How easy to take for granted wonderful things when we live with them day after day.

I speak of the marsh just outside my door. When I came into possession of a small spit of land bumping out into the Newport River, I also became an owner of a fringe of Spartina marsh, roughly one hundred yards wide and thousands of feet long.

My intention was to build a home on the land and just watch the marsh. In North Carolina, and I expect in all states now, one can own marsh, but not do much to it other than leave it alone.

This is a good thing.

Ibis

Marshes, as we’ve come to learn, are the nurseries of dozens of species of fish and shell fish. They also provide superior habitat for wading birds like egrets, herons, and ibises. Just as significant to my mind is that they are beautiful. They turn emerald green in the spring and wheat gold in the fall.

One day, when I was building my house, a stranger from New Jersey came down my lane, just ‘snooping around’, as they say. He cast his eye about the place, and offered the opinion that it took a strange person to want to live “in a swamp”.

Well, each to his own, I guess, but I found him to be an ignorant fellow and jaded to the point of blinkered stupidity. A swamp, indeed! Nothing against swamps, mind you, but setting one’s home next to a marsh is a fine choice. But I go back to my original point--how easy to take it for granted.

My little hump of land which an acquaintance once called “a sand pile covered with a thin frosting of soil,” is protected from storms by my marsh and a rim of luxuriant greenery called wax myrtle.

This wax myrtle is a miraculous shrub.

It stays green all year, thrives in the harshest of places with poor soil, blowing winds, salt spray, and weeks and weeks of drought. And it smells wonderful, a sent as fresh as salt air and as beguiling as jasmine. Not only that, the locals say the oil from the crushed leaves will repel mosquitoes and ward off fleas. (My dog does not vouch for the flea repellent qualities, however.)

Turn over a myrtle leaf, look through a magnifying glass (or the wrong end of a pair of binoculars), and note all the tiny yellow dots. Nature has provided these leaves with little glands that produce a protective wax, the yellow dots, to prevent them from drying out in the hot sun, blowing wind, and sparse moisture. Plus, the volatile oils of the wax give myrtle its delightful odor.

There is a fly in this ointment, however.

Wax myrtle proud as a tree

Wax myrtle is one of nature’s most rambunctious plants. It wants to grow-and grow-and grow, until it reaches 30 feet high and looks as proud as a tree. Though I treasure my protective fringe between the storm-churned river and solid land, I desire a marsh and river view out my windows and must keep this shrub trimmed down to waist height.

This effort gets harder and harder each year as the myrtle keeps pushing higher and my physical trimming equipment seems to get heavier.

Facing the prospect of another tiring assault on the myrtle thickets, I went to my local hardware store and inquired about a tool I'd noticed being used by a Department of Transportation crew in the neighborhood. Essentially, it was a gas powered weed whacker, but instead of the string trimmer, it had a saw blade mounted on the end of the pole.

The blade was about the size of a circular saw blade and the teeth were the size of a limb pruner saw. I already owned a weed whacker, so all I 'd need to do was  install this blade.  I felt this tool could easily tear into a myrtle thicket and aid in some major height reduction.

Describing what I wanted to the clerk, he promptly said, “Sure, you want a ‘merkle’ blade.

“Merkle blade, what the heck is a merkle blade?"  I asked.

“Just what you asked for,” he replied.

“Ah ha,” it dawned on me that ‘myrtle’ got transmuted to ‘merkle,’ somehow, and I am now in possession of one of the most common tools of the North Carolina coast.

The end of this story is not pretty

My efforts with my 'merkle blade' were too troubling to continue. This nasty, aggressive saw tore my magnificent thicket into weeping stumps and left an ugly mess. Either my control of this tool was poor (probably) or my technique crude (probably), but I was doing violence to one of nature’s most amazing plants.

So I’m back to using a hedge trimmer, heavy and wearying, but I leave the myrtle nicely trimmed off the top and ready to push ever higher the next year. By the time it overwhelms my ability to control its height, I will be beyond caring, and the myrtle will win, if you will, and seal off my little piece of land with an impenetrable, thirty foot high wall of fragrant greenery.

Sunset over Scallop Island, Beaufort, NC

But before I age beyond caring, I remind myself: never take the beauty and natural wonder of this place--marsh, myrtle, birds and all--for granted.

The Marshdoc in his hand-built kayak

"Marshdoc" is the handle of Bruce McCutcheon, educator, scientist, and naturalist. He proudly claims to be caretaker of "Scallop Island Estuary Preserve," his old dog Boon's little piece of heaven on the Newport River, in Beaufort, North Carolina.

This snail trail has formed a heart

I often wonder how far the notion of sentient beings extends into the natural world that is non-mammalian.  I confess to often engaging in conversations with all manner of that other world. When not in conversation, I might find a message. Then I might wonder if a message is for all of humanity, for me in particular, just for others of their own species or meaningless random ramblings?

I don't really know and would answer differently in different places and moods. The thickness of the veil does indeed change in different places or at different times.

What are these snail trails saying?

In my marsh meanders, I often read the travels of the marsh snails and love the different personalities – the flowery and tangential compared to the markings that seem to be factual and direct. Some seem to be soliloquies and some conversations. Then I might wonder, if they are communicating, what is the content – warnings of danger, what happened at high tide on a nearby stalk of grass, snail gossip or something more philosophical. Perhaps this is the real 'snail mail' (I just couldn't resist).

