting childhood and the power of kindness. This film goes “into the heart of a creative genius who inspired generations of children with compassion and limitless imagination.” Its rave reviews suggest its statement is capturing the hearts of Americans.

It’s a sad commentary on how we live when kindness has become a radical idea. A little courtesy not only goes a long way; Julian of Norwich says it’s next to godliness.

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.

I see Christmas trees everywhere. They’re delightful, part of the celebrations of our holidays. Regardless of religious affiliation, most folks find Christmas trees, with all their colorful decorations and bright lights, heartwarming.

Bright lights, however, cast shadows. For many people this season, the holidays will bring painful reminders that someone whom they’ve loved is not there.  Significant losses like these can make the holiday season an occasion for sadness, and make the homes which once felt secure and happy, seem empty and even hostile. Around Christmas, the wounds from such losses often become inflamed like unhealed scars, creating renewed pain and sadness. Christmas trees cast light but they can also remind us of the darkness.

Trees belong to the same species as plants, and what we generally call ‘Christmas trees’ belong to the conifer family. They’re survivors.  Conifers are the first trees in the emerging history of vegetation to have made it successfully out of the sea to live prolifically on dry land. By some counts, their historic longevity equals that of insects, one of earth’s first surface residents, outdoing the long history of even the ubiquitous cockroach. Like so many of life’s significant transitions, the conifer’s arrival on land was not without struggle. At first, it didn’t want to be on land at all. It took conifers a long time to learn how to survive outside the safety of the sea, as it does for you and me when we’re wrested from safe place and our lives are turned upside down.  When plants were first heaved from the ocean onto dry land to become our first trees, they eventually discovered the means of their survival, and it arrived unexpectedly, like a gift. 

Initially, all life forms lived in the sea. It was a place where they felt safe.  Water provided them dependable transportation, built-in nutrition and defense against nature’s most potent force, gravity.  Plants’ fragile structures were protected against gravity’s powerful downward tug by the sea’s buoyancy, without which plants on dry land would be crushed. 

Storms heaved and churned the sea, however, and for thousands of years discharged its plant inhabitants abruptly onto the arid and harsh shores of planet earth. Expelled from the aquatic safety and familiarity of their lives, they simply dried up at first, and without the structural density to counteract gravity, it seemed as if no plants would never make the transition from sea to land alive. They were stranded high and dry and died. The antecedents of conifers, in the midst of their ordeal, had evolved wood cells within them. The properties of these wood cells provided plants the rigidity by which they could withstand the new realities of gravity on land.  The wood cell also contained vessels for storing and transmitting water and nutrients. They could now remain sufficiently hydrated to live on land until they could grow. The sea plant evolved into a tree, eventually standing tall in its new and alien world because it found strength in its evolving cell. Where did the cell come from? It didn’t seem to be there at first.  What creates such miracles of biological diversity? 

My guess is that it’s all something in the divine scheme, in the mind of God, some would say, which I can only wonder at, but this I know: in the spiritual life, as in the natural world, what we may need at any time for our survival often arrives just in time. When disruptive changes come upon us, and it seems as if we’ll never have the strength to stand firm against the strong downward pull of adversity and the terrible aridity of irreversible losses, hidden sources of strength suddenly reveal themselves, and we not only survive, but begin our lives again as new creatures. 

I believe there’s a biological or cosmological equivalent to St. Paul’s inspired vision in which he says: “My grace is sufficient for thee for my power is made perfect in weakness.” In moments of our greatest vulnerability we discover we are being given what we need just when we need it, most. Our life processes, our living and dying, are the mechanism of becoming. At different times our needs vary and our lives are always changing. We’re like living rivers that twist and turn but manage to stay with the banks on their destination for an unseen sea. We go with the flow, having little idea just where we’ll end.  

Along the way we’re jostled by the falls and rapids, surprised at the view, saying to ourselves, “I never thought I’d wind up here.”  Like the aquatic plants were, we are driven by force from the security we enjoyed. We tread water, sure that we haven’t an ounce of strength left to go on. Then a miracle happens, silently, unseen, and we discover within ourselves just enough to make it through the ordeal. That’s what happened to the first conifers, the ancestors of our Christmas trees.

In John’s first epistle he writes how as children of God “what we shall become has not yet been made known.” The conifers didn’t know their destiny, either, and their history is instructive in the ways of becoming.  How we understand this process of becoming is a matter of faith. But that we will uncover new strength during the process of becoming is a matter of record, written in the story of this magnificent evolving universe in which we live.

