Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [31]
“You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins,” wrote the seventeenth-century Anglican priest Thomas Traherne, “till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”* Since I had received Christian education that taught me to view creation as both fallen and inert, I was happy to discover these dissenting opinions, but they only confirmed what I already knew to be true. I did not live on the earth but in it, in communion with all that gave me life.
“Just wait,” Ed said back in Georgia, leading me around the thin place he had found. When we reached the top of the first hill, he turned me around to see Mount Yonah in the foreground, with its great face of exposed rock barely visible to the west, and rounder Pink Mountain just behind. Below and all around those two peaks, all I saw were the tops of trees, without a roof line, a telephone pole, or a microwave tower in sight. After we had sat long enough to hear the shushing of the river a quarter mile away, we headed down the far slope toward a stream shooting sparks through the trees.
Before we got there, Ed led me under a canopy of leaves toward a pool of water so dark with tannin that I could not see the bottom. Hidden frogs croaked once as we approached and then leapt into the water. By the time I arrived all I saw were ripples. The largest of three springs on the property, this one produced a steady stream of water that came out through the roots of a big poplar tree. “We could dig it out and cap it for our water,” Ed said.
“Or we could leave it alone,” I said, already feeling protective of the land. I was used to feeling that way about living things, but for the first time in my life I was feeling maternal toward a place. I wanted to evict the cows that were eroding the banks of the spring. I wanted to remove the strands of rusty barbed wire that were embedded in the trunks of the trees along the creek. I wanted to collect the empty beer cans left by careless hunters and banish those trespassers from the land forever if they could not pick up after themselves any better than that. No one had to explain to me why Mother Nature was a she.
The spring emptied into a creek that we followed for ten minutes or more, past banks of blackberry bushes just beginning to green up for the summer and dead pines still standing with great holes pecked in them by the pileated woodpeckers I had already heard in the woods. All of a sudden there was a great commotion just ahead of us. Stopping to locate the source of it, I watched a great blue heron lift off from the creek, with stick legs still trailing in the water as the massive wings beat and then folded just in time to escape through the awning of the trees. When I could breathe again, we continued past where one creek joined another to the flood plain near the west end of the property, clearly a favorite grazing spot for the cows.
Since the creek continued toward the river on someone else’s land, we took the overland route, hiking up and over the ridge toward the sound of rushing water on the other side. Following a deer trail most of the way, we got as close to the sound as we could. Then we pushed our way through a stand of mountain laurel that was twice as tall as we were and teetered on the bank of the Chattahoochee, watching a pair of wood ducks we had just startled flying away from us up the river. Ten feet below, a huge stone jutted out into the river, flat enough to stand on. Hanging on to branches of mountain laurel, we lowered ourselves down to it and stood surrounded by wild river on three sides.
Seventy-five miles south of where we stood, the Chattahoochee was a broad, brown river foaming with suds that ran through the suburbs of Atlanta. When I lived there, I knew a particular subdivision that included a small park on the river, where I could go when I needed to be near living