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November 25, 2024

Chestertown Spy

Nonpartisan and Education-based News for Chestertown

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Snapshots of Daily Life: Coronavirus by George Merrill

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A factory worker in China dies. Residents of Seattle become ill. A man coughs in Iran while a postal worker in Italy runs a fever. These are victims of the coronavirus disease. We’re reminded again how small our world is.

If this present pandemic of the coronavirus teaches nothing else, it demonstrates how intricately interwoven the individual lives of the worldwide human family are. The spread of the disease has brought home the ancient truth that poets, political visionaries, artists and even economists attempt to convey in their work– that providence “hath made of one blood all nations for to dwell on the face of the earth.” In the last analysis, our divisions, and there are many, are mostly artificial constructs, the way parallels and meridians designate discrete sections of one entire globe. We’re all made of the same stuff, all of a piece, of one blood.

This viral infection is creating fear and suspicion worldwide. It is rare that the majority of the world population would be having the same fears, simultaneously.

As I write this column, pop-ups constantly appear on my computer with breaking news, announcing that the stock market indices have fallen dramatically or risen slightly. It’s not unlike how in hospitals where the nurses regularly monitor a patient’s temperature and blood pressure, staying alert to any significant changes. I’ll bet any nurse today has a far better shot at stabilizing the erratic blood pressures or fluctuating temperatures of her patients than stock traders have in getting market numbers back into safe parameters. We are profoundly vulnerable, economically and physically, and although continually reminded of it, we typically dismiss it. Denial has grown more difficult living in the shadow of the coronavirus.

Genesis reads how we are to “replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” If indeed this is what we’re supposed to do, God threw us a curve ball. Strictly speaking, the coronavirus is not a “living thing” and so the divine rubric which appears to give us the luxury of complete dominance over our environment doesn’t work with the coronavirus. This virus is not something we are going to subdue, or a phenomenon over which we’ll have any significant dominion.

To manage the pandemic, minimizing the effects of the virus will be the major task. That will require that the world cooperate by sharing information, resources and safety measures. This also means world leaders speaking frankly to one another. Another concern the coronavirus exposed was how political posturing, in China and America has hindered timely managing the epidemic. It boggles the mind how, although we know that cooperation is the critical ingredient in solving problems of any magnitude, cooperation is the last thing, if it’s thought of at all, that is ever considered.

A curious thing happened only a few days ago when I went to have my toenails cut. I’d been to the nail salon twice before.

The salon is run by Vietnamese. Any communications I’d had with staff were always courteous but perfunctory. Language was a significant factor. While I was being tended to by a pedicurist, one of her colleagues came over to her. She had an iPhone in her hand. She tapped the pedicurist on the shoulder to gain her attention, and said something in Vietnamese. She pointed to the iPhone. They exchanged words that sounded like soft musical intonations I didn’t understand, but I sensed a hint of alarm. The woman with the iPhone, not wishing to be rude to me, showed me the face of the iPhone. I saw Johns Hopkins Hospital and two doctors speaking about new cases of the coronavirus in Maryland. The woman with the iPhone spoke English only marginally. She held three fingers up in the air and repeated the English word ‘three’ demonstrably to emphasize the number. She seemed to want to talk about it. I had trouble understanding her – and of course she had the same difficulty with me. She then smiled agreeably, turned and left the pedicurist to her task.

In the three previous occasions when using the salon’s services, I’d never before had conversations with any of the people there. Communications were token at best; ten dollars for cutting nails, thirty for pedicure, and my response to just cut; that was it. Those sparse communications constituted, except for services rendered, about all the interpersonal encounters that I had with any of the persons on staff.

This time when my nails were done and I was ready to leave, as I was paying my bill the woman with the iPhone walked toward me. She seemed eager to engage with me further. In all my visits, this was a first.

She was a petite woman, young with a pretty, childlike face. Her face seemed, not scarred exactly, but shaded lightly here and there in soft hazy blotches –– some disease? or perhaps burns that she’d sustained? I could only guess. What she wanted me to know was that there was now a fourth case and that Johns Hopkins had confirmed it. Again, she pulled out her iPhone, showed me the reporters speaking and seemed to want to comment on the information. “No good, no good” she said, as though she were pleading and looking to me for reassurance. I nodded helplessly.

