Nettles get a bad rap. Spineless, they say, nothing but drifters, and so transparent you can see right through them. They foul water intakes on motorboats. They sting. Kids call nettles icky. Don’t be fooled. Nettles are not without resolve, nor do they want for purpose. For all their transparency, they remain profoundly mysterious and despite their gelatinous consistency and prickly stringers they’re as hardy as cockroaches and as stunning as flowers. Nettles have been here almost as long as life has. We’re the new guys on the block and still trying to figure it all out.
I anchored one morning on the Tred Avon River on a hot August day. On the ebb tide, nettles were gliding ghostlike past my boat. They go with the flow.
The morning clouds reflected on the water’s surface. The nettles hovered just below. The scene appeared like a montage. Watching for a while I felt as though I were floating through space. The clouds, I imagined, were nebulae sprayed throughout the cosmos. In the dark and watery universe, the nettles were my fellow travelers through space. The nettles slid lithely, sleepily through the liquid heaven like shooting stars only slowed to a snail’s pace, the way I remember seeing the Hale-Bop comet in an early morning sky: The comet glowed faintly then, as nettles do in murky water, but the comet seemed huge compared to the surrounding stars, in the same way the nettles seemed disproportionately large seen through the reflected clouds on the water’s surface. And although I knew the comet traveled at an awesome speed, it looked as though it were only lolling along. The nettles, too, drifted unhurriedly. I was mesmerized. I was along for the ride.
Nettles have been around an estimated 650 million years. Why so long? Nettles survive because they have made peace with the world without demanding this or that, insisting on their own way. There’s something to be said in living life a little below the surface while going with the flow.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, scientists became intrigued with the abyss, as the depths of the ocean were then called. They searched ocean floors with long cables and drew from the darkness all kinds of exotic creatures. A prevailing theory held that the soft gelatinous slime covering the ocean floor was the stuff from which all life proceeded. Woolly mammoths, as well as roses and parakeets could be traced back to the primal ooze that covered the earth’s seabeds. Another theory entertained that many of the life forms, which couldn’t accommodate to surface life eventually found their way to the bottom of the ocean. Having made adaptations, they were believed transformed and living on in the lightless depths. Plumbing the abyss might not only teach us where we came from, but where we’ll wind up.
Heaven, I once thought, was the place where answers to life’s imponderable questions lay, questions like why am I here, where will I finally go. I was here; God was up above. All the answers were out there somewhere. I have a peculiar attitude in prayer in this regard; instead of closing my eyes and bowing my head, I prefer looking skyward with eyes wide open; I don’t want to miss a thing. That underwater, below the surface, there might be as many opportunities for spiritual nurture as there were up in the sky had never occurred to me except once. In church, I first heard the tale of Jonah and his three-day sojourn in the abyss. It didn’t change him much but he took stock and changed his attitude some. In my own search for meaning, the thought of what goes on below the surface as another locus of revelation widened my horizons: my soul can find as much nurture below the surface as out there.
Most nettles go with the flow: we, on the other hand, are a terminally restless breed.
For me, this restlessness is more like hunger, the kind that nothing I can imagine would satisfy. I look up to the clouds, or at something below me, like a flower maybe, or a turtle and from the corner of my eye a small part of this stunning creation arrests my attention as it did on the morning I watched nettles go with the flow in an ebbing tide. Suddenly I am sated, at least for a while.
That kind of food for the soul can’t be gathered. It’s always delivered right to your door wherever you might be. Best just to wait, stay alert, and eventually it finds you, the way manna once appeared out of nowhere to a hungry people lost in a desert. When you find it, or it finds you, the moment is deeply satisfying.
There are also restless nettles. It’s difficult for a few just going with the flow, nettles with itchy protoplasm, so to speak. I saw one that morning in the Tred Avon River drifting past my sailboat.
He was a particularly large and meaty nettle and beat the crown of his bell repeatedly against the surface of the water. He seemed uncharacteristically restless. Remaining obstinately vertical, propelling himself upward from below again and again, his bell broke the surface of the water only slightly, leaving a transient ripple. As he began to sink below, with the same steady undulations as his cousins were performing to move horizontally and with the flow, he’d attempt the same gyrations but intending a vertical ascent; I think he was reaching for the sky. Even with high hopes he could only do so much and was able to break the surface ever so little. It must have been maddening for him, as though he were trying to break through a ceiling, which constrained his life. He was trying for a peek at a world beyond him, for a glimpse of the universe of which he was but one part.
What drives such determination? That same restlessness which from the beginning of the human race has driven us: it’s the same restlessness that makes some of us long to reach the stars, to explore the abyss, to want to know where we came from, where we will go and to see the face of God. Except for a few critters that morning on the Tred Avon River, both above and below, it was enough just going with the flow.
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