Both/And

Lovely early morning watching the pelicans waltz alongside the shore birds. We have rented a one bedroom apartment on the Loop Road past the lighthouse. The screen porch where I sit with my coffee overlooks the Sound. In front of me the water comes into a little bay before the land turns and the Sound meets and becomes the ocean. The house backs up to a nature preserve, so below the porch where I sit there is a maritime forest made up of ordinary pine trees, oaks and shrubs with now and then a stand of reeds or the bursting bright red of some exotic flower.

So is it the ocean or the sound? Is it supposed to be just mainland hardwoods or tropical jungle growth? Who dominates here – the pelicans, gulls and cormorants or the wrens, robins and crows?

Deeper than that, I want to know what the rules are here in this ‘both/and’ world. Who rules here – tide or time?

So many questions. Then I realize the questions echo only in my head. The water itself is not concerned about its movement, its salinity or where it lies on the face of the globe. The little birds fly out over the water and return to perch in the trees outside my screened window. A snowy white egret stands incongruously atop a green, piney shrub then glides away to peck for breakfast at the water’s edge. the wind blows, the frogs sing in chorus to the world and each other and there is peace.

Peace not as the world of humans gives. Peace such as only the Creator of the world can give. Peace on the edge of being one thing or the other. Peace in the middle of both one thing and another.

It is a both/and instead of an either/or.