In a strange way, what I would regard as the two scourges of our post-modern era driving people apart ––iPhones and a virulent virus –– were, in fact, drawing us closer. Virus contagion that would necessarily make us fear and avoid each other, and the iPhone, (which I always thought of as the devil’s workshop, keeping people from being emotionally available to each other) now converged, building a bridge between two people in a nail salon. The two forces merged to create a moment of mutuality, of humanity, between two people who had always lived in separate worlds.

In the shadow of the coronavirus I have thought about this brief encounter. I see in it something that transcends the particulars. I am a professional, a man enjoying the social capital that male ‘elites’ have in today’s world. The woman at the salon was an Asian immigrant, performing what we would regard as one of society’s more humble tasks. However briefly, we had been drawn together to share our concerns as equals around, of all things, the mutual concern everyone has: matters of our life and death.

In an ironic twist of fate, it may turn out that social media by which have been alienating each other, may now be the medium that keeps us connected until the coronavirus can be safely managed.

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Seeing by George Merrill

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Is it mind over matter or is it matter over mind? 

I’m thinking of how my world changes when my body does. Of course, in this sense the world does not change; it’s me that changes.  I have considered that it may well be matter over mind. Everybody knows how our bodies have a way of both demanding our attention and then focusing it.

My own body for instance, over the last ten years has seen several changes. Most were unwelcomed but each took me, however reluctantly, to a new place. I’d like to mention my aching back again as this was the most unwelcome but the most instructive of all the disruptive visitations aging presented me with.

For several months walking was painful. As I mentioned in earlier essays I reluctantly took to using a cane although I would, occasionally. It was helpful. The realities of my compromised mobility introduced me to another dimension of walking that was governed by a different mentality: no longer was I pushing for how far and how fast I could walk but how carefully to move and how alert to remain. All this came home to me again recently during my annual winter holiday in Puerto Rico

Walking long distances, I fatigue. Sometimes it may generate pain. In that regard, a cane is a life saver. It assures me of a steadier gait and a leisurely one, all of which almost magically transform a world that before had been familiar to me, or even banal, into something new and surprising. 

The other day I chose to take a long walk along a promontory I’m very familiar with. I’ve been walking it for fifteen years when on holiday in Puerto Rio. The promontory, on the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, overlooks the island of Vieques and the Caribbean Sea. It’s a gorgeous spot and although I knew this before, I hadn’t with the same clarity I had that day on this particular walk.  For purposes of discussion I’ll code the name “BB” as the world my body lived before my back trouble–– and the world after the back trouble, “AB.”

My walking while in my BB stage was clearly to just get exercise, flex those muscles. I wanted to feel the energy rush that comes with pushing my body to the max while walking. During the BB era, I could walk the entire promontory in thirty minutes and with the exception of the sea and the island, I’d see almost nothing else in the expansive terrain around me. When I’d return from this walk I’d feel triumphant, as if I’d mastered my body. I felt a surge of accomplishment; I’d done myself well walking briskly and at some distance, and like all personal victories, it was short lived. As I look back there were, in the final analysis, no real takeaways from the BB walks –– nothing particularly memorable. It was just another practice driven more for the enhancement of my sense of physical power than by any desire for discovery.

Just the other day –– I’m talking AB now –– I took the same route, this time walking with a cane. My first impulse was to pick up the pace. Going so slowly didn’t feel right. But picking up the pace did not feel right either because I’d have to swing the cane like a rapier. So, I slowed down to a rhythm that seemed to accommodate the realities of my situation; that is, my body, my cane and the landscape under my feet.

I walked past a palm tree. Over the years I had to have passed it dozens of times. I don’t recall it at all. The palm tree was unlike any I’d ever seen here. It was about 20 feet tall and with a skinny trunk. The coconuts, however, instead of growing high up nestled in the fronds at the top of the tree, we’re growing up and down the trunk as if the tree had large tumors. I’d never seen anything like it. I went up close and sure enough, as large as they were, the coconuts were held to the trunk by what seemed like short stems like grapes have. The stems did not seem substantial enough to bear their weight. They must have been like iron.

In order to be careful of my steps I began walking with my eyes on the path immediately before me. During BB, this would never have been the case. My eyes would have been fixed to the distance, as though if I had any goal, it was always one somewhere on up ahead.

Along the path, under my feet, tiny flowers grew everywhere. Some we’re no larger than small spiders. They grew along the ground on wiry vines no thicker than string and extending over the path in all the directions I walked. They spread out like a Lilliputian forest, not of trees but of flowers. Some were white, some purple and others yellow. Had my eyes not been intentionally on the ground I was covering, I would never have seen them and in the fifteen years I’d walked the promontory I had no idea they were there.