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.

Christmas without a Christmas tree? New Years without Champagne? Can you imagine the Fourth of July without franks, beans, and fireworks? What’s Memorial Day without American flags, solemn remembrances, and parades, or a Valentine’s Day without its heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and cards that say, ‘I love you.’ A pumpkinless Halloween is unimaginable.

I must tell you, however, that I can imagine a Thanksgiving without turkey and all the trimmings more readily than I can Thanksgiving Day without electronics. I had a sobering revelation last Thanksgiving.

I want to paint you the picture that remains indelibly imprinted in my mind, no, not imprinted, but seared into my memory. It occurred here on Thanksgiving Day last year. We had four of our grandchildren with us, all adolescent girls, and their parents. There were also the two of us. This is the typical complement of people here on Thanksgiving, a cadre of eight.

The dining room table works well for this number, and we can feed everyone. We have plenty of room for the several platters of food and the decorations that our grandchildren assemble for the occasion.

Our den is a different matter. It’s tight in there for eight people if everyone sits in there for the football game or the parade. My wife and I will not do usually sit with them. We’ll be tending to the cooking. The kids will chip in cheerfully should we ask. This leaves the six in a manageable space where they can settle in and watch TV.

I have an un-American streak. I don’t really enjoy watching football on TV, nor any sports, for that matter. I take some good-natured heat from my red-blooded American kin (including my wife), who are all sports-freaks. Some will wisecrack during the football game, calling out from the den (for my benefit) that a player just made another home run.

It’s all a part of the Thanksgiving ambiance. It is what we do. It’s fun.

Everyone was in the den that day, except Jo and me. I was in the kitchen, opening oysters. In an hour, I’d make a fire in the fireplace, the kids would make crab and cheese dip and we’d have drinks, and oysters by an open fire.

I went into the den to announce that we’d soon be moving into the living room for our hors d’oeuvres. I stood watching.

It isn’t as if the electronic era just arrived on that Thanksgiving. I know it’s been around for a long time. I can only attribute the size of the room to the stunned impression I felt. The room was packed elbow to arm with bodies, all of whom were deeply engrossed in their own electronic devices; the kids on their iPhones, parents on their computers while the television in one corner of the room attempted vainly to communicate its message of male virility to anyone who might look at the football game. No one did. It was a signature portrait of American individuality – of being together while at the same time not being together at all. I found it a remarkable sight.

I’ve sometimes wondered, when I’m out at a restaurant, and somebody has a conversation on a cell phone, why it irritates me so. It may be an unexamined assumption I have. I want my fellow diners to be enjoying the same space as I am, but their behavior suggests that they have little interest in it. I was going to say that their mouths were at the restaurant, but their hearts were elsewhere. Of course, their mouths weren’t there either since they were running them with someone somewhere out in cyberspace.

Frankly, I was genuinely surprised at the scene I beheld in the den last Thanksgiving but was not all that offended as I might have been in a restaurant. This was because I knew when they all left the den to go into the living room for hors d’oeuvres, while they would not surrender their electronics, they’d neutralize them for the moment and be ready to join in the community tradition of our pre-Thanksgiving dinner game of Charades played by a roaring fire.

The television is to the postmodern family what the fireplace had been to our colonial forebears. Then, everyone gathered by the fire for warmth and to talk. Today families gather around the television to be quiet and to watch.

I would observe that the pleasures of TV are more solitary and don’t do much for the mind. One screen now provides all the needs of the mind, the words to hear, and then pictures that illustrate the words. Around a fire, family conversation provides the words, and the imagination keeps creating the pictures.

Don’t get me wrong. After all, as a writer, I’m often on a computer, and I love to watch old movies on TV. My point: daily life in the electronic era is a new world. It’s added another dimension to an old tradition. Except maybe for the turkey, the pilgrims wouldn’t have a clue as to what we’re are all about on Thanksgiving.

In any event, via this electronic communication, I extend to all of you my wishes for a lovely Thanksgiving Day.

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.

Of all the things, I’m routinely in and out of, there are none more than doors. Doors are a signature feature of my daily life.

