I’ve noticed something, lately.

Since our lives were turned topsy-turvy when we were blindsided by my diagnosis, my wife and I have begun talking nonsense more frequently. As a result, we have grown remarkably closer. We used to consider mindless chatter like the weather and political discussions the bread of airheads. Now it’s food for the soul, a welcomed piece of our lives, a kind of non-sectarian speaking in tongues.

Our lives at this juncture are confined mostly to appointments with doctors and other medical facilities or just being with each other at home.

We’ve become dogged by one fear; that someone ‘out there’ could infect me with some simple germ that I am not prepared to defend myself against. I have a marginally functional immune system which leaves me a sitting duck. I’m not a danger to others, but others may be a danger to me. I feel restricted. This does not encourage a robust social life.

Living in this kind of climate for a few weeks has bred a certain habit of –– I’m not sure how to describe it except maybe, mindlessness. This to say that we have come to enjoy talking pure nonsense –– actually getting absorbed in the nonsensical excursions of our ‘spinners’. Spinners have earned a significant place in securing a hold on our sanity.

My wife, Jo, has kept flower pots on the porch for years. She’s placed spinners in the pots. Spinners are florid, burlesque, dime store bugs or flower decorations that have wings or petals that spin in the wind. They are goofy enough to retain my attention and help our minds go totally blank.

We check them out daily. Just the other day we talked about the spinners nonstop for a full hour and a half, like people might talk of their children or pets. I would describe our conversations as something like pillow talk only we’re sitting up in chairs, more focused and not as dreamy.

Coincidentally, about the time I learned of my diagnosis, some of the previous spinners had begun falling apart. We’d had them for years. Jo ordered new ones. One day, after spending most of the day engaged in the tedium of medical and doctors’ appointments, we came home to find our order of new spinners had arrived. We placed the spinners in the old pots.

As we putzed around arranging and rearranging them, we began to talk of their particular ways of being, how they behaved in the wind, in stillness or how their florid colors radiated brilliantly in bright sunlight.

We had one concern: the hummingbird spinner. As soon as the wind rose, his spinner/propeller would rotate lustily. It was evident that soon his spinning blades might clip off the small wings which were fastened with tiny springs to his body. We considered at some length how some strategic interventions might spare the hummingbird this misfortune and increase our pleasure in aiding his safety as well as extending his life.

For at least an hour and a half we arranged and rearranged all the spinners, musing particularly about the hummingbird’s peculiar habits and imminent danger to his torso.

Poets will often discuss exhaustively the distance between words in a poem or the unique way sentences or paragraphs get placed. They speak glowingly about the significance of the blank spaces and how they contain all kinds of subtle intimations of greater truth, deeper realities and infinite possibilities.

I’m of a mind recently, that some blank spaces should remain just that: blank spaces, especially mental ones. We need blank spaces in our lives. They should signify absolutely nothing. The spaces can become a respite from the search for significance or purpose or whatever problems we find that are driving us nuts; always trying to figure them out. These searches can become tiring enough as you know, so when I suddenly noticed that both of us were caught up with the particular habits of spinners to the extent that we had lost all sense of time and place, I could see we had inadvertently discovered a small harbor of refuge at this difficult time.

After half a day keeping medical appointments we’d take a break, repair to the spinners, and enjoy ‘spinner time’ as we came to name it. We reveled in the spiritual fecundity of mindlessness and even gained positive energy from our fanciful and frivolous musings. We got more than we gave, I can tell you that.

Even as I write this, I begin to see our romance with spinners is a form of play, the way kids play, and how deeply healing just playing can be. This kind of healing is not formulaic, but spontaneous, often eliciting belly laughs and gallows humor that provokes tears and guffaws alternately, often in the same moment. It’s fun.

We continue with one concern: the hummingbird spinner. A strong wind places him in a precarious position. I worry that his rotating prop as it furiously spins and bends backwards, sooner or later will whack the small fixed wing just behind it into spaghetti.

I don’t know that either of us have the particular skills to make appropriate repairs. Actually it “ain’t really broke” at the moment. We’ve decided our task right now is not to try fix anything else in our lives but to just enjoy our little spinners and let them take us to a dream world as long as they can.

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 room is cell-size and not particularly welcoming. It looks like the interior of a space capsule: tubes wires and flashing numbers everywhere, blinking like tinsel on a Christmas tree. It’s all about numbers. The numbers are about my blood, the kind of blood circulating through my body right now. There’s not a lot of the good stuff. I hope to be getting that presently.

I look out the window. In the distance, I can see the Key Bridge spanning the Patapsco River. A single church spire rises in the background just beyond a series of refurbished rowhouses. These houses are the kind that have defined the city’s mystique since the 1800’s. It’s unmistakable, charming, but this is well outside the space capsule.

My privileged view of Baltimore has come at a price. I am here for a six-day venue of chemotherapy at Johns Hopkins Hospital. My literary sabbatical from the Spy began shortly after the discovery that I was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of a cancer, AML. I almost died. My life changed overnight.

I want to share with readers not the drama of the events happening a few weeks ago, but rather to comment on some peripheral and unexpected fallouts from them. Looking back, these events seemed to me like a fireworks display, when the grand starburst of light explodes in darkness and as the darkness returns, it begins filling up with tiny shards of light so small and inconsequential as to seem wholly unrelated to the starburst. That is how I recall vividly the little things in the circumstances that darkness began revealing.

Everyone that I engaged during that week wore a mask. I would imagine it was at least 50 people who served me in some capacity –– professionals like doctors, nurses, other medical workers like EMT’s, nurse practitioners, and specialized technicians among the cadre of service workers. As they came close, I saw only their eyes; their faces were masked. Through their eyes, by the tone of their voices, and by the particular aura they emanated, I grew to know them and be comforted.

