“The Trump Administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot away forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy.” New York Times, November 4th, 2019

Not long ago I looked at the weather report. I saw an alert had been issued by the weather service that coastal flooding was imminent.

The news alarmed me. I went to the window to see how the tides were affecting the shoreline of my property. We are close to the water. The signs were ominous. The tide had already topped the edges of the shoreline and was reaching much higher than normal. It was encroaching on the lawn, creeping up to the house. When I looked at the tide tables I discovered that flood tide would be at four o’clock. It was only noon. The water continued to rise. All I could do was watch. My lawn was newly replanted only days before. Would it survive an inundation of brackish water?

Inordinately high tides occur regularly around the Chesapeake. They’ve become higher now and are flooding more small towns and lowlands. I had accepted this as a way of life here on the shore. This time, however, with my newly planted lawn, the stakes were higher. It’s strange how something as critical to my survival as the issue of global warming is, can seem so remote until it creeps up on my front lawn. I don’t “get it” easily.

Over the last few years I have had a dream, like a vision. Recently it’s grown more vivid. It’s not the nocturnal sort dream or vision, but the kind of dream that hope inspires. It’s a daydream of sorts, but not an idle one. I cling to it.

This dream returns again and again and I pray about it. Things happen in the natural world around me that seem so mindless and destructive and I feel sad. I pray more fervently that the dream I have will come true.

I dream that one day our abuses of the environment (and of each other) will finally create such a backlash that deniability of the abuses will be out of the question – no more equivocations. This time what happens will be immediate to us, closer than the Arctic’s cascading ice shelves falling into the sea thousands of miles away or the chemical laden streams that catch fire as if they were heralding an apocalypse.

In those days, I dream that we will have as the director of the Environmental Protection Agency a man or woman who actually loves the natural world, the kind of a person suggested in the Genesis myth.

God, having created the world thinks his creation is good, “very good.” God has a stake in its future according to Genesis. He appoints someone he trusts to look after it. This is a sacred trust. “The Lord God took Adam (human kind) and placed him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.”

What does it look like to love the natural world, to tend it and to keep it, and I would add, to be its voice, its advocate? I believe it looks something like naturalist, W. H. Hudson’s tender description of a day in late April when he came upon “a shallow lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some weeks before hidden in a depression in the land among luxuriant furze (an evergreen shrub with flowers), bramble, and blackthorn bushes.”

He then writes, “I sat on a branch and rested for a long time enjoying the sight of that rare unexpected loveliness. Two or three warblers we’re flitting about among the alder leaves within a few feet of my head and a dozen at least we’re singing within a few feet of my head. I listen again to the birds then let my eyes rest on the expense of red and cream-colored spikes before me, then on the masses of flame colored furze beyond. This springtime verdure and bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the infinite blue of Heaven, the bell like double note of my little feathered neighbors and the alder trees; surely this is enough to satisfy my heart.”

This new “Adam,” this Agency Director, as I imagine him or her, would have this same passionate love of the earth in their hearts, and could not be driven from their task by power brokers. This director will be wise in the matters of the material world. This person would have feet on the ground (earth, not macadam) and an eye on the sky (weather, not high-rises); they would passionately love the natural with the fervor Mr. Hudson had. Love like that may save us and heal our planet

This director will have a realistic grasp of the needs of an industrial society in which she lives. He will, like Solomon, do justice. He will weigh the reasonable requirements of industrial production and still advocate for the earth. He or she will know that the natural world is not a commodity just to be bought, sold, and traded; this new Adam understands the natural world as a sacred trust, a planet to love, tend and care for.

Too Idealistic? Too Visionary? I sure hope so. That’s precisely the missing piece in managing our present environmental realities. Currently, I see no vision, no ideals, just expediency and greed.

Since that day of the flood advisories two more extremely high tides came and went. The weather finally grew cooler and with it returned intense blue skies, filled with gray-bellied white clouds and a brisk northwest wind of about forty knots. The northwest winds around here drive the tides out, making the ebbs unnaturally low. The tides ebbed and flooded, and for a while I felt safe. The feeling is illusory.

My world, the one in which I once thought tides were predictable and would remain always within bounds, had returned but only briefly. The world of my yesterday is long gone, and even higher tides will return as they must, because they are responding in the only ways they can to the deaf ears on which their warnings have fallen.

“Listen to the earth and it will teach you,” Job instructs us. Few listen.

