From “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart” by Brian D. McLaren
I think of a wetland I used to explore as a boy growing up in Maryland, part of the Rock Creek watershed. I spent hours exploring that wetland in every season, sometimes barefoot, sometimes in boots that merely always overflowed and filled with cold water because I ventured in a little too deep. How could I stay dry when trilling toads and wriggling tadpoles moved among cattails in the spring? How could I stay away in summer and miss a chance to see that single great blue heron or mammoth snapping turtle who both hunted there, resident dinosaurs to my boyhood imagination? How could I not search for newts and crayfish in its cold waters in autumn, its sky-mirroring surface dappled by yellow tulip poplar, red maple, and orange-amber sweet gum leaves? How could I not return in the winter to slide on the ice and peer through to see painted turtles moving in slow motion along the leafy bottom? How could I not return again as soon as the ice melted to search among the brown soggy layers of decomposing leaves where spotted salamanders gathered for mysterious, slow-motion mating rituals, while red-winged blackbirds called conk-la-reel from the nearby willows?
Several years ago, I was in the old neighborhood again, and I parked my car at the same dead-end street where my friends and I used to follow a narrow trail to the swamp fifty-some years earlier. The trail was still there, but now it was broad and paved for bicycles. The wetland had disappeared. In the place where I remembered it, I found a shiny green tractor parked, its operator taking a rest from mowing the grass between metal picnic tables and park benches in the now-civilized public park. As I sat on one of the benches and looked around, I was overcome by sweet grief for the delight I once enjoyed as a boy, a lost magic boys and girls today will never know, at least, not there.
In writing these words, do you see what I’m doing? I’m returning to this precious place in my memory, this sacred swampy ground. I’m appreciating it, praising it for what it was, all the more because it has been lost. Once again, my echoing experience of the place, my love for it – my life interwoven with it and its life interwoven with mine – all are being intensified through the conscious experience of grief. I recall the words attributed to William Butler Yeats: “Things reveal themselves passing away.”