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On Gratitude

Laura Sewall: Small Point, Maine

I WAS WORKING IN MY HOME OFFICE THE DAY HURRICANE Bill hit. It was a hot August day. Perfectly calm, perfectly clear. But I could hear big waves. I looked up from the desk, out the window and across the marsh, and saw these huge waves crashing on the other side of the dunes. The water was coming into the marsh really fast because there was suddenly so much of it to move within the twelve-hour tidal cycle. I ran over to my sister’s and she and her husband were up on the roof photographing these big whirlpools swirling in the marsh. It was somehow so magical I jumped in. But I got scared immediately—and I never get scared swimming. I remember thinking, This is not any pretty water.

So I came back here, got my kayak, and paddled out into the marsh. It was completely, utterly covered. It looked like a big solid mirror. I remember floating past patches where just a few inches of grass stuck out. Because the rest of the stalks were submerged, the tips of the blades were absolutely covered in bugs. As I floated by they tried to jump into the kayak. I realized then that there is so much life in these marshes that is not prepared for higher waters. I mean, I never even thought about the insects. Where are they going to go?

After that I had a real spike of something like fear. I thought if I were to be honest with you I would admit that I don’t know what is going to happen to the marsh in front of my house. I don’t know whether some big surging wave is going to spill over that little peninsula and come pounding through my windows. I don’t know if the marsh will be able to keep up with the rise. I actually think it is years away, but I am not so sure that someone buying my house could say it is a generation or two away. And that is how the houses down here are thought of, in generational terms. So what is scary, in an immediate sense, is that I may not have the retirement funding I thought I had by virtue of selling this house. I don’t know what is going to happen with that. I have no uncertainty about the climate science, but I do have a lot of uncertainty about what to do.

I have watched a brand-new pool form on the marsh; I see the land being eroded. Right on that edge over there, eleven feet have been lost since 2004. Some people say I am in denial. But that is a really ineffective and inaccurate way of referring to a particular psychological process. Living here is not denial. It is a choice. I am sixty years old right now. I could watch some really amazing change in the time I have left and I could stay until it gets washed away. I would be, I don’t know, say eighty-five by then. It just might be perfect. I don’t have kids so I don’t need to pass anything down. It is a very self-centered perspective, I know that. But it is not denial.

These decisions are complex because there are a lot of factors to take into account. For one, I have to take into account my incredible love for sitting right here. I feel so privileged to be observing these changes so immediately. It is frightening but it is also incredibly interesting, awesome really. There is something magical and enlivening about seeing how dynamic life is on the planet. You think of animals running around but you don’t think of plants moving. See that big patch of brown grass over there? It is migrating uphill because it is not super salt resistant and where it used to be is a relatively low part of the marsh that now gets flooded more often than before. So I am seeing a different kind of grass, Spartina alterniflora, come in behind it. I am literally watching the ocean encroaching right here in front of my house and it amazes me.

But there are also nights in the winter when the wind will be blowing so hard I fear that my metal roof is going to rip off and be shredded into pieces that pierce through the windows. This fear drives my spiritual work. Where I go with it, on a personal level, is toward making peace with uncertainty, toward being more fully in the present, and toward living a life where gratitude is near the surface.

I came across this old reminder; do you know Brother David Steindl-Rast? His work has a theme that I love. Essentially, he says that it is not that you can have gratitude for everything all the time but that there is always the possibility of gratitude; there is always something that you can tap into to feel your gratitude, no matter what. Thinking in this way takes care of so much of my anxiety. It is very easy for me to feel gratitude for the place I live, at least when I have time, when I am not consumed by work. There have been too many days in this last year where I was grumpy.

It had nothing to do with where I was but with the fact that I didn’t have time to appreciate this place. I was locked into the computer or the tasks. And so many of them are uninteresting. Lately my feeling is that I need time to just be here before I can decide whether to stay or not. My guess is that I will tap into so much gratitude for my life alongside this marsh that I may just become an old lady who drowns right here.