I have friends who tell me everyone has an aura and they can see it enveloping an individual’s face, like halos. I cannot do this, but I know I have experienced the heart of intentions, mine and others. I believe that the intent of those who served me was to facilitate as much healing in my life as their skills and presence could promote.

Soon, I caught on to that. The sounds of their voices and sight of their eyes were enough and I’d feel less and less invaded when they woke me at three in the morning with chirpy salutations telling me that they were there to check my vitals. The essential nature of their presence was at work and I knew I had been feeling it deeply. I’d groan as they approached the bed. I’d shoo them away in a mocking manner and then laugh. I still felt like hell, but comforted, nonetheless. The transfer of energy is a remarkable phenomenon in physics, and even greater when healing energy is experienced as we engage each other spiritually.

Caring energy is communicated in thousands of elusive ways.

When I first thought about the diagnosis I thought about dying, the idea of my being dead. It frightened me. Intentionally thinking about it was a pure act of bravado, a psychological ruse to prove to myself that, if I could imagine such a scenario and look the grim reaper square in the eye, I would not fear death anymore.

Try as I would, it didn’t work. I struggled vainly to imagine again and again my total absence in the world but was not able to rid myself of ‘me’ in any way. Wasn’t ‘I’ the one that was declaring my own absence? It was absurd. I could not rid myself of my ego. Like a shadow, my long habit of being seemed to want to follow me wherever I went, even into the depths. Does this mean that my life has continuity? Or is such thinking just egoism? It was a rough night. Mercifully, the dilemma remained unresolved and I fell asleep.

There’s an old saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. Well, yes and no. There are things in my new life that I must do that in my previous life I did without giving a second thought; little things like morning ablutions being a good example.

My previous life, just days ago, I would rise in the morning and automatically perform the mundane rituals of meeting the day. Each act, from brushing teeth to all the other stuff I performed, I did skillfully without giving any of them a thought. Now my new life was as if I was a baby taking first steps; each particular performance required my full attention and concentration, taking what once required four minutes, now, requiring at least ten –– I don’t ever recall living a day so deliberately. A lapse of attention could be embarrassing and quite literally, make a mess. I lived life carefully, slowly and intentionally. It was at first maddening, and I thought I’d go nuts. Something deep within me began surrendering. I got with the program. Go slow.

My wife and I, long before this particular crisis descended, shared a common view of the world. It had to do with how we understood the people whom we met along the way. It seemed to both of us how that in different instances while walking our paths, certain people showed up who were critical to our healing at that particular time in our lives. They gave us something important we needed and then faded from our lives, barely noticed.

We talk about them as angels; they’ll just show up uninvited and help turn dicey moments into ones more tolerable. They bring grace into our lives at times when we can see only downers. They always show up unexpectedly and they can be familiar faces or total strangers.

I’ve met a lot them recently in the most unlikely places – like a cell-size room – that seemed as impersonal and indifferent as a space capsule.

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.

 

My children and my grandchildren possess, I’d say conservatively, at least thousands of photographic images of their family life. It seems to me that every second of their lives is being documented by a digital photograph; some pictures are printed out, others live in cyberspace where they have plenty of room and can be reached at the touch of a button.

This comes in sharp contrast to the collection of photographs I have from my growing up years. Compared to a post-modern family, my own photographs consist of a highly limited selection, scraggly at that, and most turning a light brown like onions that I’ve left in the bin too long.

I’ve noticed that my children and grandchildren’s digital images vibrate with rich saturated colors. They also have a visual acuity as sharp as a knife’s edge. I would have to say that they do come off as consistently joyful and celebratory. The black and white pictures of my own growing up years are marginal in quality and compared to my kids’, they seem like historic documentaries. Mine have a prevailing solemnity to them so even scenes from children’s birthday parties in the 40’s and 50’s, the children don’t appear to be having much fun but rather trying obediently to follow the photographer’s exhortation to hold still and say cheese.

What am I to make of this? A couple of things come to mind.

Not only have the complexities of handling cameras been dramatically reduced by the arrival of digital photography, but the volume of still images that can be taken digitally in a minute exceeds a film camera’s capacity for a year. Film cameras typically had 36 snaps and that was it. If you had the energy to reload another film into the camera you seriously jeopardized the mood of your subjects. You might compare this film-reloading moment in picture taking to the art of love; when being performed with mutual satisfaction requires uninterrupted attention for the whole thing to go well. If you do stop to scratch your foot or your elbow, you do it at great cost to what you’re about.

Candid photography of today, with its effortless mechanics, leaves the photographer free to click away and get great shots with the no real concerns about shadows, highlights, focal distance or anything that traditionally would intrude upon achieving decent images. The good news is how in modern photography the photographer can be highly mobile and a lot more invisible as he doesn’t need to fuss a lot with equipment. This allows for amazing spontaneity.

I had an odd thought the other day about all this. Will people four generations hence have any interest when they see a yellow deckled edge picture of my aunt Daisy wearing her white gloves and flowered hat, or a photo taken in 1936 on my second birthday where I’m looking grumpy in front of a birthday cake? Today’s digital images will certainly be more colorful and sharper but as they increase in volume, what will they come to mean to people? The sheer volume of pictures is already staggering and growing by the day. When the market’s flooded, things tend to lose value. Selecting what images may be kept or pitched will be a daunting task. Will the mystique of the photograph be lost among millions and millions of images? I don’t know.

