Kiara Girkins Lions Bridge

When you are analyzing your surroundings, most people look for the minute details of every individual entity surrounding them. I, however, found myself immersed not in the details of my surroundings at Lion’s Bridge, but rather the connection I felt to the landscape and the world at whole. I sat down on the trunk of an oddly shaped tree that stretched from the shore out a short bit over the water. This spot is one of my favorite places to sit when I venture down to the river. I supposed this is mostly because I am rather more secluded from any other human interaction, but more importantly because I can look out onto a stretch of water that reaches beyond what I can see. Such a view makes me realize how much more to this world there is than this shoreline, than Christopher Newport University, than Newport News, than Virginia, than the entire United States of America. I love this feeling mostly because I am not only realizing how great God is, but how connected I am to him.
The world can seem so large and at other times so small, but when I am sitting on that tree and looking out over the shore towards a world of unknown cultures and landscapes, I know that there is someone on the opposite shore looking back and wondering what or who is looking back at them. It may not be at that very moment, but certainly there has been a time, and for that moment in which we seek each other’s existence, we are connected. On page 29, Annie Dillard says, “What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuses me, bowl me over.” This connection is more than just between myself and another human; it is between myself, my surroundings and a distant wilderness. Such a connection is only furthered by the thought that the same God that created me, created the tree that I am sitting on, the shoreline I have walked, and the body of water that connects me to the foreign entities looking back, and I realize how much stake the nature of this world has in my personal spirituality. Annie Dillard says it beautifully on page 20, “The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed. The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit.” That moment of connectivity may not last forever, and is certainly most meaningful during its existence; however, it will continue to drive you with its spirit.
So when I look out onto the shores of the James River, I can hear myself being told that I am merely a piece of a much larger, and far more detailed picture than of that which surrounds me at the moment. The river itself singing with every lapping sound that it reaches far more than just me and this bit of shore. And as I get up to leave and take one last look at the river and then the tree that continually provides me with such a welcoming place to rest, I cant help but wonder that it, too, knows there is something more beyond the shore it reaches from, and that its bizarre stature is actually the tree just trying to get a better view off what lies beyond the horizon.