So many things to love in the Book of Genesis; so many things to take exception to.
Here’s one of each. Love: the image of the world as being made, and then given, with so many beautiful particularities, and we humans folded into the unfolding of it all, with duty of care for all.
Exception: Day Three, when “God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’ … and God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”
I take exception because it really was so much better than that. On most of the Earth, the division is not so clear. There are in-betweens everywhere — not quite dry land and not quite sea, but rhythmic realms where opposites meet and give birth to other wondrous things.
Genesis doesn’t mention God saying, “And let the salt marshes grow all around the dry land, and let them be moist and glistening, let them be fertile fringes of intermingling. And let them be places of procreation and protection and purification for the Earth and her people.” I wish that had been included.
I wonder if we aren’t suffering from that omission today, left not only devaluing our wetlands — a full 50 percent of the world’s salt marshes have disappeared in the last century — but also laboring and losing much under the false idea that hard edges exist between things, and between us. As if our world is just made that way, of separate things that aren’t part of one another.
We think hard edges, and we build hard edges where they are not. All over the globe, marshes are drained for development, agriculture, aquaculture — like the thousands of shrimp farms replacing mangrove forests — and walled in, no longer able to migrate landward as sea levels rise.
According to NASA, 561 square miles of salt marshes have been lost in the last 20 years alone, releasing carbon emissions equal to those of 3.5 million cars. Massive toxic exhales, the death rattle of a powerful, delicate thing.
And it is a powerful, delicate thing within us, our exquisite permeability, our capacity for empathy and co-creativity. It seems that in concert with the loss of the in-between places in the natural world, we are also losing places of nuance and ambiguity, complexity and depth in our own souls and in our social world. There is certainly an ever-increasing amount of toxic emissions from the latter front.
“It is an important decision to restore even a small piece of wetland that has been severely mauled,” wrote Annie Proulx in the New Yorker last year. “Once a few interested people put on their boots and go into the damaged wetland, and once their curiosity is aroused about how the water moves, and what plants, amphibians, and birds formerly thrived in their local remnant swamp, they are hard to stop. There is unequalled joy in restoration.”
Perhaps when we do the work, make the sacrifices, pay the costs to restore a marsh, we might also be restoring another endangered something, that sacred, fecund in-between place of the soul, where we can meet the other in the way that the tide and the marsh grass meet, as partners, as sustainers and co-creators of life.
The salt marsh is a wedding bed. Enter one and be aware of that. How the tide enters gradually, with its encroaching hem of the great beyond; how the land yields and is submerged. And then they slowly part with a long caress. They’ve worked their thing out. Twice each day! If you go into the marsh, see if you can feel their slow love and its teachings. There is no defending, no rigidity, just graceful assent and a dance of reciprocity, of mutual enrichment.