As I think of pictures, I recall in 1940, when I saw my first rendering of world class art. A family friend I called Uncle Tommy, copied three famous paintings. Tommy was French, a chemist and an expert manufacturer of colors. The copies were exquisitely rendered. They were prominently displayed in the living room. They fascinated me.

One was Gaugin’s ‘Two Tahitian Women,’ the other two were Van Gogh’s ‘Self-portrait with a Bandage and Pipe’ and Van Gogh’s famous ‘Sunflowers’. I was in and out of the house frequently and the paintings became etched in my mind. I knew nothing about painting. Uncle Tommy said once that the paintings took a long time to complete.

I’m not sure why but over the years I’ve never put my own photographs on the walls of my studio. I had a recent urge to do that. I chose three images I was extremely fond of, because of the moment they represented and for their quality. They were scenes on the western shore taken shortly after I first arrived in Maryland and was dazzled by its stunning landscapes. One was at Elk Neck State Park, the other two at the Gunpowder Falls. The photographs are large. I enlarged them to 16 x 20. They are well done, but I’ve wondered that they mean more to me because of the time and the place where the pictures were taken. Each was a precious moment in my life that I once saw through a lens darkly and it came to life in a click.

I suspect that those of us accustomed to having much, there are some for whom the plenty is not what is so rewarding; it’s the little, the few, even the tiny, just a couple of things or even fleeting moments. Among so much abundance that life brings, the real treasures can be harder to spot than for those who know and understand scarcity.

To my knowledge Uncle Tommy never made other paintings other than the Van Gogh’s and the Gauguin. It may have been enough for him, the specialness of it. I will never know what that was.

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.

Editor’s Note:

One of the great traditions of the Spy for many years, according to many of our readers, is waking up to George Merrill’s essays on Sunday mornings.

Since 2015, George has graced the pages of the Spy with now some 330 commentaries with his beautifully nuanced, playful, but ultimately powerful moral observations. To my knowledge, he has never missed a Sunday since we started. But the other day he let me know he wanted a small break from the six year routine. He told me he would be taking a mini-sabbatical of sorts starting next week.

The need to renew one’s self as a writer is as fundamental as the impulse to write itself. And so, like many Spy readers, I will wait, somewhat impatiently, as George forces himself to put down his pen (and it is a pen, not a computer) to recharge for a few weeks.

While he warns he might break this self-imposed retreat at any time, it’s fair to note to his considerable fan base that it will not be a regular occurrence during the Spring.

In the meantime, the Spy will attempt to fill the gap with the inauguration of the “Spy Sunday Essay” by guest writers later this month. More on that later.

DW

Last Tuesday, Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the murder of George Floyd. The jury, a racially diverse group of seven women and five men, deliberated 10 hours before reaching their verdict: Chauvin was found guilty of second – degree murder, third– degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

I understand this trial as an epic event in American social history. It signals a change in course that allows greater possibilities for a vibrant America; vibrant because all its citizens can have a place at the table and when they speak, they will be heard.

For over 300 years the African American community has endured relentless abuse and exploitation by a white establishment –– a white community that enjoyed a free hand by assuming an unchallenged assumption of power and privilege which was never constitutionally theirs.

Over the years, Blacks were convinced that their grievances would never even be considered much less justly addressed by the legal system.

America’s law enforcement establishment has rarely been held accountable for the conduct in its behavior toward minority groups and especially African-Americans.

Two cancers that have festered in the American soul for generations, I believe, found redress by the decision on Tuesday in the George Floyd trial.
The law enforcement system and the officers who execute its responsibilities have been delivered a mandate. They can now expect to be held legally accountable for how they perform their duties. They will be required to act in a disciplined manner and to abide by specific conventions of policing protocol. They will abide by codes of conduct.

I was particularly aware of how this trial came on the heels of the previous administration. One of its characteristics of this administration was the unconscionable ways in which it flaunted conventions of government and its codes of conduct. Social and federal protocols were flagrantly trivialized with no apparent demands for accountability coming from the congress. Federal agencies were casually manipulated, loyal government servants were abused and humiliated, while the White House itself, our national symbol, was co opted by the president as a public relations stunt for his own personal interests. Playing by the rules was trivialized. The importance of accountability in public service had been treated dismissively.

The verdict in the trial I saw, in one sense, as symbolic: it begins a process of not only vindicating the abuses suffered by African-Americans, but in an ironic way, the verdict also served to restore to white America the soul it had lost in the practices of administering justice.

Imagine for a moment the Black population now in our midst. It consists of roughly 49 million people. Here are American citizens who have been forced to hide their lamps under a bushel, so that the unique light they have ready to share in the American experience was never seen and valued. In order for this to happen Blacks had to feel some confidence in the law’s protection, and be reassured that they would be playing on a level field.

The Chauvin verdict was a sign that the burden of doubt that has plagued Blacks, the doubt they carried since they were brought here as chattel only to serve as slaves, has being seriously challenged. The African American is an American and belongs here. Blacks, like the white immigrants who once came here, this is their home. African Americans want to build a life here.

The skills and resources existing in this population bring to our collective lives, a deeper understand of our humanity and its suffering. And looking to the future, equal justice will make America great for all of us, not great again, but great for the first time.

Ironically, the statement the verdict makes creates the possibility that has never have been the case before; that African-Americans are under the law, and indeed full participants in the American dream and under the law will be treated in ways consistent with any citizens rights.

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.

My wife and I have finally had COVID 19 shots. We are now prepared to live a new life. How might that look?