In reflecting on the experience, I have to say that that my walks AB did not provide me with any victories or personal triumphs as I had known when I walked BB. There were no adrenaline rushes or stirring highs, which during my BB stage were always coveted. Then faster was better, longer was greater.  The AB experience was entirely different. 

I look at it now as though my BB world was subtly governed by one of winning, the mastering of things, like my body, through which, of course, many triumphs and victories are frequently gained. Such preoccupations are common to the ways of youth. These ways did not apply to me anymore. My AB world to which my body brought me was one of substance more than of accomplishment; instead of a sense of power, I felt one of intimacy, an acute awareness and familiarity with the space around me.

In our sublime moments of truth, nature will often mock us.

Near where I turned around to come back, the promontory is low and the beach only five or six feet below me. I saw a good-sized ghost crab emerge cautiously from his hole. These crabs appear to have both an entrance and an exit for their underground dwellings. He crawled out slowly, I’m sure eying me, and remained stone still. I didn’t move. Feeling safe, he started walking. I moved and he shot back and down the hole with what seemed the speed of light.

The thing here is that not only was he able to move with extraordinary speed, but he could see everything around him while he did. He’d never miss a thing.

Some critters have the best of both possible worlds.

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.

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Creativity by George Merrill

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Talk to yourself? I do. It may not be as ditsy as some think.

It occurred to me recently that perhaps talking to myself is not so much something to be ashamed of but an occasion to feel blessed. I say this because the first time we meet God in the Bible, he’s talking to himself. Of all people! And when he speaks, it’s not sotto voce, but a resounding voice of command. For someone who is all talk, he’s remarkably creative.

Consider this: “In the beginning when God created the universe, God commanded, Let there be light.” And there it was light. It continues; God enjoyed what he said so much he went on to, “. . . name the light, ‘day,’ and the darkness, ‘night’.” God continued –– as though on a roll ––commanding that “the water below the sky come together in one place so that the land will appear.” And on and on it went. No one was around to hear the foundations of the earth as they were being laid, or more accurately, talked into becoming. it’s clear from Genesis that these commands were issued verbally and in this manner a whole universe was created but created by someone who was comfortable talking to himself. If you’re antsy about this habit yourself, take comfort; you’re in good company. Talking to yourself is next to godliness.

When God says to himself, “Let us make man in our own image,” he really does mean man since it’s Adam who appears following the command. This might have caused God grief –as even to this day feminists can take umbrage –– but not to worry; God quickly recognizes that without women, the entire universe would fall apart. Thus, Eve arrives on the scene, but, curiously, this time not from the commands God has been issuing while talking to himself: she materializes very differently. Perhaps the first scientific miracle before cloning ; Eve shows up through some kind of divine orthopedic procedure. Good call, I’d say. Best not to start off by telling our first woman what to do.

I certainly mean to be playful here but not disrespectful or impious; reading scripture with a legal mind leads only to a scramble for the high ground, creating the stultifying trap of who’s right and who’s wrong. A fanciful mind is open to nuances and seeing other possibilities. Being literal would trivialize and marginalize the spiritual depths of meaning implied in the ancient story. Genesis is a parable, a myth that our ancient forbears devised as they struggled to understand our essential nature and the nature of God and the universe. That we were created in the image of God is particularly vital, here. If Genesis is only a static description of original prototypes it wouldn’t teach us much about our essential nature. The product here is less the issue, than the process. Great acts of creativity begin deeply inside of us, and often when we’re alone, as they did for God.

Artists of all descriptions will often speak of this. Some, like my wife, an artist, when painting by herself hums instead. A brilliant preacher I know told me once that he first goes into his study In solitude, walks the room talking thoughts out loud. Soon latent creative energy of significant magnitude is released. Inspired thoughts are brought into being, like imaginative images in art are, or music, writing, sculpture, medicine, architecture and new strategies for the practice of compassion. All of these contribute to the healing of our world. I understand the Genesis story as shaped in such a way as to show that we are and can be co-creators with God and active participants in the divine force that inspires creative goodness. The same creative forces operative in divinity also operate in humanity. That’s the image of God within us.

