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.

I’ll sleep a third of my life away. I’ll spend thousands of hours just going in and out of doors. But mostly I’ll be watching through windows, looking out or seeing in. For something that is invisible, the presence of windows enlarges my world.

In a lifetime, there will be millions of windows I will look through. They’ll reveal what would remain unknown without them. We take windows for granted. we hardly if ever notice them. Glass is a remarkable creation, first created four thousand years ago.

Mirrors were produced much later in the 19th century. Unlike windows, mirrors show “just me.” We’re seeing nothing new except for the metamorphoses of aging or various cosmetic adjustments. Windows, on the other hand, coax us out of ourselves. Windows reveal the world beyond “just me.”

Imagine, for example, living in a house with no windows or driving a car you couldn’t see out of? What would it be like roaming malls that have no windows? It’s unimaginable. Even if post-modern technology could make such a thing possible, being in our houses, driving cars or shopping in malls would be intolerably boring.

Last week, I watched the ice storm outside through my living room window. I was able to participate in two worlds at once through the offices of glass: the world out there and the one in here, very different ones I would add; the one world was cold and foreboding, the other warm and hospitable. Windows brought us together.

As a child, I was fascinated with glass: how could this thing have physical properties but at the same time remain invisible. “What’s glass made of,” I once asked my father. “Sand,” he replied. He wasn’t always helpful. I concluded on my own that glass must be composed of the stuff ghosts are; a kind of cosmic substance possessing an invisible corporeality.

In churches, I am conscious of stained glass windows. They depict saints in florid colors. Glass makes sense here since I was taught how saints were special people because light shone through them.

Among the sweetest of childhood’s forbidden fruits, breaking windows has got to be the favorite, for boys anyway. Abandoned buildings are ripe fruit; easy pickens. As the rock, I threw hit the windowpane in the old brewery not far from my house, the breaking glass sounded musical to me, titillating my darker instincts but appealing to my aesthetic sensitivities. When a rock hits a window, the sound has something of the dramatic crescendo of clashing symbols one hears during an orchestral performance.

Windows, fragile are they are, have a strong psychological effect in securing boundaries. I understand burglars are often reluctant to break windows when making a heist. Strange. It would certainly make for an easy entrance. Maybe it’s just reluctance to make noise but I’ve wondered whether, despite their fragility, windows create powerful taboos against violating boundaries.

We say, “glass ceiling” to describe the limits that existing power structures impose on select people in their workplaces, typically women. It’s easy to spot stonewalling, but glass provides an invisible barrier.

As a boy growing up on Staten Island in the late thirties and early forties, there were no malls. We shopped differently, then, not modernity’s casual drive to the mall that contains everything you ever wanted. Choices on the Island were limited. Serious shopping involved going to the city, in this case, Manhattan. Like pilgrimages, we’d make annual family excursions, to Manhattan before Easter and before Christmas. We’d outfit ourselves properly for the seasons.

These excursions were all day events. They involved taking the Staten Island ferry to Manhattan. We then boarded the subway at Bowling Green to take us uptown. I loved listening to the rhythmic “clickety-clack” as the train propelled us through its tunnels. Train windows were dreadfully grimy. I could hardly see out of them. We’d exit the stations closest to Macy’s or Saks. As we took the stairs from the station platform to the street, the skyscrapers loomed above us. They were like monoliths with windows as for up as I could see.

Department stores’ fronts had windows displaying merchandise while also securing it. One window had a display of electric trains wending their way through quaint, miniature villages and lush countrysides. The mannequins in some stores were exquisitely dressed and seemed to be looking right at me. I kept waiting for one of them to greet me. I remember once when we first entered Macy’s, the entire store exuded a distinctive and pleasing scent. It may have been the scent produced when everything in a building is brand new.

As a child, the fairy land of merchandise seemed to me even more enchanting as we prepared to leave the city for the Island. Since by then streets were getting dark, store fronts were brightly lit, and the merchandise presented behind large windows was all the more enchanting and alluring for its illumination.

We say an opportunity presents itself to us as a “window.” We look through this window to seize the good fortune that awaits us. Timing is of the essence. When the attitude of the heart is open and ready, this is the optimum time. We see the opportunities through windows more clearly then. With an open heart, our window of opportunity becomes wider and filled with promise.