Their memories and oral history must be either strong or non-existent since the tides clear away most messages daily.

In contrast, the 'marks' or writings' on the inside of tree bark take longer to complete and are larger and bolder. And, these remain private until the bark is separated from its tree. I would like these to be 'tree talk' translations that the worms might have taken on as their work.

This worm has marked its passage with a 'w'

I want to know how our actions and our world seem to a tree that may have been watching the same area for a hundred years. I need that perspective. And, if they could tell us just one thing, what would that be? Although, who knows, the tree bark worms may not know how to listen to their tree hosts.

I am not sure we humans do a particularly spectacular job of  listening ourselves.

How often do we take time to wonder about meaning that other forms of life might be screaming at us, or to hold a shell and wonder how its life might have unfolded ?

Red Fox

Morning sun illuminating
his long lustrous fur,
a solitary red fox runs,
as if levitating, through
beige and green grasses
that fill the still marsh.
I am thrilled by his beauty
his speed, and that he is not
dead on the side of the road.
In moments he disappears
in a dense cluster of trees.
Had I turned for more coffee
there would have been no fox.

The more time I spend in the natural world, the more I feel inspired to write. It may be the long horizon out over the sea or mountains that gives my mind and spirit space – room to float and expand. I seem to need this to get my creative juices moving. (Then it is so often the deadline that pushes to a final form). And, too, it is those tiny macro moments when the smallest detail fills me with wonder, sometimes then leading to bigger questions.

In the forest
a dying mushroom curls
in on itself, appearing
as a new bloom.
Who’s to say,
end or beginning.

And how I am reassured that my inside emotional world often mirrors my surrounding natural world. Even though I always see the same scene outside my house, sometimes the feel is sluggish and humid, sometimes crisp and clear with bright stars and then others, stormy, blowing and wild.

Dark fingers of storm
swirl in wind driven tango -
bright black shifting sky

I love the power and excitement the 'fingers of that bright black wind driven tango' massage into my brain. Again, it gets those words and images swirling around. Of course, I have to then participate and write, paint or photograph or the swirl is lost in the general ooze of experience. I guess this is where my love of words and images sustains the process. When the piece is ready, I want it to join a bigger dialogue, I want to share it with the hope and intention that it will strike a spark in someone else and continue the creative dialogue through them.

Brooks has simplified into using one name. She has spent most of her life on a coast and now she and her partner live in a wild North Carolina marsh. Nature feeds her and art of all kinds gives her expression. She has earned two graduate degrees and worked in education, therapy, art, theater and the marine world. Her poetry chapbook will be published in 2010.

Brooks writes Our Natural World

Nature is everything not created by humans. It is our context and the world we inhabit, no matter how much we insulate ourselves from it with shoes, walls and windows, asphalt or ear plugs. It is our place, where we start and always come back to.

Some of us work hard 'to be more natural', 'get closer to nature' or 'feel the wind in our hair' while others of us work just as hard to distance ourselves from nature and stay protected in controlled environments. Although I delight in air conditioning, electric lights, my car and keeping my ice cream frozen, I do have a bias that we have isolated ourselves too much from nature and forgotten that we are a part of' something bigger, and more important, than ourselves.

I believe that part of what makes our connection with nature so powerful is that it engages all of us simultaneously – our mind, body and spirit. And it provides a rhythm to our lives – night and day – seasons – tides – moon cycles, etc. We feel we can count on nature even with her changes, both predictable and not. I love that mystery lurks just behind nature's predictability.

My purpose in this column is to discuss with you all aspects of nature, how the natural world affects us, what we want to applaud or change, who are nature's spokes-persons, our special moments with nature and where our paths from here lead us in relation to nature.

I will just say a bit about my relationship with nature. So far many of my natural experiences have occurred in or around salt water and have included time with land and marine mammals – wild, captive and domesticated. I have usually lived in beautiful places and lived 36 of my 67 years on islands.

Jane Goodall is someone I honor as a spokesperson. She speaks of the reality of our destruction of the natural world and of the hope she sees in the many positive actions small groups of people are taking to save species and environments.

My memories of 'nature moments' seem to so often return to the peaceful excitement of being at an ocean beach from a very early age. Also when very young, I was looking across the street from my second floor bedroom window when I was certain that I saw the trees grow. When I excitedly ran to tell my Mother, she told me that was impossible. I don't remember what I felt at her response but I still remember clearly the authenticity and thrill of that tree moment.

I also carry inside me the awe and inspiration, and sometimes fear, of the underwater world I discovered scuba diving.

During an 'animal therapy' program I ran, a group of hospitalized children and I were discussing their therapeutic swim with the dolphins. A boy who had been taken away from his family due to abuse, said "the dolphin looked at me the way my Mother used to when she loved me."  That was a profound encounter with nature.

In each column, we'll explore several topics about nature.  I'd like to make this a dialogue,  so I welcome your comments.

Brooks has simplified into using one name. She has spent most of her life on a coast and now she and her partner live in a wild North Carolina marsh. Nature feeds her and art of all kinds gives her expression. She has earned two graduate degrees and worked in education, therapy, art, theater and the marine world. Her poetry chapbook will be published in 2010.