Coming or going, we meet doors at almost every turn. I would reckon that in the course of my lifetime, I’ve come and gone through millions of doors. Yet I rarely take notice of them. For something as omnipresent as doors, they remain surprisingly invisible. And so, in reflection, it seemed surprising to me a while ago driving along, I noticed several doors. The doors were hanging in an old derelict motel located just north of Easton on Route 50. At first glance, the doors were a sorry sight, but for all their wear and tear, I found the sight of them compelling, enough so that I pulled my car over to have a closer look.

The motel was brick, the one-story kind, stretching out like a set of row houses and arranged in a semi-circle forming a courtyard in front. Except for an occasional beer can, there was surprisingly little rubble in the courtyard although only a few panes of glass remained in any of the window frames. The sidewalks were overtaken with a luxuriant growth of weeds and vines, and oddly, a flower or two sprung up from between displaced bricks as if to affirm that there is always life manifesting itself amidst the ravages of time. Inside some units I saw scattered junk: old furniture here, some wire there, metal cabinets. In one unit, I saw a small alcohol stove, a couple of plastic chairs arranged as if for conversation and two mattresses on the floor. This unit, unlike the others, appeared to be a way stop. The motel although derelict, still provided a modicum of hospitality to some less fortunate travelers on their journey to another and hopefully better life somewhere on the Delmarva.

However, my eyes were drawn again and again to the doors, most of them still intact, half open, their fronts lit by the sun, highlighting the darkness within as if in its terminal condition the motel was declaring that even in its twilight days that it was still game to do what it always had, that is, provide hospitality and a functional door to assure the safety of tired travelers.

In summers, up and down the Peninsula, motel populations swell with happy vacationers on their way east and south, “downee ocean” as Marylanders say. Cars are packed with bags and toys for the beach while kids repeatedly ask ‘are we there yet,’ all seeking the sun and fun of the Delmarva coastline. Folks come from Baltimore, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and other cities as they have for years. For the last several years they will have passed this abandoned motel just north of Easton and probably never noticed it, in the way a motorists’ eyes hardly see the road as gazes remain fixed on the cars in front of them. After a while, on long drives, it’s easy to become inured to the passing landscape that’s so flat here, except for more garish billboards, like those up and down the highways that display advertisements for restaurants, motels, casinos and lawyers who. dressed in suits, assure us of the kind of aggressive representation that we are entitled to for being victims of our misfortunes.

The small abandoned motel north of Easton certainly had its day – not even its sign remained – and the only witness left to honor its contribution to the life of past summer migrations to the Peninsula were its doors. The doors still hung on their frames, still able to open and close. A few locks worked so some doors and could still provide one of a door’s most important historic functions, that is, to safely secure its inhabitants for the night.

For many, the word, “motel” doesn’t imply real class, any suggestion of elegance as say, the word “hotel” or “inn” does. The inn of colonial times, which we have romanticized today, may have then provided you a bed, but no hot and cold running water, heating in winter or screens on the windows and air conditioning in summer. Forget indoor toilets. You’d get a chamber pot or have to use a privy, and probably share your bed with strangers. Our modern motels, however marginal they may be, have a leg up on any inn of old. Comfort trumps class for most travelers. Today, in the humblest of motels, we enjoy most all of those amenities denied travelers in colonial times, including our choice of whom we’d prefer sleeping. In that sense, the derelict motel I saw may be more representative of the inns of old, than the trendy reproductions of today.

Of all the doors at the old motel that intrigued me the most, was the one designated room number ‘9.’ I wondered as I watched shadows play around the curled folds of peeling paint, what those stories may have been that the door had overheard, tales by people who had once come by to stop and to rest on their journey ‘downee ocean,’ and often somewhere beyond.

I imagined that the face of that door, like the faces of some of the many aged men and woman I’ve come to know in the last several years for whom each wrinkle that time had etched into them, had a story. And indeed, the door façades too were rippled with weathered wood and peeling paint. They had become a silent witness to stories which will be lost to history.

One day as I drove by I saw that the hotel had been razed. Only an empty lot remained leaving barely a trace of its existence. A brief seizure of melancholy overtook me, in the way that I often feel visiting old historic grave sites. I know nothing of the people interred there except, when reading epitaphs, I hear a distant voice whispering to me: “Remember friend as you walk by –– as you are now, so once was I”

Doors open before us. They close behind us. And then one day a door finally closes behind us for the last time. I wonder though, when that door having closed behind me, will I have entered a whole new world that had been there all the while but unseen since the door had not yet been opened to me.