I was affirmed recently in the boyhood thought I had about windows being composed of spectral properties. On the sun porch, on cold sunny days, between a double paned window, a ghost appears. He is translucent, like a thick mist and I watch him morph this way and that as temperatures fluctuate. Late afternoon, as it grows colder, he slowly disappears. Unlike most ghosts, this one likes basking in the sunlight between windows rather than haunting people in dark rooms. I can’t tell whether he’s looking in or out of the window.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who doesn’t love St. Francis? We love Francis because he loved the world’s fowl and fauna.

Whether he was selective in his affection for animals is lost to history. If we are to trust the iconic images of Francis that have appeared over the centuries we might conclude that he had a thing for birds.

We have a statue of St. Francis in our garden. When we moved into the house, where Francis is now, there was a cement fabrication depicting the face of Bacchus. Bacchus was not to our taste so we replaced him with a statue of St. Francis. Indeed, with this statue, Francis is cupping a small bird with both hands.

In the popular mind, Francis has become an almost universal symbol of our primal connections with nature, our interconnectedness to all living things, even skunks and snakes. Greater love hath no man, we might think.

That we humans enjoy cross-species relationships–– with deep bonds of affection ––is well known. We see it in the child’s hamster, her painted turtle, his goldfish, the guppy and the ubiquitous presence in millions of households where cats and dogs live in love and harmony with the householders

Cats are the most convenient of the four legged animals to house. They are self-directing, with finicky tastes but easy to care for; a little kitty litter and a small can of cat food does the trick and the cats do the rest, leaving their masters or mistresses free to come and go from the house with little worry. Dogs are not as easy to care for but the nature of the bond I think is more substantial; dogs are more demonstrably affectionate than cats in my view: you know when dogs are happy. Cats are furtive and sneaky; you’re never sure just what they’re feeling or thinking.

The companionship that cats and dogs offer us is legendary. They enjoy esteem among human beings such that there are even pet cemeteries here on the Shore where we can rest the bones of our pets in charming wooded ambiance with the same solemnity and dignity we practice when burying our friends and relatives.

As much as we abuse the world –– and we most certainly do –– we demonstrate our essential goodness in the affectionate bonds we make with our pets. The dog is man’s best friend, and in the modern world to a lesser extent, a woman’s best friend; I suspect cats are not as much a guy thing.

The most maligned of God’s creatures are mice and snakes. The abhorrence for these, God’s creatures, may be atavistic but it’s entirely undeserved.

Our Judeo-Christian heritage has not helped. A shared Christian and Jewish myth agree that a snake messed things up big time up for everyone. Adam and Eve enjoyed beatific splendor in a beautiful garden, a piece of real estate to die for. They let a snake snooker them into doing what they knew full well they shouldn’t have. With onerous consequences: after their eviction from the garden, Eve would bear children only in great pain while Adam would have to get a job and work for a living.

Here on the Shore blacksnakes are as numerous in the grass as nettles are in the Bay. Blacksnakes can get big –– they look scary and we need to be periodically reassured they will do us no harm.

One spring, my wife and I watched the lawn from the porch as three blacksnakes were involved in what I can only describe as a manage a trois. The snakes wound in and out of one another’s embrace in the most supple and tender way, giving the impression of a sensuality I would never have assumed of snakes. The assignation lasted about an hour and we stood there, like the basest of voyeurs, totally enthralled as we watched their intimacy. Finally, they peeled off one another, each going its way. One climbed a tree, wrapped itself around a branch and took a nap. An hour of such intensity can be exhausting even if you’re having fun.

There’s a Shore axiom involving snakes and mice. It’s a zero-sum observation of sorts; If you have snakes in the house, you don’t have mice. If you have mice, you don’t have snakes. This brings me to considerations of mice. Mice demonstrate daily how they and not dogs truly deserve the old accolade, ‘man’s best friend.’

Everyone loves Mickey and Minnie, but they’re fake mice, not the real thing. In the real world, mice are treated as pests to be rid of. This is the grossest of injustices. The better mouse trap does the job but in brutal ways. It’s always a bloody business.

There is no animal that has sacrificed more in saving human lives than the laboratory mouse. He keeps on giving even as he is man-handled, women- handled, deprived of sleep and companionship, injected with toxins, fed unhealthy foods, put through mindless exercises, suffering abuses and indignities in abundance. All this in the service of finding cures for our ills.

I have been complicit in some of these injustices that we visit on mice.

