Boat Across the River
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for Small Towns
Seeing the Truth
It would probably be impossible to have had a life more stable than the one I have thus far lived. I have lived in the same city since birth except for a year and a half “abroad”. I have never experienced a move as my parents, who have been happily married for forty years, bought the house they currently live in when I was an infant. My grandparents have lived in their house since before I was born, and they were married for sixty four years. I attended the same high school as my mom. My dad grew up down the street from where I am now and lived there from the time he was born until he got married. That’s the house in which his father died, and where his mother lived for over fifty years — until she moved into a nursing home. He has never lived anywhere but here either. There is no divorce in my family. I feel like, in the midst of a big city, I have had a stereotypically small town experience. And that I have been lucky to have had every important privilege.
Sometimes I feel so attached to this place and this life that I don’t even see it anymore. It’s like looking at my own face in the mirror. I’ve been looking at the same things for so long that they’ve almost become invisible to me. Driving to a restaurant downtown, I suddenly saw the city, the hazy sunset over the fluffy trees, the little houses snuggled close together. I saw the city as if for the first time and managed to grab hold of that image. In Buddhism, there is talk of trying to maintain a Beginner’s Mind — to keep that freshness, that quality of really seeing something for what it is. I have that when I am traveling; I see every little detail of a new place as if it’s charmed. I notice everything from apartment balconies, to little pink flowers streetside, to Spanish moss in the trees, to the little boy holding his father’s hand. I want to try to reclaim that freshness of Beginner’s Mind when I look at my own city, so that I am actually seeing where I am — so that I actually perceive the life I am living.
(And for those us who are longtime adherents to a specific faith tradition, it’s important to also see things as they really are — to not be so attached to our beliefs that we can’t see the truth anymore).
Fear
My father-in-law pastors a small congregation in a very small rural town about an hour away. We only get out to hear him once a year, at Easter. He delivered a chaotic and hilarious children’s message involving live chicks, in which my city-girl daughter stared wide-eyed over his shoulder at the little one in his hands and her cousin shouted, “He just looked at me!” After the children had finished running circles around the box of chicks, they filed out, and A. delivered a wonderful sermon.
He read the resurrection story from Matthew, and focused in on Jesus’ words to “Be not afraid.” Jesus was telling his friends not to be completely terrified that he had just come back to life from the dead. A. suggested that we extend that message out just a bit to say, “Do not be afraid, now.” In other words, now that Jesus has demonstrated that death is not what we might think…that it is not the end…we need not be afraid of what life can do to us. We need not spend all our time worrying about bad things — and especially not the little things.
He pointed out one phobia in which the person fears flowers. There are all forms of skewed perspectives to which we are deeply attached for whatever reasons, and A. said he didn’t expect us to walk out of church suddenly impervious to any of the things that trouble us. He said that he thought one message of Easter is that we don’t need to do that. I don’t claim to understand Jesus, his life, or his message. But I do believe in an afterlife, for my own reasons separate from being told to by the Bible, and I do believe in miracles. I think all this could have happened, and I love the idea that it did. Not that someone suffered intense pain, but that someone could prove an afterlife to the people around him and that he could love them so much that he would suffer intensely in order to prove it.
I liked one of my father-in-law’s sentences in particular, though I don’t know if he was quoting someone or not: ”I didn’t bring you to Disneyland to be afraid of Mickey Mouse!” Though I do not especially love Disney movies or Disneyland, I like the metaphor. There are so many beautiful things about this life; I shouldn’t waste too much time with “dark imaginings” or “sweating the small stuff”.
Leaving the Island
I carried my daughter out onto our balcony to say goodbye to the ocean at 6:30 in the morning, before we got in the car for the longest drive in the world. It was still dark and the water was so quiet that I told her the ocean was still asleep.
She said, “And he takes his blankie and lays down his little ocean head on his little ocean pillow…”
Goodbye Cedar Key!
two year old sees an egret
White egret
standing in the water
looks like the crests of the waves
breaking around him.
The stormy air still thick
the egret flies away
my daughter says,
“Look at the bird
swimmin’ through
the air.”
Ceremony
Closing my eyes on the couch
in the house above the ocean,
I heard what I imagined was a woman
shaking out the laundry
to hang it on a line.
Wet clothes smacked the air;
I was dozing and dreaming
of this woman working.
