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 nap, Sebastian herds me upstairs. “Come on, Dad, it’s nap time!” Like the lizard, Sebastian and Maggie are attuned to time and place, the angle of the sun, the rhythms of day and night and their location in space, while their Dad is racing around the world and the universe on his MacBook Air looking for a resting place when the resting place is right up those stairs.
We humans think we are an exceptional species, superior to the lizard who scampers down from the lounge chair and the West Highland White Terrier and the Shitzu-Bichon Frise. Yet we refuse to recognize our home within the limits of life itself . . . time and place . . . here in the garden, erasing all limits with the MacBook Air until . . . we become . . . like God.
Discontent with embodied existence and valuing little, we scurry away, not seeing, not touching, not hearing, not feeling anything much but one, two, three, four . . . eleven, on our way to nowhere in particular where perhaps the MacBook Air will take us vicariously to a joyful resting place . . . outside the reality of time-bound lizards and dogs . . . a delusional placeless place beyond dust to dust, ashes to ashes . . . and we miss the whole experience . . . on the way to someplace which is no place.
I want to learn to be in one place at one time. I want to live less anxiously. More present, one might say, to embodied life in this one spot where I really am . . . this one place . . . and find within it a joyful resting place in time.
6. Thoreau “Life Without Principle.” Originally presented as a speech titled “What Shall It Profit?” in Providence, Rhode Island on December 6, 1854.
7. Berry, The Art of the Commonplace, vii.
Memorial Day and the Soldier’s Helmet
As wounded men may limp through life,so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.
—Frank Moore Colby9
Memorial Day once honored the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers. They called it Decoration Day, and they laid wreathes and flowers on the graves of the dead soldiers.
When