immensity taps at your life

.

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose

That great calm being,
This clutter of soup pots and books--

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield
.

St. Helena's Island, South Carolina low country.  The chapel was built in 1740 so the local white workers didn't have to travel into Beaufort for service. Slaves worked the farm land until after the Civil War when an experimental (The Penn School) was set up to educate the "freed" Africans or Gullah.

.

 .

A friend told of poisonous snakes gliding silently off of tree limbs while paddling the local waters. In sandals and a summer dress, I kept an eye out and wished rubber boots to protect my toes. At first...

 Layers and levels of looking up into a new kind of atmosphere.
.

The walls, more white in life, made of local oyster shell, lime and local sand over scaffolding--a construction called Tabby.
.

Slaves probably slurped these, wet and salty. The water (though surrounded by marshy savannah/grass inlets) must have been so clean of pollution in 1740.

The small children's cemetery wall self-planted a fern atop its tabby. Or maybe the ghosts planted it. Is Time a ghost decaying.
.

A soldier's crypt. The door's absence seems a (ghost) legend from the first days of burial. I didn't get too close.
.

Imagined voodoo dolls in the old iron work, loops of rusty thread.
.

The light meter had trouble calculating so much dappled info.
.

The silence here, the layered branches draped with moss, gave sense of an even greater chapel roof stretched over everything below. Me and my littleness. I could feel my heart beat, listening for all the lives that had lived on this island, died here. Slaves lay buried in unmarked graves; war had entered here, voices of love and hate; worship, song, an end of slavery; babies cried, hurricanes, droughts, and a forest fire in 1886 took the roof of this bone-white chapel shell of oyster shells.
The year 1740 seemed to reach through me with all its 270 years since. In a moment it felt I, small flesh, I was the one crumbling--and an oyster shell suddenly seemed strong-wisdom, respectable. Ancient. Bone of my bone.
The sea incarnate.
Immortal.

Compared to me.

Yes. The light was watching through everything, breathing through the moss, offering itself as living luminous prayer among the thriving, throbbing green.
Haunting.
.
Peace to all who enter here.
.