Ocean City

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Navigating fall, then winter, then spring in Baltimore was increasingly tedious for me each year in my youth.  Aside from contending with the tedium of school and church, I felt increasingly imprisoned in a city whose towering concrete/glass structures obscured the majesty of the sky, whose cacophonous traffic sounds gnawed at the senses, and whose inhabitants seemed never to slow down, as if ants in a colony.

By the end of each year’s spring, I had had my fill of Baltimore’s “noise and haste,” famously referenced in Max Ehrmann’s prose poem Desiderata, which was first introduced to Baltimore by the rector of downtown’s Old St. Paul’s Church in 1959 (unaccountably leading to the popular misconception that the work had been penned at that church in the 17th century).

The wise antidote to urban tedium prescribed in Desiderata is to “go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.”  It was my parents’ presumption, however, that such peace should best be sought not amid the noise and haste of Baltimore – but rather, away from it – specifically, three hours away from it by car – in Ocean City, MD, on the Atlantic coast.

So, each summer, the three of us (sometimes accompanied by Grandaddy or one of my friends) vacationed placidly and restoratively for a week in Ocean City, where peace-bearing silence could be experienced on its sandy shores (and curatively remembered in subsequent falls, winters, and springs). 

Silence?  At an ocean beach?  Yes!  Whether building sandcastles, hunting for the perfect seashell, or dancing/swimming in the surf, our playfulness there was endlessly serenaded by the cyclic, hypnotic harmony of ocean waves approaching/retreating, wind gusting, and seagulls keowing – all awakening in us, deep down, that which we had known before but had forgotten: in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.”  

The silence we had journeyed there to experience, then, was not without, but within.  Songs sung by those waves and wind and gulls were the requisite outer conditions – analogous to gardening conditions for inducing rebirth of a dormant perennial plant bulb – for re-awakening in us our inner “wise silence,” and hence – in the spirit of Desiderata – our peace. 

As inner silence awakened, sprouted up and bloomed in us, we slowed our pace, enabling us more fully to “live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”  It became natural for us to pause, by day, to behold the vastness of the sky and sea, whose unobscured, curved horizon re-affirmed that our earthly home was but a spherical speck, spinning and orbiting in infinite space.  

And by night, with less to distract us, we found it easy to pause even more, gaze up, and accept millions of stars’ invitation to behold their (and our) infinite oneness and goodness.  

Dwarfing religious notions of a petty, conditionally loving Creator, the stars whispered timeless, comforting words, like these from Desiderata, to each of us: “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.  And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding the way it should.”  

Yet, though incalculably momentous, all but a few of these spiritual experiences in Ocean City occurred in us without our conscious knowledge (for good reason: we would have been overwhelmed, perhaps incapacitated, otherwise!), yielding simply an ill-defined but highly potent, liberating conscious sense of well-being and peace, of which we never spoke.