Last Tuesday, Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the murder of George Floyd. The jury, a racially diverse group of seven women and five men, deliberated 10 hours before reaching their verdict: Chauvin was found guilty of second – degree murder, third– degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

I understand this trial as an epic event in American social history. It signals a change in course that allows greater possibilities for a vibrant America; vibrant because all its citizens can have a place at the table and when they speak, they will be heard.

For over 300 years the African American community has endured relentless abuse and exploitation by a white establishment –– a white community that enjoyed a free hand by assuming an unchallenged assumption of power and privilege which was never constitutionally theirs.

Over the years, Blacks were convinced that their grievances would never even be considered much less justly addressed by the legal system.

America’s law enforcement establishment has rarely been held accountable for the conduct in its behavior toward minority groups and especially African-Americans.

Two cancers that have festered in the American soul for generations, I believe, found redress by the decision on Tuesday in the George Floyd trial.
The law enforcement system and the officers who execute its responsibilities have been delivered a mandate. They can now expect to be held legally accountable for how they perform their duties. They will be required to act in a disciplined manner and to abide by specific conventions of policing protocol. They will abide by codes of conduct.

I was particularly aware of how this trial came on the heels of the previous administration. One of its characteristics of this administration was the unconscionable ways in which it flaunted conventions of government and its codes of conduct. Social and federal protocols were flagrantly trivialized with no apparent demands for accountability coming from the congress. Federal agencies were casually manipulated, loyal government servants were abused and humiliated, while the White House itself, our national symbol, was co opted by the president as a public relations stunt for his own personal interests. Playing by the rules was trivialized. The importance of accountability in public service had been treated dismissively.

The verdict in the trial I saw, in one sense, as symbolic: it begins a process of not only vindicating the abuses suffered by African-Americans, but in an ironic way, the verdict also served to restore to white America the soul it had lost in the practices of administering justice.

Imagine for a moment the Black population now in our midst. It consists of roughly 49 million people. Here are American citizens who have been forced to hide their lamps under a bushel, so that the unique light they have ready to share in the American experience was never seen and valued. In order for this to happen Blacks had to feel some confidence in the law’s protection, and be reassured that they would be playing on a level field.

The Chauvin verdict was a sign that the burden of doubt that has plagued Blacks, the doubt they carried since they were brought here as chattel only to serve as slaves, has being seriously challenged. The African American is an American and belongs here. Blacks, like the white immigrants who once came here, this is their home. African Americans want to build a life here.

The skills and resources existing in this population bring to our collective lives, a deeper understand of our humanity and its suffering. And looking to the future, equal justice will make America great for all of us, not great again, but great for the first time.

Ironically, the statement the verdict makes creates the possibility that has never have been the case before; that African-Americans are under the law, and indeed full participants in the American dream and under the law will be treated in ways consistent with any citizens rights.

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.

My wife and I have finally had COVID 19 shots. We are now prepared to live a new life. How might that look?

It’s a little over a year since the pandemic became a reality. My wife and I were among those only marginally affected. COVID infected 31, 516, 783 people significantly, leaving 569, 528 dead. I keep having that mixed feeling people report having when they tell you they’ve dodged the bullet.

I’ve been thinking back over the year. It’s not so much what I did do during the height of the pandemic but what I didn’t. My routines changed dramatically. The period was an experience in avoiding, simplifying, unloading, while waiting for shots. I began to live more reactively, cautiously. I felt surrounded by danger.

Shopping the supermarket wasn’t playful anymore; I stopped indulging the pleasures of wandering the aisles aimlessly like dogs do on walks; they will sniff the environment with every step they take with no purpose other than curiosity.  At the pandemic’s height, when I went shopping, I took a list of items meticulously prepared. I came, I saw, I bought, I checked out and got back to the car with groceries in the trunk in a matter of minutes. I have never experienced myself so single focused in a supermarket before. It used to be fun.  It’s now efficient, instead.

I didn’t conduct small group classes in spirituality and eldering any more as I had for the last fifteen years. Prohibitions against group assembly nixed that. I missed the group interactions. They were deeply moving and often funny. A virtual presence like Zoom may substitute some in times like this but it will never be as energizing as the real thing, surrounded by real bodies and being attuned to the nuances that real presence awakens.