It’s a little over a year since the pandemic became a reality. My wife and I were among those only marginally affected. COVID infected 31, 516, 783 people significantly, leaving 569, 528 dead. I keep having that mixed feeling people report having when they tell you they’ve dodged the bullet.

I’ve been thinking back over the year. It’s not so much what I did do during the height of the pandemic but what I didn’t. My routines changed dramatically. The period was an experience in avoiding, simplifying, unloading, while waiting for shots. I began to live more reactively, cautiously. I felt surrounded by danger.

Shopping the supermarket wasn’t playful anymore; I stopped indulging the pleasures of wandering the aisles aimlessly like dogs do on walks; they will sniff the environment with every step they take with no purpose other than curiosity.  At the pandemic’s height, when I went shopping, I took a list of items meticulously prepared. I came, I saw, I bought, I checked out and got back to the car with groceries in the trunk in a matter of minutes. I have never experienced myself so single focused in a supermarket before. It used to be fun.  It’s now efficient, instead.

I didn’t conduct small group classes in spirituality and eldering any more as I had for the last fifteen years. Prohibitions against group assembly nixed that. I missed the group interactions. They were deeply moving and often funny. A virtual presence like Zoom may substitute some in times like this but it will never be as energizing as the real thing, surrounded by real bodies and being attuned to the nuances that real presence awakens.

In a similar vein, I did not gather with friends or even family for dinner or meet acquaintances for coffee. The pulling back hurt, especially so since during this period we had a great granddaughter born. We saw her regularly on an electronic site called Tinybeans. Through this medium we watched her grow almost daily in the first year until we made our first visit. Holding her was magical. 

I did not engage any more in what was probably an unhealthy habit, anyway. When I grew bored or was restless, before, I might jump in the car and go to malls or stores to just to look around. I might go to Penny’s and check out clothing or to Lowes to inspect tools. This never amounted to purposeful behavior –– it was shamelessly escapist, tainted with the scourge of consumerism. I behaved this way only because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. 

There was one upside: I didn’t spend much money on gas during this period. I used the car so little there was not need.

I will confess that for a time I felt deprived of “normal” activities.  

The pandemic, at its height, kept most people at home. That was perhaps the greatest complaint: the feeling of being housebound, trapped, with nowhere to go. I know I’m not alone in this but for a number of us, this confinement revealed some surprises. It was common to hear people say: “I can’t believe I’ve accumulated so much junk.”  I’ve heard the comment a lot from people when they’re moving but rarely from anyone who’s not going anywhere.  People were amazed as they opened long forgotten closets, poked around cabinet drawers, searched garage shelves, attics and cellars; “Why in heavens name did I keep this for?” As our clutter was exposed, the purges began.

Landfills were suddenly inundated by householders bringing truckloads of junk. Some landfills prohibited them from dumping until they could efficiently accommodate the deluge. Neighborhood recycling stations began refusing cardboard since homeowners who had finally dumped old household stuff, started all over again. They bought more stuff through Amazon. Cardboard is a must when mail ordering and for a while cardboard seemed to spontaneously reproduce.

I wondered about other venues for getting rid of things: I thought immediately of the kids. It was very painful to discover that my kids had no interest in the furniture mom and dad wanted to dump. It was hurtful to learn that not only did the kids have no sentimental attachment to great grandma’s sewing table –– a beautiful Victorian relic –– or other memorabilia I was sure they would want, but also no interest even in childhood mementoes that survived the rooms they grew up in. Too dated for them, they’d say. What do you do with what’s piled up or perhaps more to the point, how come what I once wanted, needed, valued, and paid a hefty price for, no one, including myself, needs, wants or values anymore. Everything has a shelf life excepting perhaps those items Sotheby’s auctions off at extortionist prices. Awakening to the reality of being up to my ears with “stuff” is humbling. It’s a sign that a new generation is taking over the one I’m vacating. 

The post- pandemic era will be shaping a new mentality. Just what that will look like isn’t clear. Hopefully we’ll be getting along with a little less.

I wondered what Google might be offering for people downsizing –– a subject referred to alternatively as decluttering –– and I found at least twenty books on the subject, numerous tips, suggestions for decluttering and a couple of writers that identified downsizing and decluttering as spiritual exercises. I was interested to note, too, that getting rid of books was especially difficult. It was a subject with its own category, addressed as specialty in itself.

Some of the books suggested that unaddressed clutter in one’s life was a form of addiction requiring a kind of 12 Step approach, which assume meant taking the first step that we were powerless.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Possessing illegal drugs is a crime. Costs for some prescription drugs is a crime.  On both sides of the law we have a drug problem.

As is the case with most of us elderly, as the years add up, so do the pills. Taking more medications is as much a part of an aging life-style as afternoon napping and watching Jeopardy.

Either because of medical necessity or spiritual emptiness, young Americans are getting hooked on drugs at alarming rates. Addictions are largely driven by feelings of spiritual vacuity, a pervasive sense of inner emptiness and meaninglessness. Sedative dugs anaesthetize those feelings while amphetamines and hallucinogenic drugs provide intoxicating energy and optimism. For the chronically ill, there are often not enough drugs, on the street there are always too many, and for all concerned they cost too much. It’s an odd thought that legitimate patients, drug pushers and junkies share a common concern: will our drugs be available when we want them, and if they are, will we have enough money to pay for them?

As a kid, on my bike, I delivered prescriptions for our local pharmacist. Mrs. Waters was my favorite client. She was so grateful when I arrived with her “headache powders” and tipped me generously, a quarter, big money in 1948. Heaven only knows what may have been in the powders but whatever it was she was always glad to see me and that, including the tip, made me feel good.

