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.

According to The Guardian, a rat was sighted in New York City engaged in what can only be called “take out.”

He was seen on the steps of a subway entrance carrying a pizza slice twice his size, far more than he needed. He proceeded down several steps to the train platform. A rat would not qualify for delivery services and I’m sure he wasn’t trying to catch the uptown. He was taking lunch home somewhere in the tunnels. Remarkable really but slightly irregular. I think of rats as more covert, furtive in their habits.

The Guardian also reported other animal anomalies.

In England, a kestrel was seen regularly checking out his reflection in the traffic camera on a busy corner. His vanity was insatiable: he returned regularly to check his image and primp even though he was harassed by a magpie and a raven. He also was buffeted unmercifully by high winds.
In California, a peacock somehow found its way into a liquor store. I can only assume by his behavior that he’d had a beak full, and was wasted before he even got in. He ransacked the store and caused hundreds of dollars-worth of damage knocking bottles off the shelf. This behavior in the critter world may strike some people as amusing, but I found it troubling at first.

In January of this year an aggressive squirrel terrorized the residents of Rego Park, Queens in New York. Locals have become fearful of leaving home lest they become the victims of a squirrel attack. Some residents, exercising their right to bear arms for personal safety, have taken to the streets carrying weapons, notably pepper spray. Micheline Fredrick, a Rego Park local, told the Guardian that she had been targeted by the squirrel in a bloody attack on December 21, while holding the door open for a furniture mover. “Suddenly the squirrel ran up my leg . . . and I thought how can this be? The furniture man ran inside for cover leaving Ms. Frederick to be “bitten on her arms and hands, with her little finger badly gnawed.”

These anomalies from the natural world express my own sense of this day and age where all anomalies are regarded as norms. I wish we were kinder and gentler, a little more predictable. Chaos and unnatural acts are seen everywhere. There’s little certainty, little dependability and nothing that one can, “put in the bank” as the saying goes. Where does one go for solace? In nature, of course. But the solace of nature may be under siege, too. Is nature going nuts? Or are these critters behaving as we do.

In the last four years, and particularly in the last several days, I feel I have lived in a topsy-turvy universe. Some of our elected officials have been behaving in erratic and cruel ways, like the errant rat ort peacock. More recently, vigilantes, like the predatory squirrel, stormed the Senate chamber bringing death and injury. For what reason isn’t clear. Are planets faltering in their orbits and stars crossing?
When I feel troubled, I try taking a long look. It’s to gain perspective, and in some instances, to preserve my sanity. When one enormity follows another, it doesn’t make things any easier. Like bad weather it does pass but while it lasts, it’s disturbing. One thing stands out for me in the stormy weather of the last few days.

Our democracy has been under siege. On Wednesday, January 6th the siege came to a head. Our President, charged to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, abandoned his charge by enabling and inciting a mob to attack the Capitol, thus desecrating the symbol of democracy and causing five deaths and destruction.

Taking a long look at the last few days I’d say this: it’s the nature of things to have rats that take more than they need; there are people everywhere who, like the predatory squirrel, attack innocent people; And, there are people like the birds that are so narcissistic they can never get enough of themselves; or like peacocks, love showing off wherever they go but leave suffering in their wake ; our democracy has weathered them and many more since its inception and been vindicated. Our National Anthem describes last Wednesday night and Thursday morning in a timeless, and timely fashion:

The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,

When the violence of the siege ended late, and the political rhetoric finally spent itself by Thursday morning, the flag was still there.

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.