In 1926-1927, Henry Beston spent a year on Cape Cod in a small house he built two miles south of the Nauset Coast Guard station. He wrote about that time in his memoir, The Outermost House. Summing up his experience living beside the Atlantic Ocean, Beston wrote this:
“During the months that have passed since that September morning [when I arrived] some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one’s first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow’s morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now… It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”
“Here and now” is a fascinating phrase.
It’s an idea that invites us to pay attention both to the physical location we inhabit and at the same appreciate and inhabit the present moment. Choosing to do that, Beston observed, was a pathway to reverence and joy.
Do you have an “outermost house” in your life?
A favorite chair beside a window, a beach where you walk in the morning, a coffee shop, a park with lovely shade, a path where you run? Where is the place you are both here and now?
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