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 Trump Administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot away forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy.” New York Times, November 4th, 2019

Not long ago I looked at the weather report. I saw an alert had been issued by the weather service that coastal flooding was imminent.

The news alarmed me. I went to the window to see how the tides were affecting the shoreline of my property. We are close to the water. The signs were ominous. The tide had already topped the edges of the shoreline and was reaching much higher than normal. It was encroaching on the lawn, creeping up to the house. When I looked at the tide tables I discovered that flood tide would be at four o’clock. It was only noon. The water continued to rise. All I could do was watch. My lawn was newly replanted only days before. Would it survive an inundation of brackish water?

Inordinately high tides occur regularly around the Chesapeake. They’ve become higher now and are flooding more small towns and lowlands. I had accepted this as a way of life here on the shore. This time, however, with my newly planted lawn, the stakes were higher. It’s strange how something as critical to my survival as the issue of global warming is, can seem so remote until it creeps up on my front lawn. I don’t “get it” easily.

Over the last few years I have had a dream, like a vision. Recently it’s grown more vivid. It’s not the nocturnal sort dream or vision, but the kind of dream that hope inspires. It’s a daydream of sorts, but not an idle one. I cling to it.

This dream returns again and again and I pray about it. Things happen in the natural world around me that seem so mindless and destructive and I feel sad. I pray more fervently that the dream I have will come true.

I dream that one day our abuses of the environment (and of each other) will finally create such a backlash that deniability of the abuses will be out of the question – no more equivocations. This time what happens will be immediate to us, closer than the Arctic’s cascading ice shelves falling into the sea thousands of miles away or the chemical laden streams that catch fire as if they were heralding an apocalypse.

In those days, I dream that we will have as the director of the Environmental Protection Agency a man or woman who actually loves the natural world, the kind of a person suggested in the Genesis myth.

God, having created the world thinks his creation is good, “very good.” God has a stake in its future according to Genesis. He appoints someone he trusts to look after it. This is a sacred trust. “The Lord God took Adam (human kind) and placed him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.”

What does it look like to love the natural world, to tend it and to keep it, and I would add, to be its voice, its advocate? I believe it looks something like naturalist, W. H. Hudson’s tender description of a day in late April when he came upon “a shallow lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some weeks before hidden in a depression in the land among luxuriant furze (an evergreen shrub with flowers), bramble, and blackthorn bushes.”

He then writes, “I sat on a branch and rested for a long time enjoying the sight of that rare unexpected loveliness. Two or three warblers we’re flitting about among the alder leaves within a few feet of my head and a dozen at least we’re singing within a few feet of my head. I listen again to the birds then let my eyes rest on the expense of red and cream-colored spikes before me, then on the masses of flame colored furze beyond. This springtime verdure and bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the infinite blue of Heaven, the bell like double note of my little feathered neighbors and the alder trees; surely this is enough to satisfy my heart.”

This new “Adam,” this Agency Director, as I imagine him or her, would have this same passionate love of the earth in their hearts, and could not be driven from their task by power brokers. This director will be wise in the matters of the material world. This person would have feet on the ground (earth, not macadam) and an eye on the sky (weather, not high-rises); they would passionately love the natural with the fervor Mr. Hudson had. Love like that may save us and heal our planet

This director will have a realistic grasp of the needs of an industrial society in which she lives. He will, like Solomon, do justice. He will weigh the reasonable requirements of industrial production and still advocate for the earth. He or she will know that the natural world is not a commodity just to be bought, sold, and traded; this new Adam understands the natural world as a sacred trust, a planet to love, tend and care for.

Too Idealistic? Too Visionary? I sure hope so. That’s precisely the missing piece in managing our present environmental realities. Currently, I see no vision, no ideals, just expediency and greed.

Since that day of the flood advisories two more extremely high tides came and went. The weather finally grew cooler and with it returned intense blue skies, filled with gray-bellied white clouds and a brisk northwest wind of about forty knots. The northwest winds around here drive the tides out, making the ebbs unnaturally low. The tides ebbed and flooded, and for a while I felt safe. The feeling is illusory.

My world, the one in which I once thought tides were predictable and would remain always within bounds, had returned but only briefly. The world of my yesterday is long gone, and even higher tides will return as they must, because they are responding in the only ways they can to the deaf ears on which their warnings have fallen.

“Listen to the earth and it will teach you,” Job instructs us. Few listen.