Mystery Makers Eating Eternity

Like thousands of suburban families across the country this year, my family and I decided we needed to visit a beach for Spring Break. We were all tired, everyone I know is tired. Not just the typical exhaustion, but the kind where personal, family and societal mental health are percolating at a constant low boil of existential crisis, and everything seems equally urgent and useless. That kind of tired.

We travelled to a remote island on the South Carolina coast, where gnarled ancient Live Oaks form thick forests of freshwater swamps, that give way to sandy dirt roads and tidal marshes, all wrapped by miles and miles of wide sandy beaches. I’m not necessarily a beach person, but my family likes the beach. I wanted to come here so my tired eyes could drink in the unrelenting green pulse of the swamps. Throughout my life I have had a need for the deep green of forests, I love every part of a forest, from the smell of rich organic soil to the canopy’s evocative night noises. I love to be surrounded by deep forest where life layers upon life and death, decomposition, and then more life.

At another time in my life this primal need for green was what lead me south from where I grew up in North Western Pennsylvania. Back home in the consistently cool Great lakes region, Spring was a hard struggle. You could practically feel the ache of the first buds breaking through an unforgiving earth. We never called it Spring Break, it was Easter. It still felt very much like winter. Our Easter Sunday dresses were made to fit over snow suits to allow for the inevitable late season storm. Easter was about hoping for blue skies and chocolate bunnies, going to church and eating salty ham. The persistent grey of Lake Erie winters created a spiritual need to remember that renewal, and new life is possible, so every Easter we bathed ourselves in pastel colors, religious ritual, and sugar.

Here in the South, Spring is not a struggle. Springtime is laid out as an easy feast of growth and gentle warmth. Yellow, blue and white ephemerals bloom unbidden in the scrub, ferns topple over themselves, having never pulled away into the earth to escape the cold. Life here isn’t yearning for renewal as much as it seems to overtake itself with itself, ever more deepening in its own mystery. Here, life does not begin or end, it just continues, changes, deepens. And nothing remains untouched from the constant growth.

I came to this barrier island on our Spring Break feeling the struggle of the last two years, and yearning for some personal renewal. Haunted by questions about the quality of my life and my work, and my ability to love and provide. I found something that felt like answers in two places on this forested island.

First, while exploring the interior of the island we found a 300-year-old cemetery down a narrow twisting dirt road. The space was permeated with quiet stillness, each headstone arranged with care, nestled side by side with loved ones. The etchings on the headstones told of lives that are hard to imagine, but the love and strength held in those lives was easy to perceive. All around us the sunlight filtered through the Spanish moss draped on the wide graceful branches of both living and dead Oak trees. The monuments remaining here were but a fraction of the lives, the human pain and the joy that have been a part of this island. And in this space of monuments, the ground felt sacred and soft, the stones themselves patiently decomposing into the forest. Within this resounding pulse of green, there was a soft outline of the promise and the mystery of our short lives.

As I have said, I love the forest, so perhaps finding this peace in the forest was not surprising. But on this day it had a profound effect, being away from all the decorations of meaning I hang in my life, all the meetings, emails, noises, chores, and instead just living life itself. Life here had a simple, unrelenting pace forward, with the human and the forest layered upon each other.

Then there was the second moment. On a long walk down an expansive low tide beach I stumbled upon a long-abandoned seawall. As I said a day of just sand, water and sun isn’t really my thing, but the exposed pools and flats of a low tide? That is irresistible. I love the creatures, tube worms, tiny clams and crabs that make these spaces home.

This particular tide exposed an abandoned seawall covered with dead and living oysters, barnacles, and hermit crabs. As I knelt beside the wall more and more creatures revealed themselves, and their slow consistent work of reclaiming and dismantling the wall and dissolving it into the sea. Looking up to the incoming tide and the horizon beyond I knew in time all what was here at my feet would be swallowed into the sea. As it should be, life feeding itself with itself, re-creating life into eternity.

This is the promise of my Easter this year, to take this break in time to celebrate Spring and its eternal promise of life beyond life. Here between the forests and the sea, I felt a deeply generous opening over and over of life: resonate, rhythmic and true. Everything is temporal but consistent. Life itself will persist, what is my past is chewed on and recreated into my tomorrow and on and on into my own eternity and my own mysteries. Life will persist.

And what questions did I think I could answer? What conclusions could be found? Am I good person? Mother? Writer? None of those questions have end points. How could I ever have thought differently?

Every identity I have ever taken on: caretaker, partner, gardener, friend, every bit has had struggle, mystery and layers. Never was there an endpoint, everything grows and tangles and struggles and decomposes and new growth emerges. Any monuments to the self are eaten by eternity, leaving in its place only the wonder and mystery of life itself.

Why did I expect it to be any different? Being a writer, being a mother, being a partner? There is no conclusion. Over and over, I am reminded: we are never finished. The garden has weeds, then I work, then it doesn’t, then it does again. That is how life is. Slowly the soil strengthens, the perennials spread and life moves forward. There is no destination or final answer. Next year my roots will be deeper, the soil richer, the mystery thicker, and all of everything sinking more into the generous beautiful eternity itself. Onward, as ever it should be.