It grieves me to see how religion loses its way, today, while its scriptural teachings are coopted for secular power and gain. Religion has allowed political values of pride and dominance to define its mission. Politically driven, religiosity is necessarily divisive. I see this divisiveness as a perversion of the inspiring myths of historical scriptures and particularly the implicit message of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Genesis story, with various interpretations, some, admittedly troubling, has nevertheless been a formative myth in western thinking and has at its core this primary vision; that goodness is greatness are connected and that humanity was conceived in divine love.

When creation is finally completed, as one account in Genesis reads: “ God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” According to the account, God, does not articulate this while talking to himself. Some editor of Genesis wrote this, convinced of the creation’s fundamental goodness.

And maybe that’s the point; After the creation is established and evolves and we make our transitions from the innocence of Eden into the complexities and paradoxes of life east of Eden, it remains our responsibility, and the fundamental task of our humanity to revere the goodness in each other and act with gratitude toward the planet that sustains us.

While making a case for the creative potential of talking to oneself I should add a couple of caveats. On those occasions when I strike my thumb with a hammer, I speak commandingly, and loudly and to myself. Fortunately, no one hears it. It’s typically one word, hardly redeeming and never creative.

Grumbling is another variation in this business of monologues. Grumbling is usually a direct response to someone who irritates me and with whom I have unfinished business. To the extent that my grumbling may resolve the matter happily, it can be redemptive. I’ve noticed when I grumble a lot, I’m really not resolving anything. I’m only fueling the indignation with my sense of my righteousness.

I say if the true spirit of creativity seizes you and you find you are talking to yourself, go for it. You really can’t go wrong. After all, It’s next to godliness.

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Snapshots Of Daily Life: Shadows by George Merrill

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The other day I was out walking. As I went up the driveway, my shadow extended before me at a remarkable length, twice, maybe three times my height. I could not believe that I looked so tall. I enjoyed the feeling that, at least for the moment, I was ten feet tall. The feeling was short-lived. I must confess I was enthralled with my own shadow.

I’ve seen my shadow this way hundreds of times in my life, but perhaps it made a greater impression on me now because at my age I’m growing shorter.

There’s a little boy living in me who does not want to grow up. He doesn’t want to grow shorter either. On my walk that day I met this little boy once again in my shadow, and although I’ve aged, I knew right away my little boy wanted to play. So, I began playing. I tried to get the shadow to look like Darth Vader, the character from Star Wars.

The challenge was to position my body with the sun at my back to produce a shape like his; particularly to replicate the helmet on his head that identifies Darth Vader. Raising my arms near my head I could get the bottom part of the helmet visually contained within my shadow, but suddenly, postured this way and that, the entire shadow became a monolith with two burning eyes created by the light escaping from the raised arms near my elbows. I got into the game, but couldn’t get my shadow to do my bidding. My shadow had a mind of its own.

I’ve been wondering recently about the shadows we cast, but shadows of a very different kind.

I watched a Trump rally once. For an hour, he relentlessly vilified a host of perceived enemies. He denounced them as, liars, cheats, fakers, schemers, traitors, bad people, crooked, dishonest, conspirators, spies, despicable but to quote some. Trump, of course, was describing his own character traits.

The shadow knows.

Attributing to others our own undesirable traits is an ingrained human characteristic. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, identified the phenomenon naming it our ‘shadow side,’ that darker side of our personality that we unconsciously disown.

Jung tells us that the ‘shadow side’ contains all those ugly attributes we possess, but we cannot admit them to our own consciousness. Instead, we impute them to others.

For people who may be influential, like high-profile celebrities or others who may enjoy social status and public confidence such as clergy, care givers and political leaders, their shadow can be very destructive. Here the matter of an unacknowledged shadow side becomes potentially ominous because such people are widely recognized and have credibility and authority. Their shadow side, if they are unaware of it, can wreak havoc on all those others upon whom this shadow might fall.

Recent disclosures of sexual abuse perpetrated by both Protestant and Catholic clergy disturbed Americans. How, we asked, could men sworn to virtue and commissioned by the church to serve others faithfully, maintain a façade of moral righteousness while actively engaging in sexual abuse? Even though the clerics may have turned their back on their shadows, the shadows never went away. Know thyself is more than a cliché. In the human family, this knowledge of self can avert a lot of pain and suffering.

Frederick Douglass wrote about his experience as a slave. He mentions two ordained clergy who were his slave masters. They were preachers and followers of Jesus Christ. They had spiritual authority invested in them by their denomination, and enjoyed the economic and social status the state granted them as land owners.

