Unseen Beauty: A Journal

The Soul of This Place

I moved to Florida from the North. I had always been a country girl; always alone, I had my choice of playing in the house with the straight lines of the manmade world around me or in the wild wonder of the natural world. The seven acres of my young childhood was luxury; the hundreds of acres we moved to in my middle school/ junior high years was paradise. I was no naturalist, but I knew the sounds of that world, its rhythms, its soul.

Even in college, that connection remained. When the world was too much with me and the darkness closed in, running to the trees, the earth, the soul of the tiny wild spaces between the straight lines, gave me peace. But while I was there, fighting my own demons and seeking to find a light in the darkness, my parents moved away from the acreage of my childhood, the green silences and the wind whispering in the birch leaves. They moved to Florida.

I knew Florida; we had visited there once or twice a year throughout my childhood. I loved the sound of the surf, the breeze in my hair, the sand moving beneath my feet. I loved the soul of the borderline, the space where land and sea met. But it wasn’t my home; it wasn’t the same feeling, the same place I knew so well back in Pennsylvania. I had no desire to stay there, on the strand between earth and sea; I wanted to stay with the sweetly dangerous soul of the deciduous forest of Pennsylvania.

And then I visited my parents. Instead of the sound of the surf and the wind, the place of transition, I found that they had moved to a completely foreign landscape. They had moved to central Florida, to a place filled with straggling trees, jungle undergrowth, and oversized insects. I hated it.

Graduating from college, I had little choice. Broken and broke, I was essentially forced to go with my parents, to the land of heat and harshness, away from the green spaces and soft breezes of home. I thought that I had come to a place with no soul.

Central Florida was so inhospitable that it seemed as though it was consciously trying to be so. Even the grass was sharp, coarse, cruel on the feet. Every plant seemed to sport thorns or poison, and every creature that inhabited the landscape bit, scratched, or poisoned anyone who came in contact with it. The pine trees, instead of rising in graceful cones, straggled upwards, reaching skeletal branches to the blue bowl of the sky. And where man had touched the landscape, he had imposed his own straight lines on it with a vengeance. The county where my parents had taken up residence was divided between the rich and the poor. Where the poor resided, they let nature take its course, occasionally daring to mow the harsh grass down or sprinkle it with toys or the scraps of life. Where the rich lived, they created circles of mulch, planted straight-trunked palm trees that stretched to the sky, and perforated the grass with smooth arcs of concrete for walkways and driveways.

I had every intention of staying just long enough to find my feet and save a little money, and then head straight back home, to the land that held my childhood. But it didn’t work out that way. The vagrancies of life stepped in. A job presented itself; my parents’ health remained at issue; I got involved in local theatre.

And somewhere, in the round of life, I sat still. Back Home, I had discovered that sitting still created magic. A place that seemed utterly devoid of life was never truly dead. If you took the time to sit utterly still, alone with your thoughts, your self, listening to the rustle of the wind in the trees, life sprang up all around you. Birdsongs wound their way in counterpoint to the wind and the groan of the swaying branches. Tiny creatures hopped through the leaf litter, ladybugs crawled and bees hummed. Like magic, life was there, you simply had to look for it.

By accident or purpose, I did the same thing in Florida: I sat still. And, just like at home, the world came alive around me. Certainly, it was not Pennsylvania, not the sweet sylvan spirit of my home, the soul I had grown up knowing, that had become so much a part of me. But there was beauty in the landscape around me, breathtaking beauty. Florida had a soul, a mighty soul, broad, deep, magnificent and tumultuous. Its soul was primal, old, unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the trappings of humanity and the noise of modernity. Unlike the soul of my home that hid in the quiet glades, slipping in golden green sunshine between the houses and through the waving grasses, the soul of this place in Florida spurned the touch of man, withdrawing from it or fighting against it.

I live here now, and I have no desire to leave. I still miss the beauty of my home, the sweet smell of dark earth, and the sound of deer skittering through the fall leaves. But I just miss it, I do not pine for it. I have found a new home here, and I know its soul. Florida is an old man with a flowing beard of Spanish moss, lightening in his eyes and the sound of the hurricane in his voice. There are no words for the beauty of the spreading branches of the live oak, reaching its shade across seemingly impossible stretches of grass, its branches as mighty as the tree trunks of my home. There are no words for the sight of storm clouds piled up so high that they look unreal, blinking like Christmas lights as the lightning flickers within them, casting their contours into eerie relief. There are no words for the blue bowl of the sky that reaches from horizon to horizon, lapis lazuli at its heart and fading to stonewashed-denim white where it touches the land. Florida is a place different, a place that most people see as ugly and harsh, a place to impose human order on, a place where landscaping is an “Improvement.”

Florida isn’t an easy place, but it is a place of mighty beauty, a place that holds onto its identity in the face of an unbelievable onslaught of humanity. It is a place that does not ask to be understood, but rewards those who sit still. It is a place of wonder, of ancient magic, and of soul.