I saw her behind closed eyelids:
hair pulled back but flying away
in the salty air, red
and yellow shirts, blue jeans
kept slapping, slapping
as she shook them out.
Finally getting up to see,
I leaned against the rail of my balcony.
Ten pelicans sat like fat footballs
on the calm water below;
they were taking turns
smacking their wings with purpose
against the ocean’s face.
One set off the next, and they beat
their wings on water.
Until eventually: they pumped their feet
against the soft runway,
and then they flew away.
Pelicans of Cedar Key
I just watched thirty pelicans fly by my open balcony doors!
I think the birds are starting to come back to the area to nest on the protected island nearby where people are not allowed and where there is a rookery. We boated out there a few days ago, but the birds had not arrived yet.
Seeing the group fly by just now was spectacular, though, and I can only imagine what the skies are like in a few weeks.
Poet of the Marshes
“As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.”
– Sidney Lanier from The Marshes of Glynn as compiled in Sidney Lanier: Poet of the Marshes Visits Cedar Key, 1875 by Charles C. Fishburne, Jr.
The Surface of the Waters
Currently, I am on vacation in Florida — the birds are everywhere in Cedar Key. The roof of our house appears to be some form of sea gull rookery…they fly right up to the top balcony and catch bread crusts that we throw out to them.
The wind was really blowing last night. We are right on the water, and as I rested in bed at night and in the dark, I could hear the wind and waves in constant motion outside the window. I keep thinking of the phrase from Genesis 1:2 that says, “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” I picture the Holy Spirit, even with my belief in the Big Bang Theory and evolution, flying through the darkness over the smooth, almost endless, surface of the oceans.
I imagine the Spirit of God moving over the water like the wind. Or like the birds, flying low, as close to the water as they can get. But I imagine the Spirit moving over the surface of the waters as having been massive like the wind: roiling, boiling, the physical world materializing out of spirit as it moved.
I have not seen the ocean in two years, and have been having dreams about her weekly for the past few months. I don’t know if the ocean is so calming because its incessant motion and activity is a constant distraction from one’s thoughts, or if it’s because the sea is a reminder of the beginning of time on Earth. There is something soothing about remembering the water’s timelessness — its ancient, primal, nearly eternal rhythms of life.
Maize: The Maze
We took S. to an apple orchard over the weekend and bought the obligatory jar of apple butter, an enormous bag of apples, and some glowing amber and maroon colored corn to hang on the door. In addition to the apple trees and pumpkin patch, this family farms corn and makes a little extra money by creating a maze through the field, charging a small entrance fee to run around inside and lose yourself.
As soon as we stepped foot in the maze, I was carried away by my enthusiasm. The walls of corn on either side of us reached several feet above our heads. The funny little feet on the corn looked almost alien. Or like the spreading roots of mangrove trees in Florida’s swamps. I was surprised (maybe because of the weedy condition of my own yard) by the fact that nothing else grew on the ground beneath the corn. The earth was very smooth, a pale beige color, flat, dry…barren looking, really, except for the many stalks of corn growing out of it. It was almost paradoxical: the earth — weirdly absent of any greenery whatsoever – juxtaposed with the corn. Sadly, I suspect the use of chemicals, though delicate blue flowers neatly wove their way through the meaty ears, dense and substantial in their protrusions from the stalks. The earth is so dry, I could smell its distinctive aroma as the breeze carried pieces of the loose top layer to my nose. The earth was cracked in such a perfect grid that it looked deliberate.
As we made our way around the twists and turns, able to see only corn and blue sky, I felt I was navigating a meditational labyrinth. At the center, would I find one of the answers to the question: Who am I?
Harvest
Driving through a little town named after a bean, windows and roof open, I can smell in the cool, dusty night air: corn. Corn is being harvested right now, at this late hour…in the middle of the dark, dark night, and in the middle of the tall, tall corn there is a pool of light rising up from a combine. Corn dust swimming in headlights makes it look like a fog has settled over the middle of that field. I wonder how late the farmer will be out…
…and now we are gone. Without realizing where one field ends and another begins, we have passed into the next little town with another lovely name. My friend’s father was a farmer before having to give it up; people have to take out a mortgage to be able to afford a combine. But for me, passing through, I can’t feel any of his stress or strain; I just feel the beauty of it.
Blessings to you farmer, and may your crop be bountiful!
