Last week, I spoke at Chautauqua on resilience. This week, I’m at the ocean on the Outer Banks in North Carolina.
The Outer Banks are one of my favorite places. Since first coming here in the 1980s when I was in graduate school, their quiet beauty and natural mysticism have proved compelling. And for almost two decades, I’ve returned every summer.
When I arrived this year, having just spoken at Chautauqua, I had resilience on my mind. In many ways, the Outer Banks is a remarkably resilient place. It is the location where European settlement failed (several times) and even indigenous maritime natives had a tough time surviving. Yet people kept coming back. Perhaps pulled by the same enchantments of sea and soulfulness still evident every dawn, perhaps to escape some sadness or stress stalking them on the mainland. People came to this stretch of thin land and dunes far out in the ocean - failed farmers, tough fisherman, lighthouse keepers, freed African-Americans, descendants of shipwrecked fools and pirates - and somehow made an uninhabitable, storm-ridden sandbar home.
Every dawn, I greet the day here at the edge of the sea. Standing in the waves as the sun rises, I think of the thousands of thousands of daybreaks here, before human eyes would witness them. In many ways, the land itself is resilient, a place that probably shouldn’t even exist but does. A place pummeled by the Atlantic century after century but remains. A place tortured by modern developers but refuses to be ruined even by them.
And yet, it is so fragile.
The towering dunes protected against human encroachment, the beaches surrendering to sea rise. The creatures struggling to survive everything from over-fishing to warming ocean temperatures. I stand on the beach each dawn marveling at resilience and wondering if any of it will be here in another thirty years, another fifty…? And I often cry. To love a place so much, to know the odds are not good. So much resilience over so long - all to become merely memory in a single generation. I helped my daughter love the Outer Banks, too, all the while knowing that by her life’s end, it may well exist only in her mind’s eye.
There’s a sea turtle nest several yards down the beach from our house this year. We’ve been watching with the volunteers as the nest hatches. The turtles are endangered. Those who care about their survival guard the nests from predators, and when the hatchlings come forth guide the tiny babies to the water. Each summer and fall, a few thousand will be born, some will make it to the sea where they will catch the current of the Gulf Stream, swim to the other side of the world, and, eventually, the smallest percentage of the babies will grow to adulthood and return to the Outer Banks to lay their eggs.
They are so small. There are so few remaining. The ocean is huge. And a dozen or so of us surrounded them at their moonlit birth - and cheered - as four tiny turtles made their way down the starry beach and were carried off by the waves.
Maybe fragility and resilience are twins. Maybe we’re all just hatchlings at the edge of the sea. Maybe we’re always assisted by helpers we don’t recognize - a communion of saints, the ancestors, attending angels. Maybe we never swim alone. Perhaps resilience isn’t grit. Perhaps it is more grace than we will ever know.
INSPIRATION
The Turtle
by Mary Oliver
breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water...
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest...
and you think
of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do-
and then you realize a greater thing-
she doesn't consider
what she was born to do.
She's only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn't even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind,
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.
she can't see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin.
she doesn't dream
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.
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Resilience and Fragility
I love your writing each time I receive it, each book of yours I read, but this today was special. Thank you.
Oh, my, thank you so for this remembrance, where I alone took my "boys," now approaching 50! Having just spent a week there with friends, reveling in the hardiness of the place, I was filled with gratitude. For it was there that I first truly embraced God, having been in church all my life. The feeling was God loving me (?!), though I was as small as a grain of sand, with all the big and tiny creatures there, and God is all powerful for sure but still provides solace to living creatures.