“All the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.” Douglas writes. “I have found them the meanest, basest, the most cruel and cowardly of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in community with such religionists. Rev. Daniel Weeden owned a woman slave . . . this woman’s back was literally raw, made so by the lash of this merciless religious wretch. Rev. Rigby Hopkins was even worse than Mr. Weeden. Both ministers were ordained in the reformed Methodist Church. The peculiar feature of Rev. Hopkins was that of whipping slaves in advance of ‘deserving it.’ He always managed to have one or more slaves to whip every Monday morning. He did this to alarm their fears and strike terror in those escaped.”

What would Jesus do? He certainly wouldn’t do that. What did these ministers think Jesus would do, anyway? I don’t imagine they gave it much thought. If they had, Weeden and Hopkins would have to know that Jesus made it clear how he didn’t want anyone to be his servants or slaves, he wanted them to be his friends. It’s right there in the Bible, in the Gospel of John.

Their shadow side had been successfully hidden from them. They kept it behind them and out of sight. To acknowledge their shadow side would jeopardize business. Free labor (slave holding) was a money maker, labor was costly to get (slaves weren’t cheap) and slaves were very hard to keep (they often ran away.)

We all have a shadow side. Our own shadow side contributes to many of our petty prejudices and aversions. In the normal course of events, it causes no great harm.

About my own shadow, then?

In this column, I choose not share the shadow side of my personality that I’m painfully aware of. The reason is simple enough; it’s embarrassing. To redeem myself some I will say this: I have given serious consideration to its nature and have tried diligently not to let my shadow side intimidate my better angels. Of course, I’m talking only about the shadow I can see, like the shadow falling in front of me on my walks. I know I’m sure to be blindsided by the one I can’t see behind me.

Certain shadows we cast may lead us to believe we’re bigger than we really are. For those of you who see just such a shadow and believe it’s an actual portrayal of you, I offer this caution. Tell those closest to you about it; a spouse, partner, especially your children, the older they are, the better. Be careful not to intimidate them, and they will tell you, not what you want to hear, but what you need to know.

Nothing but a passing cloud makes that long and grandiose shadow disappear as quickly as when your kin tell you how they really see you . . . including your shadow.

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Canes by George Merrill

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My mobility has returned slowly, but steadily. I’m now able to do basics, but no quick moves or heavy lifting. I’m pleased.

I’ve had a cane for a while. After the worst of my back ailments, I used it around the house. Then I abandoned it, doing well without it.

One day, recently, I took an extended walk around my neighborhood. Not being confident of my gait, I considered the practicality of using the cane to avoid falling, but my pride resisted it mightily.

“Why not get into the practices appropriate to the next phase of my life,” I lectured myself half-heartedly. “Consider the cane a kind of warm up for the future.” I only hoped no one would see me. Taking the cane turned out to be a good call, but not without some lessons.

I walked up the driveway out onto the street. I noticed that the cane assisted me in making a surer footing. This increased my confidence. It had been shaken in the last few months. Now, with the cane, I walked longer while experiencing little pain. I was getting into it; placing the cane deliberately to the ground, listening as it struck the ground, tapping rhythmically in synch with my stride; it seemed like a dance. It was neat.

Walking along smartly, I felt proud; wasn’t this like my good old days? Emotionally buoyed, I tucked the cane under my left arm, fancying myself a Marine officer in a movie I’d once seen. He carried a swagger stick. I picked up my pace confidently. I felt jubilant, imperious like a Commander reviewing his troops, the measure of his authority and command resting tidily under his arm. Was he cool, or what? Was I cool, or what?

I didn’t see the rock.

I stepped on it. It turned my foot abruptly. I stumbled just enough to throw me off balance, but not to drop me to the ground. I retrieved my step. Humbled, I returned the cane to its proper use. I’d thought more highly of my new mobility than I ought – or perhaps more accurately, thought of myself as someone I simply wasn’t. I was neither walking in the light I had nor taking the stride that was proper to me.

During this period of my increasing mobility, something else had also been going on within me; the difficulties I experienced in finding my new stride, which I had regarded as limitations for all these months, even humiliations, were not diminishments at all, but another way of being in my world. It was an oblique imperative to slow down and live with increasing awareness of what I was doing in any moment.

