SUMMER 2006
ario and I have just returned from a four-day stay at the beach, celebrating our 26th wedding anniversary. We spent some of the time visiting places we had seen on our honeymoon, including Assateague Island, Maryland. There have been many changes. The first day after our wedding, twenty-six years ago, I lay on an ocean dune, naked in the sun. I saw no place at all on this visit that was private enough for such a nude venture. The wetlands have been overgrown by the tourist trade. The shrinking wilderness saddens me.
But wildness could still be seen in places, along with hope for its comeback. In Assateague National Park, I walked on a road of broken asphalt. Winds had swept the sand away from the asphalt, so, in places, it stood three feet above the ground. In the story of that broken road, I saw hope for our future. Back in the late 1950s, a real estate magnate took advantage of the growing popularity of the shore to start a development, a project that would destroy a habitat where wild horses and dune deer grazed; where migrating birds found food in spring and autumn. Then a nor'easter hit in 1962 and literally shredded to pieces his new road. The builder walked away from the project. Later, the U.S. government created a national park around the village ruins. A dream of wealth lost to wilderness.
Nature has also returned in other places. Shenandoah National Park is a land that returned to forest after its trees had been leveled for decades for farm and industrial use.
There is a life force in all the corners of this world that is not dead – that waits to rise upward again out of emptiness and pollution.
A while back, in a talk with ritual abuse survivors, I said I think love is the strongest force in the universe. Some one who, as a child, had survived unbelievable abuse both at the hands of her parents and at the hands of the U.S. government through Project Monarch, asked me how I could believe so strongly in the power of love, given what we ritual abuse survivors have suffered.
I said, "Grain taken from the pyramids of Egypt, 2500 years dormant, has been planted and has grown. There is a force in the universe so powerful it can wait through 2500 years of silence to express itself. I believe that force also waits through generations of familial abuse, and through generations of people who are more interested in wealth than in the environment. When the circumstances are right, it bursts into bloom. And that force is a part of the power I experience as 'love'."
Sondra Ball
Clerk, Salem Quarterly MeetingRETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Last modified:
Monday, May 08, 2006 at 07:24 PM