In a similar vein, I did not gather with friends or even family for dinner or meet acquaintances for coffee. The pulling back hurt, especially so since during this period we had a great granddaughter born. We saw her regularly on an electronic site called Tinybeans. Through this medium we watched her grow almost daily in the first year until we made our first visit. Holding her was magical. 

I did not engage any more in what was probably an unhealthy habit, anyway. When I grew bored or was restless, before, I might jump in the car and go to malls or stores to just to look around. I might go to Penny’s and check out clothing or to Lowes to inspect tools. This never amounted to purposeful behavior –– it was shamelessly escapist, tainted with the scourge of consumerism. I behaved this way only because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. 

There was one upside: I didn’t spend much money on gas during this period. I used the car so little there was not need.

I will confess that for a time I felt deprived of “normal” activities.  

The pandemic, at its height, kept most people at home. That was perhaps the greatest complaint: the feeling of being housebound, trapped, with nowhere to go. I know I’m not alone in this but for a number of us, this confinement revealed some surprises. It was common to hear people say: “I can’t believe I’ve accumulated so much junk.”  I’ve heard the comment a lot from people when they’re moving but rarely from anyone who’s not going anywhere.  People were amazed as they opened long forgotten closets, poked around cabinet drawers, searched garage shelves, attics and cellars; “Why in heavens name did I keep this for?” As our clutter was exposed, the purges began.

Landfills were suddenly inundated by householders bringing truckloads of junk. Some landfills prohibited them from dumping until they could efficiently accommodate the deluge. Neighborhood recycling stations began refusing cardboard since homeowners who had finally dumped old household stuff, started all over again. They bought more stuff through Amazon. Cardboard is a must when mail ordering and for a while cardboard seemed to spontaneously reproduce.

I wondered about other venues for getting rid of things: I thought immediately of the kids. It was very painful to discover that my kids had no interest in the furniture mom and dad wanted to dump. It was hurtful to learn that not only did the kids have no sentimental attachment to great grandma’s sewing table –– a beautiful Victorian relic –– or other memorabilia I was sure they would want, but also no interest even in childhood mementoes that survived the rooms they grew up in. Too dated for them, they’d say. What do you do with what’s piled up or perhaps more to the point, how come what I once wanted, needed, valued, and paid a hefty price for, no one, including myself, needs, wants or values anymore. Everything has a shelf life excepting perhaps those items Sotheby’s auctions off at extortionist prices. Awakening to the reality of being up to my ears with “stuff” is humbling. It’s a sign that a new generation is taking over the one I’m vacating. 

The post- pandemic era will be shaping a new mentality. Just what that will look like isn’t clear. Hopefully we’ll be getting along with a little less.

I wondered what Google might be offering for people downsizing –– a subject referred to alternatively as decluttering –– and I found at least twenty books on the subject, numerous tips, suggestions for decluttering and a couple of writers that identified downsizing and decluttering as spiritual exercises. I was interested to note, too, that getting rid of books was especially difficult. It was a subject with its own category, addressed as specialty in itself.

Some of the books suggested that unaddressed clutter in one’s life was a form of addiction requiring a kind of 12 Step approach, which assume meant taking the first step that we were powerless.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Possessing illegal drugs is a crime. Costs for some prescription drugs is a crime.  On both sides of the law we have a drug problem.

As is the case with most of us elderly, as the years add up, so do the pills. Taking more medications is as much a part of an aging life-style as afternoon napping and watching Jeopardy.

Either because of medical necessity or spiritual emptiness, young Americans are getting hooked on drugs at alarming rates. Addictions are largely driven by feelings of spiritual vacuity, a pervasive sense of inner emptiness and meaninglessness. Sedative dugs anaesthetize those feelings while amphetamines and hallucinogenic drugs provide intoxicating energy and optimism. For the chronically ill, there are often not enough drugs, on the street there are always too many, and for all concerned they cost too much. It’s an odd thought that legitimate patients, drug pushers and junkies share a common concern: will our drugs be available when we want them, and if they are, will we have enough money to pay for them?