Some years ago, I’d done several yoga practices. It was portentous that the walking meditation then was the one exercise that made me the most impatient; it drove me nuts. I was far more of a fidget then. Whether it was walking or doing anything else, I simply wanted to get on with it. I fought against the slow, deliberate measured steps required of the yoga walking meditation. But that’s the only way I can really feel the ground under my feet, the only moments I will ever commune directly with what is always holding me in place no matter what I happen to be about; literally, the ground of my being.

As a younger man, I was an unconscious but willing participant in the frenetic velocity modern culture drives us. I moved quickly, drove fast, walked hurriedly, and wolfed food down – sometimes not even bothering to sit at the table. I answered questions barely taking a breath. I rapidly dispatched anything I was about, getting it out of the way as soon as possible so I could go on to something else. My governor had been stuck for years at full throttle. The challenge to my mental lifestyle began imperceptibly years ago when I first read one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s pithy aphorisms: “When you wash dishes, wash dishes. When you put them away, put them away? I remember reacting to this with a dismissive, “Right, whatever.” However, I never quite shook his thought.

My world view was simple and practical then: dishes were there to be washed and dried and put away swiftly so I could get on with more important things. What was Thich Nhat Hanh getting at anyway?

When I took the cane from the ground, tucked it under my arm and turned it into a swagger stick I lost awareness of where I was my world. I surrendered my alertness to enter an illusory world where I didn’t belong nor ever had I. In the here and now where I walked, my world was in fact right under my feet touching it at every step. Then, too, the more I noticed my steps I also noticed how the ground was strewn with small affirmations of life, past and present. Some were very endearing, like the undulating bodies of the Woolley Bears, executing their tasks of crossing the road to find a place of refuge for the winter.

Others were cryptic. As wind blows hard, Conifer trees broadcast pine needles everywhere and they fall onto the macadam road where I walk. They form curious patterns like Chinese pictograms. The configurations that their thin and supple lines formed demanded my attention, like half completed puzzles. They seemed to express a language of their own as if having left their last habitations on the tree limbs and fallen to earth, and now had a message to communicate to me, something from the life in which they participated as part of the tree. I was a man reading tea leaves.

All very fanciful to be sure except for this: I finally stopped playing soldier that day and got real, and resumed walking with the cane. When I walked, I walked; when I stopped, I stopped; and when I looked at the ground, I looked to the ground and I knew there was no place, at least for those moments, where I wanted to be, except right there where I was.

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.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Snapshots of Daily Life: Environment by George Merrill

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It’s Thanksgiving Day and I am looking out of my studio windows. I never tire of the view. The view changes seasonally but each season offers its own delights. I’m situated on a small cove off upper Broad Creek. The cove doesn’t look much like a cove at all, or even a part of the great Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the U.S.A. It looks more like a mud pond. The wind is shifting to the northwest, blowing across the creek and cove, driving most of the water out. It exposes a mudflat, strewn with the half-shells of spent oysters. It’s one of the hidden graveyards of bivalves, common around tidewater.

It’s fall’s last gasp. Wind seizes the remaining leaves from the limbs they cling to; the tethered leaves flutter at first, reluctant to surrender their moorings. Unable to hold on, the leaves break free, off on the ride of their lives –their first and last – and before they finally light they zig zag, whimsically, as moths and butterflies flit this way and that before they land. In the meantime, trees sway to and fro, and the residual water in the cove shivers as if chilled. It’s a natural thing, timely.

I am thankful for the beauty of this place. The day before Thanksgiving, in the media, I learned that the world, as we know it, is on its way out. I wish it were fake news.

The United Nations Environmental Programme issued a decisive report of their findings concerning climate change. A changing climate is impacting us now. Although the subject is about warming, the report is chilling, even apocalyptic, as it reveals the extent of our relentlessly warming atmosphere. Its effects are already evident; diseases, like malaria expanding into higher latitudes, more severe hurricanes, coastal flooding inundating cities and the increased acidity in our oceans which destroy the world’s coral reefs that sustain the life of millions of fish species. I’m sad, I feel helpless. Do leaves feel this way when the wind tears them from their limbs? I don’t think so. What’s happening to them is at the right time. In our case, it’s not.