Our dependence on drugs for our health and comfort has grown dramatically since World War II.  Prior to 194l, only six drugs accounted for sixty percent of all prescriptions written. In the last decade, James Surowieki reported in the New Yorker, that U.S. drug companies have created more than three hundred new medications.  

Drugs and medicinal potions have been integral to the human experience. From ritual incantations chanted over herbs and roots, from ‘potions,’ from the claims of ‘patent medicines,’ to the modern miracles of pharmacology, we continually hope for healing. Healing from what? From the afflictions that ail our bodies, to be sure, but also from the conditions that trouble our spirit.

In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth worries about his wife’s disturbed state of mind; she’s not sleeping. He implores the doctor:

“Cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased…

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse 

the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart.”

Macbeth’s plea is common enough: “Come on, Doc, can’t you give her something?” 

He can’t: “Therein the patient must minister to himself,” the physician concludes. Today, Macbeth would never have held still for that kind of advice; he would have immediately sought a second opinion. 

America’s extraordinary history with patent medicines–– nostrums as they were called –– reveals our deep longing to be made whole, a desire often exploited by charlatans that introduce false hope. This history should also make us thank our lucky stars for the FDA.

Before modern pharmacology, and in the absence of effective diagnoses and treatment, the sick were desperately vulnerable. Their plight bred a large ‘patent medicine’ industry which made outrageous claims, while selling as antidotes, what were hardly even anodynes, and toxic ones at that. 

If you lived around tidewater, there was even a potion offered to treat ‘miasma’, allergy to swamp gasses. Most likely, it was a derivative of Jack Daniels.

Take the shameless Dr. Archambault, an industrious nineteenth century Boston entrepreneur. He claimed that his treatment called “Wonderful Paris Vital Sparks,” stimulated “marital vigor.”  It was reputed to ” . . . act on the organs as rapidly as a cathartic acts on the bowels.” Dr. Archambault’s formula, with its comprehensive properties but explosive propensities was wisely accompanied with his company’s assurance of legitimacy. Similar to our own prescription drug disclaimers today, it covered the waterfront while remaining totally inscrutable. “Sincerity in speaking as they think, believing as they pretend, acting as they profess, performing as they promise, and being as they appear to be. This is what the Dr. Archambault Co. always does.”  Bubba’s lawyer couldn’t have said it better.

Patent medicines affected no cures, except perhaps for the soothing effects of opioids and alcohol.  Their active agents were typically combinations of both. Some contained lethal agents like mercury compounds and hydrochloric acid. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 began to curtail these shams, and suits against the companies continued well into the l920’s. 

Today, Lady Macbeth’s physician would have knocked her out like a light in seconds and would not likely have recommended psychotherapy. Every day new wonder drugs promise effective treatment for all kinds of ailments–even those that may be “just in your head.” Some critics are disturbed by the increasing use of drugs to correct aberrant behavior like shoplifting, or interpersonal problems such as shyness, and the recently diagnosed affliction, “Affluenza,” a nervous disorder suffered by some who win lotteries or become millionaires overnight. Affluenza patients may turn out to be lucky on more than one count: the cause of their neurosis also pays the freight for treating it. For the rest of us, treatment costs are onerous.

But rarely do drug manufacturers make the outrageous and fraudulent claims they once made in the past. Manufacturers’ disclaimers, however, will frequently contribute to our confusion. Most are written as exhaustively as Dr. Archambault’s assurances. Medical professionals regard such disclaimers as simply attempts by manufacturers to CYA. Are drug companies suspect in their practices? If they are, it’s not the first time. Back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote that “Apothecaries’ profit has become a by-word denoting something uncommonly extravagant.”

You’ve probably noticed that many HMO’s are sexist. For instance, most HMO’s will cover Viagra but not Birth Control pills. I know women with insurance policies that won’t routinely cover an annual physical for them. Men’s yearly physicals are regularly covered. I’ll bet it’s mostly guys who are making these policies. 

Our real problems arise around the miracles of modern pharmacology, not so much from their efficacy–– many are an undisputed  blessing –– but in learning how to use them to live life more fully, not to escape it.

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.

In seventeenth century England, Clergy and nobility, the high rollers of that day, played hard ball with each other and with most everyone else. Religion and politics weren’t only matters of one’s preferences or personal beliefs; they were a form of blood sport. You could lose your head for not playing by the house rules, that is, for not being politically or theologically correct. Excessive political and religious zeal frequently turned lethal.

I like the idea that even in the past, when intolerance and vindictiveness prevailed, somebody with a conscience was speaking out at considerable cost to themselves.

This climate of intolerance in England grated on Anglican Bishop, Jeremy Taylor and in mid-sixteen hundred Taylor preached a sermon to address prejudice. Its title, “Against Bitterness of Zeal,” caught my eye. He wrote, “Any Zeal is proper for Religion but the Zeal of the Sword and Zeal of Anger.”

Here’s the sermon:

“When Abraham sat at his Tent Door, according to his custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old Man, stooping and leaning on his Staff, weary with Age and Travel coming towards him, who was a hundred years of age, He received him kindly, washed his Feet, provided Supper, caused him to sit down; but observing the Old man Eat and prayed not nor begged a blessing on his Meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of Heaven. The old Man told him that he worshipped the Fire, and acknowledged no other God. At which answer, Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old Man out of his Tent, and exposed him to all the Evils of the Night and an unregulated Condition. And when the old Man was gone, God called to Abraham and asked him where the Stranger was? He replied, I thrust him away because he did not worship thee.”

God answered him, ‘I have suffered him these hundred Years, although he dishonored me: and coulds’t not thou endure him one Night?”