I drove to the recycle station the other day. I often go there. This trip was different.

I had literally filled the trunk of my car with a lifetime of correspondences, workshop designs, communication involving friends and children, family letters, publishers’ contracts, graduation and ordination certificates. There were letters from mentors, pictures of teachers and supervisors who shaped my life. There were many pages from my embryonic attempts at writing a book and also photographs I planned to use in it. I found letters and cards written to me by appreciative people to whom I had ministered in my capacity as a pastor. Other letters expressed gratitude for the help I had offered in a variety of spiritual and writing workshops over the years. All very satisfying. However, there were other papers as well.

There were letters of rejection from publishers; some abrupt and perfunctory. There were a few others leaving a thin a ray of hope: “Sorry we have to pass, but try us another time.” There were divorce papers, death certificates, two of my report cards from grade school that revealed miserable school performances. I’d often wondered why my mother kept them. I found them in her papers only after her death. I discovered acrimonious letters written back and forth from me and the senior pastor of my first church. It was a bitter time begun with all the hope and promise of “firsts” and then the crushing disappointment of discovering I was part of the worst kind of clerical dysfunctional. The church is a noble institution. When it goes bad, it really goes bad.

There were many more letters, notes, and documents. Of all these artifacts, what should I surrender and what should I keep?

On a good day, my personality doesn’t lend itself to being decisive. The decision-making in this instance of intense harvesting and culling of my past was agonizingly laborious; at times, I got sufficiently obsessive to almost immobilize myself. However painful, the process of reviewing the material and deciding what to keep or get rid of provided me with a hands-on review of my life that was more intense and vivid than anything I had ever experienced before. I alternately felt grief and gratitude.

I suppose I was like the crab in the process of shedding his shell. The crab knows intuitively that it’s time to shed it and get on with new life. I imagine the crab feels vulnerable and lost for a while since the old shell had been such an intimate part of his beginnings. These papers were the symbolic remains of my past.

The papers filled two huge boxes: I was feeling encumbered by them. The difference between the crab and me is that the crab knew instinctively that he would grow a new shell. I was less sure of what was ahead of me so I had, for reassurance, been clinging to the certainties of my past.

When I arrived at the recycle center I thought, this is where people take the pieces of their lives for which they have no further use. The papers I delivered to the recycle bin would soon be taken away and lost to me, but they would also be transformed, not destroyed as such, but transformed. Into what is anything transformed? Who knows? It’s the mystery at the heart of the universe. Matter is neither created nor destroyed; only transformed. I suspect that in matters of our spirit, similar laws apply. All these artifacts represented the many events and people influencing my life. The artifacts of my past would soon be gone, but gone only in the state that they were when I delivered them to the bin. I’d retain the essence of their contents in my heart.

As I drove to the recycle station I thought about some of the ironies in this existential mission. Here I was with my past strewn, page by page, all over the trunk of my car, scattered like fall leaves. I did not want to rid myself of the papers bound up in heavy packages because I might damage my aging back lifting them. The spiritual and the physical realities meet at the significant moments of a life.

On my way back home, I felt a strong wave of grief and then a fleeting impulse to return the bin and retrieve the papers. It was a feeling I recall as a boy when some of my relatives died. When leaving the gravesite, I’d feel a wave of panic. I wanted to go back and retrieve them. I did not want to surrender these people who had been a part of my life. The circumstances of surrender differed in this way: on my trip to the bin I made the choice to let go. As boy, I had no choice when loved ones died; they left and I had no say in the matter. It was harder to let go.

In order to make room in the trunk for all the papers, I had taken out some odds and ends I keep there routinely: a flash light, a first aid kit, some cloth shopping bags, two umbrellas and a bottle of water that I’d always hear rolling from one side to the other as I made turns.

Back home I opened the trunk. It was eerily empty, nothing there. Whatever had been there only minutes ago now existed only in me. Artifacts of my past were gone. What remained were all the stories they told, now woven like a thousand threads through the fabric of my being.

I put back into the empty trunk the things I knew I’d need for now.

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.

As a boy, I had my own bedroom. I also had another room. This one was special.

Located in the basement, we called it the ‘ping pong’ room. No one played ping pong there anymore. The room had a wooden floor which was dry rotted in spots. There were two casement windows on opposite walls – one opened to the outside and the other, oddly, opened to nowhere except a cement wall. During the time of my adolescence, I spent hours in the room alone, processing photographs in a darkroom I’d contrived. I’d listen to music. Occasionally, I’d invite friends to come and watch Donald Duck movies on Castle Films with an old 16mm projector.