It was fifty-three years ago when I felt this same helplessness and grief. I was scared, then, too. It had been a warm, sunny June day. I sat by a window in my mother’s room. The window was open, enough that a warm breeze wafted through the open window making the curtains slowly rise and fall. My mother was in bed. I am sad because I knew she was dying. Cancer is so rapacious; its errant cells mercilessly devour a body. You don’t notice it at first. Then it metastasizes and there’s no doubt. The cells traveled through her body and this once beautiful woman wasted away. I sat, helplessly, and watched the subtle changes in her breathing as she slept. She is being wrested from her limb but something has gone awry; it is not the natural time for her death. She is in her mid-fifties. It is not the right time.

The president says the U.N. report is a hoax, fake news. Congress gives no indication of having any will to act on any of the recommendations of the Programme. Devouring the fair beauty of the earth will also waste its inhabitants, and it will be a lingering process. This seems so wrong to me. I sit at the window of my studio; the trees sway, like curtains in a breeze, indifferently and I grieve.

Love and loss. They’re part of the deal. The world we are born into, as stunningly beautiful as it is, with all its delights, lays out strict terms for its residents; some of these terms are bitter. In the course of our lives we will struggle to make our peace with them, chiefly with suffering and death. Losing someone or something we love is a harsh condition; it’s just how it is. But what’s more bitter and not written in our contract with life, are losses sustained because of ignorance, and I don’t mean ignorant in its common use as an insult; we are all ignorant. We know little for certain. There’s another kind of ignorance, the kind that, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the evidence is ignored and dismissed. Suffering always follows.

The United Nations Environmental Programme has revealed how, with scientifically verifiable data, the planet’s disease process is metastasizing rapidly. Disease symptoms have been identified in several parts of our world body; the air, earth, air and water, effectively its essential organs. The forces we have put in power claim that the data is a hoax. Politicians are silent and inert.

When Rachel Carson wrote her book, Silent Spring, it was published in 1962. Her findings were dismissed as fabrications. The then captains of industry, men, the ones in power, insisted that because Dr. Carson was a woman, and women were known to be hysterical – especially unmarried women – her claims weren’t credible. Dr. Carson documented how agricultural chemicals were poisoning the food chain. Toxins were being insinuated into the soil, into vegetation, into fish and wildlife, leached into aquifers, emptying into the sea and finally appearing in the human body. Carcinogens, from waste disposal of common household chemicals were inducing cancers in various parts of the world body. As enlightened visionaries emerge, ignorance grows up around them like weeds. True prophets have a rough way to go in our land.

But what to do.

Recycle. It seems a small step but the one over which we have immediate control. But recycling also indicates a realistic understanding of what the earth is – not something we use and throw away but a treasure. The second step, a more challenging one, is voting out the nay-sayers, and voting in advocates who are not immobilized by ignorance but ready to take remedial action. Finally, rethinking how we understand the earth will inform how we act. If we treat the earth as we do now, as real estate, a commodity primarily for our profit, the way we once regarded slaves, abuse is inevitable. If we see the planet as a sacred trust, we will behave toward it with deference and respect

John Mitchel, in his thoughtful book, The Earth Spirit, wrote this: “The earth [is]sacred, not because pious people chose to regard it, but because it was in fact ruled by spirit, by the creative powers of the universe, manifest in all the phenomena of nature, shaping the features of the landscape, regulating the seasons, and the cycles of fertility, and the lives of animals and men.”

The earth, like our bodies is informed by the same spirit. “Speak to the earth and it will teach you,” wrote Job. Listen to what it’s saying. It’s a matter of life and death.

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Snapshots Of Daily Life: Marriage by George Merrill

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Marriage is an institution unlike any other; it’s all about personalities and there’s nothing as inscrutable as the complexity of personalities.

Soon, my wife and I will celebrate our 36th anniversary. I’ve been thinking about marriage.

What other social institutions can exalt the humble, and humble the exalted like marriages or can calm the troubled and trouble the calm. Marriages drive the sane, mad, and the mad to become sane. Marriages complicate the simplest issues, like the legendary toothpaste cap and simplify the most complicated– like identifying the one “who’s really at fault, here.” Marriages bring happiness and joy and create acrimony and heartbreak. All this because marriage is a microcosm of our human condition. It highlights the most elusive thread in all human interactions: what specifically are the personality conditions that promote mutually satisfying relationships?

