Ampbibious

Earlier this week, walking home from work along the spillway, I came around the bend, and something large and dark was already moving away from me, heaving itself across the mulch toward the water. Too big for a muskrat. Too long. The tail was wrong, thick at the base and tapering, nothing like the flat rudder I've learned to spot from across the pond.

An otter.

Back in February I admitted that whenever someone sees a muskrat cut across the pond, they hope it's an otter, and I never have the heart to tell them otherwise. IIt's not that we never see otters. But they are rare. This time there was no mistaking it.

On land, he was a mess. 

The body that looks poured through water was all hinge and hunch on the rocks, back arching, hind legs bunching and shoving, a gait somewhere between an inchworm and a sack of laundry falling down the stairs. He loped, and bumped, and hurried. Then he reached the edge, slid in, and became in one motion the most fluent thing you might ever see. No splash. A seam in the water, and gone.

I stood there a long time watching him. 

Years ago I heard Barbara Crafton preach at and ordination at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. In that sermon she called human beings “amphibious.” Made of spirit and made of earth, and never entirely at home in either. I have carried that word around ever since. This week I watched it cross the spillway.

I know that gait. I have spent much of my life feeling the way that otter looked: built for somewhere other than where I'm standing. Too earthbound for heaven, too restless for earth. Awkward at prayer, then awkward at the dinner party, and never sure which is the land and which the water.

The rocks are the otter's country too. He needs the bank to den, to rest, to cross from one water to the next. The clumsiness is what it costs to belong to two places.

Every creature is clumsy somewhere.

Today the pond is taking a Nor'easter on the chin. Before it came, crisp mornings, a few leaves considering it, the season promising a change it hasn't made yet. I caught myself scanning the maples for the first red, and I stopped. There's no reason to hurry toward the next season. This one is enough. 

The otter will lope again tomorrow over the same stones, and slide into the water that fits him. I hope to catch a glimpse again. For now, the bank is where he is. For now, it's where we are.

A Prayer

God of the water and the bank, who made the otter for both and made us for both: you know how we lope and stumble between the life of the spirit and the life of the body, never fully at ease in either. Keep us from despising the ground where we are clumsy. Teach us to trust that every crossing leads to water that fits us, and that the awkward stones belong to you and your country too. With Christ, who came up out of the Jordan dripping, and walked our dry ground all the way home. Amen.