One winter we discovered mice had been nesting in the car. We saw droppings first. A family found its way to the engine compartment and nested in an air filter. After a while the smell in the car became unbearable tipping us off to the regular presence of mice. Mice have abysmal sanitary practices. They poop and pee indiscriminately, on the run, as it were, leaving a trail of effluence that with enough time stinks. We had our mechanic removed the nest, leaving them homeless. When asked about the smell, he looked at us, the way a doctor looks when delivering bad news to his patient: “Takes months at least to go away,” he said in a muffled vice. Was there anything he could do, we asked? Again, with the same somber look he shook his head, gravely.

Considering the plagues of all kinds from which I was safely delivered, saved because some mouse gave his all, I’d say having a smelly car for a few months is a small price to pay. I’m confident that St. Francis would have had it that way, too.

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 other day I woke up to a bleak, cold, overcast, rainy and snowy morning. My mood followed suit. I didn’t feel normal.

Temperatures outside hovered between 32 and 33 degrees, as if mother nature was undecided whether to ice my neighborhood completely or just leave it wet with slushy snow. The porch steps froze with a thin layer of ice. This meant my comings and goings for the day, usually uneventful, would be a challenge. Quite literally, I’d have to watch my every step. We aging folk have an atavistic dread of falling.

This recent storm had been a two-and-a half-day affair: sometimes sleet, sometimes rain, sometimes snow, all happening in fits and starts. I was never sure of what was coming next.

It seems to me, as of late, that the world has been in a tentative state. It’s been unsettled for some time: we’re never sure of just what’s coming next. First there was the onset of the coronavirus followed by a frantic search for vaccines. Then violence and disorder surrounded the election process, followed by an irrational insistence that the election results were rigged. All this happening not in a smooth and straight trajectory, but in fits and starts. I’ve found this unsettling.

My fear of falling makes me reluctant to leave the house for my studio; the treachery of icy steps holds me hostage. The simple luxury of just coming in and going out of the house, without giving it a second thought, was shelved for most of the day. The world that I knew just before the storm, as it had been before COVID-19, was a normal world as I thought about it then. Now it is chaotic. But, then what is normal, anyway? We usually mean by ‘normal’ something that feels familiar or predictable. Whenever I think things are normal they usually don’t last that long. Sometimes I think normal is a fiction, a kind of illusion we get from hindsight. However illusory, while it lasts, ‘normal’ can be comforting.

In addition to the bad weather, there has been the virus. It has restricted my comings and goings and upended what I thought was normal. In my engagements with other people, once arranged casually with an email or a phone call, I negotiate now selectively, and with great caution ––I wonder who will be a danger to me or will I be to others; who’s infected with the virus and who isn’t. There’s chronic uncertainty with every breath I take. Because of a prevailing fear of the coronavirus, like my fear of falling on ice, I know I’m living reactively.

The omnipresence of the coronavirus feels confining. Snow and ice don’t help make it better. I once inhaled the air freely, unobstructed, naturally, in shops or outdoors. I now outfit myself like a robber who goes about his business furtively, thoroughly masked to ensure his safety. I long for uncompromised air (the blowback from in my mask signals a breath worse than I thought. Breath fogs my glasses, too, obscuring my vision). I also yearn for the ice to melt so I don’t have to measure my steps or for the measure of my days.

Snow days, as you may have surmised, don’t do it for me. Snow’s aesthetic properties are also lost to me. Snow isn’t as magical as it once was during my childhood.

It’s when I see squirrels in the snow romping and cavorting around, I confess I’m reminded of sledding, skating and making snow men at Marling’s Pond when I was a kid. The squirrels look like they’re having fun. I did too, then. I wasn’t afraid of falling. Squirrels, of course, never fall. In fact, falling off the sled or slipping on the ice, then, was half the fun of being in the snow. Getting up off the ground (or ice) on my own was an option back then.

There’s a smell I associate with my boyhood days playing in snow; wet wool. I recall it fondly. Winter clothes today are made from synthetics which when wet, don’t smell differently than when they are dry. One other property of wool in the snow: when we came back to the house and went in the foyer to take our snow suits off, small patches of snow clung stubbornly here and there to wool clothing. We plucked them off like thistles.

The day’s weather ended as bleakly as it began, but I can happily report that my attitude, at least for that day, died a natural death. I got back to my own self again, normal.