Clichés about marriage, the one’s about what it takes to make them work, while folksy, are guesses. I’m convinced nobody really knows. I’m sure this will sound horribly irreverent but I believe marriage is a crapshoot. It is a guess. We have high hopes when we marry but no substantial idea just what we are getting into. I don’t imagine anyone would make big decisions like buying a car, house, refrigerator or taking a job with as little solid information as we have about the person we are about to marry. The varied personality types – widely ranging from poet-like to statistician – decide on a spouse basically in the same way; intuitively. We act on the basis of a feeling not on any well-reasoned rationale. Intuitions may be spot on, but are typically unreliable.

I have been married twice. My first marriage ended in acrimony and heartbreak. My children were hurt. It took me years to finally acknowledge my own pain much less the pain of my ex. It’s common during divorce to fault the spouse for the marriage’s failure. Blame and anger are frequently a defense. There’s a tendency to hang on to grievances, to feed the anger; it’s grief that’s the bitterest legacy of a failed marriage and no one wants to feel its pain in any depth. The loss of what began with such high hopes and grand dreams ended tragically. It’s like experiencing a death but with subsequent ghostly visitations from the ex. Rather to stay angry; it’s less painful to be angry than to feel the grinding ache of grief and loss.

I have been in the second marriage now thirty-six years and in every sense of the word, it has worked. I mean by that, how real love survived the initial excitement of entering into an intimate relationship, as the real differences in personality and temperament emerged. Occasionally we will talk about the marriage and about us and about changes we’ve noticed. We’re pleased how an abiding and deep affection has slowly morphed from the titillations of early love. I keep wondering just what are the conditions that make for a mutually enhancing marriage. How can radically different kinds of people be together in satisfying ways? Is it to be schooled in the psychology of marriages or informed in the complexities of human relationships? I doubt it. I have been a marriage counselor in my career. Among my professional colleagues, one was married three times, with some short-term relationships in the interim, and the other is in his fourth marriage . . . maybe. They both have huge counseling practices. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach, or in this case, become marriage counselors. Or is the message here that we must have lots of practice–– hands on, in a manner of speaking–– to finally get marriage right. I’m not convinced. Serial monogamy can become a way of life in itself.

At the core of making durable marriages and partnerships, is our need to be together, to know someone is there for us. I know this for certain; there’s a primal fear of being alone in all of us. We need and want others. As much as ants, bees and geese, we are social creatures. With the advent of birth control, marriages have become much more complicated alliances than just being fruitful and multiplying.

Even God was convinced Adam shouldn’t be alone. Early on, he tried some match making. The problem was that God offered him only animals for soul mates. Adam would have none of it. God finally made Eve. It was a great match for a while and like so many marriages, things got out of control and went bad. Strictly speaking, Adam and Eve weren’t married. They lived together but were confronted with the same challenges that any committed partnership demand. For better or worse is an understatement.

One wonders at times what might have happened if Adam had settled for a zebra, or if he went for polygamy, choosing a few cats. For sure, our evolution would have looked a lot different.

Let me offer some of my own guesses about what I’ve thought makes marriages work and how social relationships in general, can be mutually enduring.

Trust is a huge factor; not just sexual fidelity but the sense one has of knowing who the other is and depending on that knowledge; finding something supportive in the other in living out the day-to-day experiences. I’m convinced that a sense of humor also plays a huge role in keeping the boat from rocking too perilously. Humor has a way of softening the hard edges of significant differences. Humor has a way of weaving what are naturally antagonistic threads into a larger cloth, which produces stronger seams. Acrimonious issues when considered humorously, lose a lot of sting.

By now I’m sure it’s clear that I don’t have a real clue why some marriages work while others do not. I have seen couples who are as prickly as porcupines. Yet they seem fine together, as if they’ve found ways to poke each other but only enough not to scuttle the marriage.

Now, in a world grown so rancorous, it seems all the more important that we evolve more holistic views of how to intentionally create mutually enhancing communities, marriages especially. So much begins with a marriage, and now today, partnerships.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty: marriage is a pure blessing when it works.

In our house, a long hallway connects our bedroom to the den. My wife, Jo, rises earlier in the morning than I do. She goes to the den to read. When I first get up from bed, I see directly down the hallway to the den. Her chair sits next to a large window covered with a sheer curtain. The curtain picks up the early morning sun and makes it glow. What I see first thing every morning is her profile as it appears in relief against luminescent background. My snapshot accompanying this essay is what I see. For me, the picture is worth a thousand words.
Most every morning (except when she sleeps in) I see her bathed in light.

I’m grateful for her. I’m grateful for us.

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.

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