A model schooner stood along one wall. Exquisitely crafted, it was maybe four feet from stem to stern. I never knew who built it. It was magnificent and I’d sometimes just look at it and dream of sailing around the world as I’d read Joshua Slocum had. It was my space to make photographic images and to dream and I loved it. I was safe there. Happy.

In Virginia Woolf’s iconic essay, “A Room of One’s Own” she advocates specifically for recognizing a woman’s need for “a room of her own.” She needed her own space and the economic means to give expression to who she was, in her case, a gifted writer. Even from privileged families, Victorian society didn’t recognize women’s skills nor were women allowed rights of their own, particularly rights to their own space.

What has been a luxury of the privileged is now a recognized necessity for everyone. In both a metaphorical and literal sense, everyone needs a room of one’s own.

Even today, Woolf’s concern extends beyond gender equality and well beyond literature. Having one’s own safe personal space without intrusion is a requisite for sanity, for a balanced and fulfilling life. Economic inequality, gender and racial discrimination have deprived many people from realizing their inner potential. They have been deprived of a room of their own, like the millions of immigrants fleeing oppression to seek a safe space; to find a safe haven of their own and the means to live there with dignity.

I have adequate means. I have a room of my own. It’s a studio converted from an old tool shed. I do much the same in that space as I did when I was a boy in the ‘ping pong’ room; I dream and make images – photographic images and create the thousand words that might describe what the pictures are trying to say. There’s a small model of a square rigger I bought for ten dollars at the early attic store in Royal Oak. By the window is a marble top table from my mother’s house where the model sits. From my chair, I can look out past the model on the table and watch the busyness of marsh creatures doing the things they love to do. Having a room of one’s own is a blessing.

Speaking of personal space, marriages need it. . . if one wants the marriage to last. It doesn’t take long for the bonding quality of first love to lose some of its adhesive properties. The adhesive quality eventually gives way and couples find they need room of their own, their own space whether literally or metaphorically. My studio provides me my own space. Occasionally my wife suggests I might like to go there for a while. Having my own space has inadvertently given her the space she needs. An old wheeze puts it this way: “For better or for worse, but not for lunch.”

Respecting others’ space is not a social convention that many observe any more. It’s most evident in social discourse and today’s political rhetoric. Violating one’s space is now the name of the game, and the venerable practice of extending respect to others is as arcane as a man deferentially tipping his hat to an acquaintance. There are few boundaries left. Respecting the boundaries of personal space are critical for maintaining good will and helping us to get along.

To make space for others is the oldest of the social conventions that human beings have practiced – not as often as we might have wished – but practiced, nonetheless. You and I know this convention as hospitality.

A significant form of hospitality can be seen practiced here in Easton. It is an organized expression of love in action. This hospitality is extended by the Talbot Interfaith Shelter. They provide room for the people who have none. They offer safe space for the vulnerable and extend respect for those whom society has marginalized.

“For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms–only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant –and therefore beautiful,” writes Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her classic essay: Gifts from the Sea. Her observation is relevant to much more than just the shells she discovers on a beach. She’s describing a way of life.

Bonds of affection originate when we welcome others into our space while being welcomed into theirs.

My first awareness of the effects of making space, happened in a creative writing course I took years ago in college. Mr. Atkinson was the professor. He invited us to write an essay of our own choosing. The only caveat was that we had to write what we really thought, not what we thought would just look good. Big words wouldn’t cut it – just how I really think, would. There was no topic.

The assignment confused me at first; almost my entire school life I was meeting standards, trying to assimilate the facts others introduced, doing assignments right, working at being correct. Now I was on my own. In the best sense, it was all about me.

Mr. Atkinson looked at my first attempt. In the kindest way, he smiled and said to the effect: You’re not telling me what you really think. That’s all I want to know. Try it again, and tell me in your own words how it was for you in that incident.

Simply put, he was offering me the space in which I might be who I was. That’s all, just who I was. His gesture was both heartwarming and disorienting at the same time, but looking at it years later I understood. In retrospect, I often feel a profound sense of gratitude for this man’s hospitality. By finding myself in his space, I was being encouraged to enter my own and perhaps know it for the first time.

It’s good to have room of one’s own. It’s even better when we know we’ve helped others to find theirs.