Taylor was no stranger to the civil and religious conflicts raging in the England of his day. He apparently irritated some nobleman or offended clergy as he was imprisoned three times. Fortunately, he managed to keep his head.

Today, there’s an antagonistic religious/political atmosphere here in the states. This is why Bishop Taylor’s sermon struck me as it did; a kind of ‘déjà vu in retrospect, a discouraging one at that.

Intolerant people act hatefully, zealously, particularly in groups. Is such behavior driven by some natural law? Do men (typically men) necessarily turn cruel when they convene in groups to collectively regulate their needs? I have read accounts of atrocities committed by men in groups; there’s a theory that holds how it’s unlikely they’d behave that way as individuals.

In an old Life magazine, I read an article about a lynched black man. In an accompanying photograph, we see the man naked, dead, hanging by the neck from a tree limb, He had been castrated. An assembly of white men, and some children appear to be milling around the body, festively chatting as we might see people attending a community barbeque. I know from other accounts how church going Christians would likely be among such gatherings. These Christians would profess to love Jesus but would have no scruples brutalizing this man. They held an opinion that became a conviction: that the man hanging from the tree was not “their kind.” He was less than human, someone to be rid of.

In Bishop Taylor’s parable, Abraham was religious, ready, as his faith taught him, to provide hospitality to the stranger. When Abraham learned the old man was not a worshiper of his God, the old man was dehumanized in Abraham’s eyes. Abraham suddenly turned cruel, became punitive, putting the old man out into the night. What was he thinking?

In this tale, Abraham held a contemptuous opinion about people who didn’t worship his God. Fire worshipers, in his opinion, were inhuman. When Abraham discovered the old man’s religious preferences, all bets were off; Abraham treated the old man inhumanely. Dehumanizing those you dislike, is an ancient vice. The old man was undeserving of the normal courtesies of Abraham’s faith.

Our minds and bodies host all kinds of conditions. They live in the body or the soul but remain inert and do no harm. Circumstances, like being fearful or threatened, or affectionate and caring can activate the latent conditions to appear. I believe the habits of the human heart work in similar ways.

I have experienced two habits of my own heart that have influenced my life; the habit to love and to care, and the habit to hate and destroy. I have seen the way kindness activates the activates loving and caring. I have also experienced the fear that mobilizes violence. This is an ugly condition.

Years ago, a bat found a way into my house. He awakened me but I don’t know how, since bats on the wing are silent. However, I saw him. He scared me.

I knew that bats follow air currents and if I opened a downstairs window, he’d eventually find his way out. But I was too afraid to wait; I became possessed to get rid of him immediately. I grabbed a squash racket and waited for him to fly over the bed again. As he did, I swung hitting him square. The bat hit the wall with a thud and fell to the floor. I went over to see him. He lay on his back, his wing broken and twisted. He bled.

I looked at him –– this was the first time I’d seen a bat close up. –– and I saw how beautiful a creature he was. He had the fine features and the innocent face of a mouse only dark haired. He body was tiny with two tiny black eyes that glistened and still showed life. I looked carefully at his face and I was overwhelmed with sadness and regret. My behavior was mindless and particularly unnecessary and to this day I would swear, while he was dying, that his eyes were looking right into mine and asking me, why?

That’s when I met some of the bitterness of my own zeal inspired by fear and how destructive it can become.

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.

A murder in their backyard in Oakland, California changed the lives of Adam and Dani. 

Lauren Markham wrote about the incident in Harper’s magazine.

One day Dani saw a flock of crows descending on the back yard. Flocks of crows are known as ‘murders.’ It looked as if the crows were attacking Mona, their dog. Dani rushed out, shooed the crows and brought Mona indoors. Soon they found they could not be outside. When the couple went out to the porch, the murder menaced them. They feared for their safety. How did they get on the crows’ hit list? Desperate, they consulted a local and trusted ‘crow whisperer,’ Yvette Buigues. 

Yvette is a character, described as a “rowdy, 40-something raconteur with a gravelly voice who likes to cuss.”  She’s also a pet trainer, painter and craniosacral therapist working with animals. She definitely has a gift.

When Yvette arrived, she spoke wordlessly to the murder. The crows backed off cautiously while she explored the backyard. She found a wounded fledging in the bushes. It was mauled, bleeding and with a wing hanging. Yvette wordlessly talked the wounded bird into her hand and arranged to place it in a box with food and water. Yvette was not sure the bird would live. The crows watched but did not menace her. In a day, the bird was gone and the crows, too.

It seemed that the dog may have injured the bird and the crows were out for revenge. 

Ethologists (students of animal behavior) and whisperers like Yvette agree that communicating with animals requires deep, sustained attention.

Markham titles her essay “The Crow Whisperer: What happens when we talk to animals?” As I read the piece, I sensed that the burden of the trans-species communication had less to do with what the whisperer might say –– Yvette didn’t seem to verbalize her thoughts ––but relied instead on something in the way she listened. 

Inter-species communication is fascinating. However, an immediate task is addressing the quality of the communication we regularly have with each other. Nobody needs to be told that it’ snot good, nor has it been for several years. Many years ago, Ernest Hemingway observed, “Most people never listen.”

Several pieces addressing the importance of  how we’re listening to each other  in our culture appeared recently in op-ed columns in the New York Times and Washington Post. I think they were written in response to the tense climate of the last four years and how we are struggling to cope with the anxiety and uncertainty the pandemic has generated.

There was a prevailing theme in the newspaper pieces, namely that listeners’ are emotionally attuned to what some speaker may be saying only about 5% of the time. In conversations, we’re typically somewhere else.

