The Right Space For Grace
The first day our family was together on the coast of Maine last week, we sat on the deck overlooking Muscongus Bay. Overhead appeared an osprey whose flight path we tracked to a large and well-built nest visible with the naked eye just a way further up the shoreline. The house binoculars came out and the comings and goings of what turned out to be two adults at the top of that dead pine tree became a constant preoccupation.
Immediately available online to any curious birdwatcher, of course, are the basics. Why they prefer tall dead trees and how an osprey’s vision is almost eight times greater than a human’s and how they can have a six-foot wingspan and the males are leaner than females and how they were nearly wiped out from DDT in New England between 1950 and 1975 and how they are the only raptor with their own taxonomic family– Pandionidae. Anything else one wants to know is out there.
What can’t be looked up is how it feels to be near them, close to their habitat, with the sense of awe.
I went down to the rocks late afternoon one day and lay on a ledge by myself positioned just right to view the nest without straining my neck looking upward, certainly the closest I’ve ever knowingly been to one. I lay there for maybe forty five minutes, during which time the pair came in overhead, circling the nest, with the surf behind me at high tide, and I broke down, not sobbing, but genuinely moved, like something broke through my defenses, over the ramparts. Something was pulled out of me, the way one of the great birds jerks a fish out of the water.
It all just washed over me like the big foamy water onto the granitic ledges and into the tide pools.
I remembered Mary Oliver’s words from The Sun and used them like an aid to worship, an invocation, a doxology, a prayer (“in the words of Mary,” I thought, “who taught us when we pray to say–Have you ever felt for anything such wild love…”). It felt like a sacred space.
I asked “But what turns this into gratitude? Or is it gratitude right now?” I thought not. A thank you needs to be expressed. So I said “I acknowledge that this is a gift and occurring outside any agency on my part,” which is perhaps awkward but makes the point.
Oh how great to feel deep and humanly, to have portals open up. Such moments are hard to reproduce authentically, without rote. I felt like I wanted for nothing. Good to reach for gratitude, better to feel it and with tears. I wondered how to keep it for myself, keep it pure and whole, gather it for power, then let it spill over to others when I was ready. So, I lingered and watched.
I’m just wondering about what it takes to have that more often, to break through my ordinary dailiness. I don’t think I have a particularly thick crust either and I’m grateful for that, but how rich it is to feel deep joy and gratitude and sense of transcendent mystery and natural sublime.
When I say in the gratitude prayer how I acknowledge the lack of any agency on my part, is there some part that actually does belong to me and my agency? If not, why even work on gratitude? I have taken some action in all of this. Maybe there’s a corollary to the harder I work the luckier I get, something like “the more I create the conditions beforehand the likelier I am to have real feelings of gratitude.”
In Return of the Osprey, author David Gessner wrote “…while you can’t force Grace, you can put yourself out where Grace is.”
Then later, “If Grace is an unexpected blessing conferred, then there is also a sort of moment of wonder that you earn by putting yourself in the right place.”