As a kid, on my bike, I delivered prescriptions for our local pharmacist. Mrs. Waters was my favorite client. She was so grateful when I arrived with her “headache powders” and tipped me generously, a quarter, big money in 1948. Heaven only knows what may have been in the powders but whatever it was she was always glad to see me and that, including the tip, made me feel good.

Our dependence on drugs for our health and comfort has grown dramatically since World War II.  Prior to 194l, only six drugs accounted for sixty percent of all prescriptions written. In the last decade, James Surowieki reported in the New Yorker, that U.S. drug companies have created more than three hundred new medications.  

Drugs and medicinal potions have been integral to the human experience. From ritual incantations chanted over herbs and roots, from ‘potions,’ from the claims of ‘patent medicines,’ to the modern miracles of pharmacology, we continually hope for healing. Healing from what? From the afflictions that ail our bodies, to be sure, but also from the conditions that trouble our spirit.

In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth worries about his wife’s disturbed state of mind; she’s not sleeping. He implores the doctor:

“Cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased…

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse 

the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart.”

Macbeth’s plea is common enough: “Come on, Doc, can’t you give her something?” 

He can’t: “Therein the patient must minister to himself,” the physician concludes. Today, Macbeth would never have held still for that kind of advice; he would have immediately sought a second opinion. 

America’s extraordinary history with patent medicines–– nostrums as they were called –– reveals our deep longing to be made whole, a desire often exploited by charlatans that introduce false hope. This history should also make us thank our lucky stars for the FDA.

Before modern pharmacology, and in the absence of effective diagnoses and treatment, the sick were desperately vulnerable. Their plight bred a large ‘patent medicine’ industry which made outrageous claims, while selling as antidotes, what were hardly even anodynes, and toxic ones at that. 

If you lived around tidewater, there was even a potion offered to treat ‘miasma’, allergy to swamp gasses. Most likely, it was a derivative of Jack Daniels.

Take the shameless Dr. Archambault, an industrious nineteenth century Boston entrepreneur. He claimed that his treatment called “Wonderful Paris Vital Sparks,” stimulated “marital vigor.”  It was reputed to ” . . . act on the organs as rapidly as a cathartic acts on the bowels.” Dr. Archambault’s formula, with its comprehensive properties but explosive propensities was wisely accompanied with his company’s assurance of legitimacy. Similar to our own prescription drug disclaimers today, it covered the waterfront while remaining totally inscrutable. “Sincerity in speaking as they think, believing as they pretend, acting as they profess, performing as they promise, and being as they appear to be. This is what the Dr. Archambault Co. always does.”  Bubba’s lawyer couldn’t have said it better.

Patent medicines affected no cures, except perhaps for the soothing effects of opioids and alcohol.  Their active agents were typically combinations of both. Some contained lethal agents like mercury compounds and hydrochloric acid. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 began to curtail these shams, and suits against the companies continued well into the l920’s. 

Today, Lady Macbeth’s physician would have knocked her out like a light in seconds and would not likely have recommended psychotherapy. Every day new wonder drugs promise effective treatment for all kinds of ailments–even those that may be “just in your head.” Some critics are disturbed by the increasing use of drugs to correct aberrant behavior like shoplifting, or interpersonal problems such as shyness, and the recently diagnosed affliction, “Affluenza,” a nervous disorder suffered by some who win lotteries or become millionaires overnight. Affluenza patients may turn out to be lucky on more than one count: the cause of their neurosis also pays the freight for treating it. For the rest of us, treatment costs are onerous.

But rarely do drug manufacturers make the outrageous and fraudulent claims they once made in the past. Manufacturers’ disclaimers, however, will frequently contribute to our confusion. Most are written as exhaustively as Dr. Archambault’s assurances. Medical professionals regard such disclaimers as simply attempts by manufacturers to CYA. Are drug companies suspect in their practices? If they are, it’s not the first time. Back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote that “Apothecaries’ profit has become a by-word denoting something uncommonly extravagant.”

You’ve probably noticed that many HMO’s are sexist. For instance, most HMO’s will cover Viagra but not Birth Control pills. I know women with insurance policies that won’t routinely cover an annual physical for them. Men’s yearly physicals are regularly covered. I’ll bet it’s mostly guys who are making these policies. 

