Nature: A Path Toward Growth and Change
by Diane Lundegaard, Dix Hills, NY
The anxiety Pippa felt about leaving home was understandable. “Life’s really going to change,” said her friend who knew this from her own college freshman days. The two young women met for lunch, their last outing together before the fall semester. Pippa kept her eyes on the menu. She took a sip of soda. She didn’t want to talk about change or how life would be different because for her life had already begun to change.
As summer drew to its close Pippa spent as much time as possible at the shore. The recent high school graduate loved island life, especially Long Island’s which had more than one thousand miles of shoreline for her to explore. She loved swimming in its bays and floating on its ocean waves. She loved the sensation of the moist salt breeze as it rippled through her blond hair and enjoyed combing the shore for treasures like jingle shells and skate and whelk egg cases. After she and her friend parted it should come as no surprise that Pippa headed to one of her favorite beaches.
As Pippa strolled along the upper shore towards the jetty, her favorite place to sit and think, bits of wet sand, seaweed and ground seashells clung to her feet. Lost in her thoughts, Pippa strayed onto a band of sand covered by flotsam and jetsam. On this tidal wrack lay nature’s debris: crab exoskeletons, sea shells and seaweeds snared with man-made refuse, nylon fishing lines, Styrofoam food containers and crushed soda cans. The cast ashore debris matted a narrow strip of sand running the length of the beach. Although Pippa quickly moved off the nettlesome wrack, there remained other outrages for her to deal with, such as the existential crisis taking hold of her mind as it expanded towards adulthood. Challenges to the way she had been raised, to her place as a woman in the world, and most painfully, to her faith gnawed at her, constantly biting at her much like the tiny but powerful jaws of the wrack’s beach flies that nipped at her ankles. Pippa could swipe at the flies. “But what,” she questioned herself, “does one do about the other stuff?” Pippa heard the harsh wail of a lone seagull and looked up. She watched as the bird’s wide black tipped wings flapped through a skid and then light it onto the sand.
When Pippa reached the jetty, she climbed onto one of the groin’s larger rocks. She dipped her feet into the clear water that channeled through a vein created by some partially submerged pieces of granite carpeted by barnacles. Nearby, shore birds scurried about at the water’s edge catching sandflies. Pippa’s blue eyes, now scanning the beach followed another gull, one walking towards the wrack, perhaps looking for something to eat, thought Pippa, and then her thoughts turned abruptly back inward.
Was it faith she had lost, or belief? If one couldn’t believe what was the sense of faith? Pippa felt like her life’s foundation was sinking, leaving her to flounder in a turbulent sea. She tugged at the silver chain she wore around her neck. Faith, Hope and Charity. A cross, an anchor and a heart. They were supposed to hang together. Was faith the foundation for hope? Or was it the foundation for charity?” Pippa’s thoughts spun like objects lost in space, ready to crash-land.
An unexpected breeze stirred the water in which Pippa bathed her feet. She watched the clear water flow past the barnacles and rock weeds clinging to the jetty. She caught sight of an oxygen seeking crab pushing up through the sand. A flock of seagulls flew in from the foredune. Their boisterous flight whipped past her, their wings cut into the air, the invisible substance through which they soared and cried as if petitioning heaven. She looked upwards, way past the gulls as if casting her own appeal for a divine revelation among the golden edged clouds.
Looking back over the beach Pippa caught sight of a gull struggling to free one of its legs that had gotten caught in the wrack’s debris. Moved by the bird’s suffering Pippa got up from the jetty, up from the tangle of coming-of-age thoughts weighing her down and walked slowly and decisively towards the trapped creature. With a felt sense of the divine pouring through a felt sense of nature she went to its aid. Pippa took her next breath as if ready to fly along with the gull as it lifted itself into the air and soared out to sea. She then smiled the inner smile of the pilgrim who has felt a sense of the divine pouring through a felt sense of nature and has returned home to himself.
Diane Lundegaard is a Freelance writer and environmental educator
