Little Cranberry

Little Cranberry Isle, Summer 2019: a warm blueberry donut and a warm cup of coffee.

The stones look like a blueberry donut, encircling the water at low tide. The sky is warm, like a cup of coffee.

I miss traveling. Last year was my third year of medical school. That means that it was my first experience working in the hospital every day. I rotated around – from surgery to obstetrics to medicine to psychiatry – every four to six weeks. Between rotations, after taking a final exam, traveling was my reward.

With my girlfriend and two dogs, we rotated around from the mountains to the beach to Savannah to the Northeast. Getting away always felt like a reset button: the change in scenery permitted me to rest and encouraged me to re-center. And scenery like Little Cranberry Isle is conducive to both.

This photograph reminds me of the reset button, of indulging in nature’s beauty and newness as a way to feel beautiful and new. The water framed by the stones framed by the camera creates a pleasing symmetry that surrounds a reflective center. The double-framing forces the eye inward. The center reflects back. Intersecting the symmetry from side to side, the photograph creates a symmetry of color from top to bottom with a centerfold of sunset pink. As a result, the photograph’s intersection occurs at the center of the horizon. So, naturally, the viewer’s eye travels to the farthest distance captured in the photograph.

Still, the camera simply cannot capture the vibrance of what I was seeing. To better reflect what I was seeing – or, at least, how it felt – I edited this photo by slightly increasing the brilliance. In order to enhance the juxtaposition between the encircling stones and the water, I slightly increased both the brightness and the shadows to achieve contrast. All minor edits were made using iPhone Photo technology.

In the current pandemic, I am unable to rely on travel as my reset button. I can no longer go searching for the low tide cradled by stones to be my model of centeredness. This has required me to discover new ways to do so. And, what I’ve come to realize is exactly what Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach” in 1876:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…

The world around us creates the space to feel; the feelings themselves, however, are generated by our relationships with others. And, now more than ever, we hear Arnold when he cries, “Let us be true / to one another!” Because we haven’t been. And that has caused a lot of harm to many people in a variety of communities.

And I realize now that escaping to Little Cranberry Isle, to the stones at low tide was really an escape away from a world that has become unkind. But we can’t keep running away into the solitude of uninhabited land. As citizens of the world, we are necessarily intertwined with one another and with the world at large. The solution, instead, is to be true.

The world offers space; we simply fill it with our interactions. So, it turns out that the joy and love and light and certitude and peace and help for pain that we seek on the coast of Maine can actually be found in each other. As I admire this photograph, I feel motivated.

Being unable to travel has unveiled what I have been escaping from. And now, more than ever, is the time to confront that. And to change it.