Читать книгу Be Still! - Gordon C. Stewart - Страница 11

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.