refreshment of the tides can keep the tide pools fresh. Otherwise, we watch the news, asking Fosdick’s old question, praying that fundamentalism and fanaticism will not win, knowing that without the ocean tides, the tide pools will pass with time.
1. Sigourney, “To the Ocean,” in Poems for the Sea.
2. Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Christian Work, 716–22.
3. Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick, 399; Fosdick, “Dear Mr. Brown.”
4. French, “Minn. Muslims Denounce Attacks.”
Stillness at Blue Spring
When words become unclear,I shall focus with photographs.When images become inadequate,I shall be content with silence.
—Ansel Adams5
I don’t belong here.
Walking the wooden path of Blue Spring State Park next to the clear shallow waters, I am a trespasser in the habitat of the West Indian Manatees who winter here. I walk among the sabal palms and nature’s stillness disturbed only by the distant roar of an engine somewhere above and other tourists who have come to see the manatees inch their way forward into the hot spring where they pause, reverently it seems, over the opening from deep in the earth below. Blue Spring is a sacred place.
So gracefully does the Manatee approach the spring head, the deep hole through the limestone that pours 111 million gallons of water per day from deep below the earth’s surface, enough for every resident of greater Orlando to drink fifty gallons of water a day. The manatee knows nothing of nearby Orlando. Nothing about Epcot or Disney World. Nothing of the Holy Land theme park. Nothing of technology, malls, or vacations. She lives where she is . . . in this special place where she spends her winters to stay warm by the heated water of Blue Spring.
Her movements seem effortless, so fluid and gentle, like the water around her. Her huge flat tail, like a leaf fluttering in a soft breeze, inches her upstream toward the place where the earth is refreshed by the natural hot tub, before the water from deep below the surface cools as it flows downstream to replenish the river. Slowly, very slowly, she moves to the edge of the black oblong opening, this hole in the earth, the spring head, the epicenter of the green pool at the head of the river where she lives. Her tail stops moving. She stays very still and bows her head, like the Virgin Mary pondering the mystery of an ever-virginal Incarnation.
The trespassers get to see this. We can only see it if we push away the noisy culture we have brought to this place; push away the interruptions of a gathering crowd of people talking on cell phones, laughing, and loudly speaking to their fellow tourists as though they were at the mall, cruising past the mannequins in the shop windows or stopping by a town for an hour or two on a cruise. Instead, this is where the manatees live more naturally than we.
The manatees have no enemies. None but us, their human brothers and sisters, who, like the distant plane flying overhead, pay them and their endangered species and habitat little heed, except for the Florida State Department of Parks and Recreation, which watches over their slow recovery from human threat.
The pool of Blue Spring is its own kind of temple. A sacred place of the deepest silence where only those natural to this habitat belong. Today I was there, and the beauty of it deepened the sense of Incarnation: the sacredness of flesh and blood and water and algae and sabal palms and a natural quiet that mellows the soul, joining the manatee in taking a bow over the place deep below the surface from which the water flows.
5. Attributed to Adams in AB Bookman’s Weekly: For the Specialist Book World, 3326.
A Joyful Resting Place in Time
I think there is nothing, not even crime,more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay,to life itself, than this incessant business.
—Henry David Thoreau6
I’m on vacation . . . in a pool . . . in the Florida sun . . . where I wished to be several days ago when back in frigid Minnesota. I’m here . . . but . . . not quite here. I’m moving forward to something even in the water . . . not standing still in this pool. I’m doing my prescribed water exercises. Not so much because I’ve chosen to do them, but because there’s nothing else to do. I’m bored.
“Lift left knee. Extend arms. Pull arms to side as left knee goes down and right leg lifts. Keep abdomen tight. Keep neck and upper back muscles relaxed. Repeat.”
I’m doing the exercises, but even in this pool, I think I have to be moving forward, advancing to the other side. One, two, three . . . eleven. I reach the other side of the pool. Turn, repeat to opposite side. Count steps to give sense of progress.
Even in the Florida sun in this quiet pool with no distractions, I seem to feel I must accomplish something. Be on my way to something. If I’m in the middle of the pool, I’m working to get to the other side. When I reach the far side, I turn and start pulling for the opposite side. Until the counting of strokes reaches one hundred. Then I change the exercise routine . . . and repeat . . . one, two, three, four, five . . . eleven, reach goal, turn, repeat until I count one hundred strokes.
I get out of the pool, dry off, take my place in the lounge chair. I’m having trouble just being here . . . alone . . . in the Florida sun . . . by a pool surrounded by palm trees and tropical birds. I turn on the MacBook Air, and as I do, I notice I am refusing to be here . . . where I really am . . . right now. My spirit insists that I am placeless.
A small gray lizard perches on the arm of the lounge chair next to mine. I look at it. It stares at me. The lizard’s throat blows up like an orange balloon twice the size of its head. I move. The lizard scampers away. This is the place where the lizard lives. I do not. I am human, capable of being everywhere at any time, but homeless, scurrying like the lizard for a resting place.
I put down my passenger ticket to everywhere and nowhere—the MacBook Air—and reach over for the hard copy of The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry I’ve brought for a quiet moment like this . . . a time to think . . . a time to seek perspective. I open to the Introduction by Norman Wirzba.
Novalis, the German romantic poet and philosopher, once remarked that proper philosophizing is driven instinctively by the longing to be at home in the world, by the desire to bring to peace the restlessness that pervades much of human life.
Our failure—as evidenced in flights to virtual worlds and the growing reliance on “life enhancing” drugs, antidepressants, antacids, and stress management techniques—suggests a pervasive unwillingness or inability to make this world a home, to find in our places and communities, our bodies and our work, a joyful resting place.7
The closest I get to that resting place is my daily afternoon nap back in Minnesota. I am not alone in the nap. Maggie and Sebastian join me in the siesta. Maggie cuddles up close to my head while Sebastian rests against my thigh, reminding their cerebral, restless friend that I really am a creature in one place . . . at home . . . in the same time and space with them. If I am distracted when the time comes for the daily