In family life and particularly in marriages, the experience of not feeling heard is a common complaint. Kimberly Probolus, quipped once how, “as far back as ancient Greece –– when Cassandra warned the Trojans about the wooden horse, women have been speaking loudly and clearly. The problem is that men are not listening.” 

I must confess I was guilty of that kind of behavior in the early days of my marriage. You’d suppose as a clergyman and trained psychotherapist I would be a natural at deep listening but alas, there were times when I left it all at the office. My wife would periodically call me on my over talking or trying to “fix” the problem she was describing rather than just listening and trying to understand her. Generally, it’s better for a man to leave his work at the office, but I might have done better by her if I’d brought some of it home with me, at least a few of the tools of my trade. 

To feel someone has listened and understood us is a profoundly moving experience. It cuts through a kind of primal loneliness that’s woven into our humanity. Learning how to discipline our inner emotions in order to be available to others to listen to them attentively sounds simple enough but it’s not easy to do. It’s an intentional act and it’s all about focusing attention.

Let’s say you are my friend.

You want to tell me something that’s on your mind, or some pain weighing on your heart. 

As you tell me, I will have an instinctive emotional counter-reaction within myself. It’s natural, when in the presence of someone else’s painful revelation to feel an inner discomfort of my own. Can I sit still with my own discomfort? Or will I have to get rid of it nervously by issuing lame reassurances, saying something like, ‘Oh you’ll get over this,’ or ‘You must not worry so much.’  Reactions like that on my part would serve to relieve some of my discomfort, but would communicate to my friend that I am not feeling easy at all with what she is telling me. Such comments are like saying ‘I’ve heard enough.’ Rather than feeling understood, my friend will feel even more alone in her troubles because she’ll sense that they have been a burden to me. This will make her more uncomfortable and isolate her still further. 

What about interspecies communication? Being able to listen to and hear the voice of the natural world is more than just a diversion or curiosity. We are paying a terrible price for our failure to understand and respond to the voices of the land, the water, the birds, the animals the plants and the trees.

With documented global warming and escalating species extinction, the natural world is screaming bloody murder for our attention. The planet yearns to be heard.  Few of us are listening.

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.

Memory is notoriously unreliable. Even if you have all your wits about you, gleaning a memory’s significance may be tricky.

This is not to say memories are insignificant; regardless of distortions, a memory carries a kernel of truth and some historical credibility. I think of some memories as old, buried manuscripts. 

Say, I happen upon one. Significant portions of the text are illegible. Still, I sense that the story contained in the manuscript is important. So, like archeologists do, I comb through the document –– the memory –– trying to fill in the blanks and put the memory together.

The other day an old incident appeared in my mind’s eye like the pop-ups on my computer. It crossed my mental screen while I was thinking about something else.  A computer pop-up, like random memories, seek my attention and for a reason. The reason is the substance of what my recollection is all about.

I looked out onto the cove, recently; I had nothing on my mind. Suddenly I recalled being a 17-year-old, a lifeguard on a Staten Island beach. In the fleeting recollection, I see orange –– the color of our bathing trunks –– and then a tall stand where lifeguards sit. I remember going into the water to retrieve a little girl who’d ventured deeper than she realized. It seemed a perfunctory act: waves were insignificant –– she was in no real danger, but the water was up to the girl’s neck and it frightened her. She was afraid to move. I went in, put my arm around her and guided her to shallow water. She then ran up the beach to her mother who awaited her. They both walked up the beach. Neither turned around.

The pop-up recollection was fragmentary. It didn’t immediately reveal what was the most significant piece of the incident and that was the child’s mother. I realized she was what the recollection was all about, and the reason it arose at all.

Reconstructing the memory as best I could, I recalled the mother standing at the foot of my chair, looking panicky and trying to get my attention. She reached up hesitantly, tapping me on the foot. She couldn’t speak English. She kept pointing demonstrably to the water and I could see she was directing my attention to a little girl in the water. I figured out what her concern was and got the child back on land.

The seeds of past experiences lie fallow, deep in the mind. Some seeds will remain inert in the corridors of memory for the rest of my life. However, others will, in a seemingly arbitrary way, appear in my consciousness. What precipitates their appearance is typically something that is happening in the present that strikes a similar chord to something experienced in the past. Even though the experience back ‘then’ varies greatly in particulars from the ‘now,’ there’s a tissue of significance joining them.

A few days earlier I’d read about the migrants detained at the Mexican border. The article was accompanied by a photograph. In I can see a small child, a toddler; I see her from the back. She is walking down a passage in a large building between huge plastic bags filled what might be garbage or throwaways of some kind. It is not clear where she is going or what she’s looking for. The article begins: “A surge in migrant children detained at the border is straining shelters.”

Many of the children are unaccompanied by parents or any adults. They are alone with little or no advocacy. There is anguish among the adults for the welfare of their children. Children are afraid and have no way to understand what is happening. One Border Control officer was quoted as saying, “. . . one girl seemed likely enough to kill herself . . .  the children cry constantly.” The migrants are strangers in a strange land, desperately needy, unable to speak the language to advocate for themselves or their children.  

I wonder what it must feel like to be a migrant in a strange land; to feel alone and vulnerable; unable to communicate and desperately in need of help. That was the connective tissue between the present awareness and my emerging memory from the past.

The newspaper column went on to say how “the number of unaccompanied migrant children detained along the southern border had tripled in the last two weeks to more than 3,250.” In short, the detention policy implemented to deter migration, turned brutal for lack of care and administrative incompetence. Hospitality to the stranger is possible only if someone values its humane implications enough to want to exercise it. You “gotta have heart” to make it work.