Our real problems arise around the miracles of modern pharmacology, not so much from their efficacy–– many are an undisputed  blessing –– but in learning how to use them to live life more fully, not to escape it.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I write this, ice is covering everything: a mist-like rain falls and temperatures hover between 30 and 35 creating the optimum conditions for ice to form everywhere. My local landscape looks as if an exuberant glazier had turned himself loose on the landscape in a moment of pure ecstasy.

There’s a Redbud tree just outside my living room window. We planted it years ago but for three years it didn’t do well. It looked more like a weed than a sapling. In the fourth year, it inexplicably shot up and has been growing lustily every year since. The Redbud grew into five separate trunks, one of them embracing another, as if behaving affectionately with a sibling, something I don’t normally associate with trees. It’s thirty feet tall now. Its successful struggle to survive endeared the tree to me.

Redbud leaves can grow as big as my open hand and are shaped like hearts. In the fall, they’re the last leaves to drop, clinging tenuously to the limbs like chicks in a nest reluctant to leave. I write this on Valentine’s Day and it seems appropriate to ponder the Redbud.

On this particular day, the Redbud, now leafless, looked stunning. Each limb was coated with layers of glistening ice, as if it were adorned specially to celebrate the sentiments of the day. After all, who doesn’t have thoughts of love on Valentine’s Day?

While sitting in the living room looking out on the Redbud, I became aware just how lovely it was being inside my home while enjoying the tree outside. Home is a powerful word and a potent reality in the quality of our lives. It’s home where we prepare to engage the day and return to it when our business is completed. If we live with partners or other family, it’s at home where we find comfort in being together. Even if we are alone, knowing our home is there waiting for us is a soothing thought, a place of refuge after we’ve been handling a workday’s stresses.

The pandemic, of course, has required of us a lot more of home than we may have wished. Like so many things, more is not always better. For all that, however, I would insist that for most all of us, there’s no place like home.

As I sat there, my thoughts drifted to people who have no homes, like refugees and others whose circumstances have conspired to force them to manage their lives with no home. What made the thought come to mind was watching a squirrel romp across the lawn. He seemed indifferent to the residual snow and freezing rain. He was as comfortable out there as I was at home here in the living room enjoying the natural world’s beauty from the vantage point of warmth and safety.

There are many people today, however, who live as wildlife does, but without the natural endowments animals and birds have for their survival: when the world turns bitter cold or steaming hot, such people have no refuge they can depend on; they must treat each day as a new struggle for survival. For me the ice storm is an aesthetic experience I can take with leisure and ease; for those with no home, it’s another scramble to stay alive.

In the minds of those of us who are privileged, becoming aware of the needs of others in want can be unsettling. I do believe that many want to help, to relieve the suffering of others but don’t know just how. Sometimes it’s the enormity of the needs, and the sheer number of them, that immobilizes us and the mind slips into denial. It’s uncomfortable to think about.

I was peripherally involved in the establishment of Habitat for Humanity here in Talbot County. Habitat’s mission is to build homes for people whose circumstances would otherwise preclude them from having a home of their own. Building the homes brought together people of different races, ethnicities and social status. The widely divergent worlds from which the volunteers came necessarily created initial awkwardness. I’d love to say otherwise but there’s no getting away from it: it takes a while to feel at home with people of different races and ethnicities. Sometimes all we have is what we’ve assumed from the stereotypes we may have harbored. If there is nothing else I learned from my associations with Habitat, it is that building trust takes time. A common task is one of the best ways to build that trust . . . and while we’re at it, complete a well built and affordable home for a family who’s never had one.

In a similar regard, Easton’s own Talbot Interfaith Shelter has recently expanded shelter services to individuals and families who have need of temporary housing. It will soon open its second shelter, called Evelyn’s Place, creating still more safe harbors for those with no place to live.

By two in the afternoon the temperature had reached 37 and the ice on trees began melting and dripping to the ground. Toward evening, the sky was still misty. A hint of sunlight fell upon the landscape creating a soft glow. The ice would soon be gone.

The squirrel reappeared. This time he sat erect, stone-still at the foot of the Redbud. His tail folded upwards covering his back like a cape and his two front paws were joined together just under his chin as if trying to decide if the ice laden tree was safe to climb.

Squirrels are at home in all kinds of weather.

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.