The ice melted sufficiently so I could make it safely to my studio. That lifted my spirits. From the window, looking out onto the cove, I watched the geese for a while. They paddled around the cove slowly, effortlessly, in concert, as if choreographed; they moved together as though one body. I suspected they were searching for the warmest spot. They were uncharacteristically quiet. Not one goose honked as if the freezing weather had taken their breath away. They seemed take the weather in their stride, confident that whatever may be coming next for them, they’d know how to stay afloat . . . and remain normal.

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 watched a pot boil, recently.

The pot, an eight-cup saucepan filled with water, was heating up on the stove. I was planning to make oatmeal. A large window near the stove cast light on the water’s surface. The glossy surface lay still like a pool of mercury, as smooth as glass. Soon, tiny whiffs of steam rose from the water as if they were ephemeral puffs of vapor dancing to and fro like will-o-the wisps, and evaporating as fast as they materialized. It was like watching mist rising from a marsh. Bubbles appeared on the surface. They darted about, like water skimmers scoot around on a pond. The tiny bursts of ghostly mists slowly coalesced to become a solid curtain of steam as the entire pot boiled and roiled, its contents abandoning itself in an ecstasy of pure physical energy. The metamorphosis was now almost complete. In a matter of minutes, if left undisturbed, the entire contents of the pot would be transformed. What was once liquid would disappear to become a gas and be subsumed into the atmosphere. Who says the watched pot never boils? We say that only because after we turn up the heat, we take our eye off the pot.

What happened was as ordinary as it gets and yet I was beholding one of the universe’s fundamental phenomena, the transfer of energy. It was a moment of Zen.

Changes are endemic to life here on the planet and to the cosmos as well. There’s no getting away from it; nothing stays the same. We notice most metamorphoses only after the fact, when the changes have been long under way. That’s certainly the case with aging, overdrawn checking accounts and flat tires. Farmers, too, sow seed and then wait to see what the soil may yield. Before that first shoot appears, a lot has been going on under the surface. It used to be the case, too, with human birth. No one knew how the state of the emerging infant might look until the advent of the sonogram. There’s something marvelous in witnessing the seamless, and sometimes not so seamless, transformations of life as they’re under way.

Just how and when changes occur is up for grabs. There was a Ginko tree outside my office years ago in Baltimore. In the Fall, the fan shaped leaves turned bright yellow and clung to the tree long after other trees had shed theirs. When the leaves finally dropped, they all fell in a single day. My staff and I would take bets on which day the Ginkgo would shed its leaves.

The changes and transformations in life create a mood of anticipation. Much of what we anticipate is pleasurable. The excitement of anticipation is like the experience of hope. Hope anticipates changes, typically welcome ones, but we rarely enjoy knowing exactly when change will occur and what form it will take. Until it becomes evident, we wait. I reckon we spend most of our lives waiting, if not necessarily always watching.

Attitudes toward change vary. Adventurous souls welcome it and relish what the next moment will bring. They live expectantly. People like me, more timid in constitution, tend to be wary of change and live more reactively. The saying, “I don’t like surprises” describes me well. Yet for all that, when surprise discoveries foist themselves upon me regardless of my attempts to manage the flow of events, I often find that I am indeed surprised and delighted for it. The ordinary can surprise us like nothing else. It can be a moment of Zen.

That’s how it was that morning when, to my own surprise, I found myself almost absurdly fascinated as I watched this common transfer of energy. I must have boiled water a million times in my life and never watched the entire process. One of the great marvels of the universe had been going on right under my nose and I never looked at it carefully. I wonder how much else goes on that I never see.

Serendipitous discoveries like the one I had that morning can be awkward to explain, especially to someone who may not have experienced its excitement in the same way. I say that because my wife had been doing errands that morning and when she returned, she asked off-handedly what I had been doing. “Watching a pot boil.” She looked at me with that expression of bland tolerance, the kind one sees on the faces of people who are sure you’re not playing with a full deck, but you don’t really pose any harm.

And such may be the point of it all. Moments like that, a moment of Zen, is often idiosyncratic but peculiarly moving. When it comes to those moments when the commonplace suddenly comes out to meet us in what seems an unfamiliar costume, revealing itself in a character by which we have never recognized it before, and we see for the first time what, for so long, we’ve been looking at.

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.

 

At this tumultuous time, what should I write about? Something profound about recent political developments. As I thought about it, I heard an inner voice: “Put a sock in it, Merrill, give it a rest.” I took this as a sign.