A statue stands in New York Harbor about ten miles north from where I once sat on the beach that day in the summer of 1951. It was the day when I first saw in a stranger’s face, a mother’s face, in terrible fear. The monument is the Statue of Liberty. The presence of the Statue of Liberty declares America’s intention to offer hospitality to the stranger. In a similar way, our constitution declares its intent to govern justly by its declaration that “all men are created equal.”

In the last few years, we lost our hearts to the fear of the stranger. I’m feeling more hopeful this can be turned around. The noble visions that characterize America’s uniqueness, in order to be realized, require ‘heart,” or to say it differently, “compassion.”

As far as memory is concerned: it took me a while to reconstruct the memory fragment to discover the mother. She completed the significance of the event for me. The mother-child bond is perhaps the most intimate and tenacious in the ways of human love. When it’s violated, it produces excruciating pain.

The past recollection of the mother and was a kind of spiritual “pop-up” to alert me to be vigilant and be ready to offer hospitality to strangers. It’s a good thing. According to legend, being hospitable may even have unexpected perks: by offering hospitality to strangers, we may be entertaining angels unawares. 

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.

Late February is the dreariest and least hospitable time of the year; if not rain, there’s snow, ice, sleet, and gale force winds from the northwest making for some uneasy days. A redeeming factor: the arrival of the buffleheads or dipper ducks, as they’re called. In the bleakest of days, they bring a ray of light, or more to the point, a scattering of lights.

One early morning recently, I saw a small armada of buffleheads navigating the cove. The sun had not fully risen and the dipper ducks, still in the shade, looked from a distance no bigger than fishing bobbers floating in the water. One bufflehead dove under, then another, still another as they randomly submerged to feed. It takes a keen eye to see where they will resurface but that’s one of the delights they present; trying to guess becomes a pleasing diversion as I wait for the sun to rise over the trees. 

When the sun finally ascends above the trees tops and illuminates the cove, the dippers will be visually transformed; they’ll go from being colorless dots floating in the water to tiny but vibrant flashes of light, like strobes exploding in random sequences. The dippers submerge and surface again in less than a minute. As they surface, the glossy sheen of water still enveloping them and their white clusters of feathers glitter in sunlight. The armada now appears like glass shards scattered over the water, shiny and glistening.

The dive that dippers make is like a miniature replay of how a porpoise first rolls forward to submerge. The dippers, when preparing to dive, will draw back their necks slightly and then suddenly roll forward effortlessly in a somersault as smooth as you please. Under they go in one effortless motion.

I saw my first dipper ducks when I came to Maryland fifty years ago. I was visiting Ft. McHenry with a friend, a Baptist minister, who was a Maryland native familiar with local wildlife. We were standing at the water’s edge and I noticed a large flock of ducks diving and reappearing significantly distant from where they submerged. Fascinated, I asked my friend what they were: dipper ducks, he told me. I said to him that they must be Baptist ducks; they practice total immersion.

I’ve never actually seen dippers on the wing but only in the water where they’re obviously very much at home. They’re also at home above or below the water. They can remain submerged for a little less than a minute which puts them under some pressure to select their meal in a timely fashion. No dawdling here. They usually prefer seafood; they know just what they want to have even before they go for a dip and down to eat.

Occasionally I’ll see a dipper bobbing on the water, apparently content with his solitude and making no attempt to dive for his supper. He’ll look tiny there on the water, no bigger than a handball. Compared to the geese whose presence on the cove can be overwhelming –– I rarely see a goose alone, they’re social creatures –– but it would seem for the dippers, although they will often appear in large numbers, that some of them relish time just to be alone.

One day from my studio windows I watched a solitary dipper. He was content to be taken wherever the wind and current would dictate. I’m sure I impute to this bird a feeling he may or may not have.  It is one I know I have. 

This solitary dipper just bobbed on the water for the longest time. He never dove. He relished the solitude.

I remember as a boy taking solitary sails on Raritan Bay in my eleven-foot Penguin sailboat. My excursions were typically during the week and after school and I had the whole of Raritan Bay to myself. The time of solitude was magical.

I’ve known loneliness and solitude and they are very different. Loneliness weighs on me. It’s a fearful and frightening feeling; it includes an attendant sense of personal vulnerability, as if some unidentified danger lurks somewhere nearby and no one is there to help me deal with it.

An experience of solitude is paradoxical. In solitude, I am indeed alone and there is no one nearby. And yet I feel safe and secure, and surrounded by some kind of benignity, the way I’d feel in the company of good friends. 

In the light wind the Penguin would ghost along, a mile off the south shore of Staten Island up toward the Narrows, bobbing, carried along with the wind and by the current. There was no one on the beaches. In the distance, I watched ships going in and out of New York Harbor and I could see the headlands of Sandy Hook. I’d be embraced by the spaciousness and feel confident that I was exactly where I belonged. I knew I was somehow an integral part of the land and the seascape. The light wind was taking me to no planned destination. For a while I felt in tune with the world, floating on the bay, like a single dipper duck in the cove, content to be carried by wind and current.

I finished writing this essay in the first week of March. I left the computer to stand, stretch and look around.  I looked out on the cove. It was about 1:00 pm. I saw nothing. Then I’d see one, and looking further, another and finally lots more. As I continued to look, I saw the tell-tale wake of a couple of dippers, the glitter of others just surfacing until I realized the cove was filled with them.

There are people who hunt dippers. I am writing this to celebrate the joy buffleheads bring me. Do you suppose they know that and that they  arrived here in numbers to support my efforts? I like to think so. 

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.