I decided to write about something nice instead. I’ll write about my favorite photograph hanging in the studio where I write and process films. It’s particularly meaningful.

In the winter, it has been my habit to take to the fields, woodlands and the shore to photograph. Why winter? Spring, summer and fall reveal the earths plumage and busyness but, in these climes, winter shows the land’s infrastructure and reveals some of the basics that hold everything together.

I’d made similar excursions while living in Connecticut, but they weren’t as satisfying as they were in Maryland. In Connecticut, it often snowed – hiding the landscape. Snow left a bland sheet of white over everything.

In winter, Maryland’s rural landscapes are more generous in showing their stuff. Snows are less frequent so I’m able to see the nuances of their composition. In the other seasons, it is more difficult to see to the heart of what holds things together, their primal connections. Winter can reveal these connections

Speaking of how things are held together: my first visit to an orthopedist years ago was not particularly helpful, but it got me thinking about connections. I saw a life-size skeleton in the doctor’s consulting room. I wasn’t sure what kind of statement it was intended to make. Maybe nothing more than to remind me why I was there if I should get chatty and begin to wander too far from my complaint. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. I’d never seen a real skeleton. Was this the real thing? The thought spooked me.

I trusted the doctor’s office skeleton was not a commentary on the successes or failures of his practice, but only designating his specialty. I was almost sure that this skeleton wasn’t the real thing. Still, I was very conscious of its presence and remained curious. I decided it would be in poor taste to ask.

My winter walks often included frequent visits to small, old country cemeteries, many hidden behind old churches, alongside farmhouses or in open fields, lonely and melancholy. The epitaphs were sad. There was a famous 18th century epitaph I read about, less melancholy than it was sobering:

“Remember, friend, as you walk by, as you are now, so once was I,
As I am now you must be, prepare yourself to follow me.”

Whether about the fundamentals of a rural landscape in winter or the bare bones of a body, matters like this finally came down to how all things in this astonishing universe are connected; how one thing or a single phenomenon, apparently so different from another, or even distant, are conditional upon another. I believe this is one of the principal laws of the universe. For all its complexity, we understand only portions of it, but the natural world is, as we are, all of a piece.

I especially enjoyed roaming Elk Neck State Park at the head of Bay. I took the above photograph there in 1974. It immediately became my favorite.

I’d often be the only one out in the fields and woods, except of course for the critters like herons, geese, foxes and deer that roam through the fields. It was the leafless hardwood trees that seemed skeletons of sorts and they commanded my attention more than anything I witnessed that January day when I first walked the park. It hadn’t snowed. The day was cold and clear with clouds that came and went. Everywhere the bare limbs of the hardwoods were set against the dramatic sky that was alternately overcast and then sunlit; some trees were huge. Their leafless limbs reached out laterally, a few drooped downward, but most reached upward the way some tribal worshipers throw their arms up in the air in the intoxication of religious ecstasy; the tree limbs, crossing this way and that, presented a delicate tracery like a fine filigree does when silhouetted by the light shining from behind it.

As I saw the landscape, my instinct was to stand and be still and in the presence of the trees, reverently, as if I were on holy ground. I recalled the familiar call to worship in church liturgies that begin:” The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him.” It never worked, at least in the churches I served. In seconds following this invitation, there’d be hymns, announcements, prayers, the sermon, muffled whispering, an atmosphere more like the Tower of Babel than the silence of a holy temple.

But here in this winter wood, a silent reverence was certainly the order of the day except for a bird or two and the sound of cold air as it passed between tree limbs with a soft rush.

No doubt there is particular grandeur to a tree in leaf –– especially the bold, gold and crimsons of fall and the delicate yellow-greens of Spring. There is yet another glory of trees when they surrender their leaves to reveal their graceful bodies and elegant limbs while waiting for Spring’s wardrobe to arrive.

I couldn’t count how many prints I have made over the years. If I could, I hope this would not reveal me as a misanthrope. Most images are of tidewater environs in winter, usually empty of people. The thing is, that it’s in standing in the very uncluttered expanse of land and water that I have sensed intimations of eternity.

The photograph’s value to me is not its aesthetic properties although there are some. It has served me more as a documentation of a special time when I once stood in a liminal space between two worlds, the one bound in time, the other outside it and how I had the strongest sense that both were connected.

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.