As is perhaps true for each of us, my spirituality sounds in who I was as a child. I grew up on a small Eastern Iowa farm from 1950 through 1965. My mother, though loving, embraced and enforced a stringent Christian fundamentalism. My father, often absent, was kind when present. Serendipitously, we lived with my grandfather from whom I learned to revel in and be nurtured by the natural world. A favorite memory is sitting on the edge of the cistern with him early each summer morning, wordlessly lacing our boots for a day of work, watching the sun rise, hearing the birds sing, and feeling the freshness of the early morning air followed by Grandpa saying, “This is the best time of day; ever’ man alive oughter be out here.”
Great love and great loss in the decades since have brought me resolution of the duality inherent in most Christianity and other religions. The God of my understanding is not dualistic but rather all-embracing Love, gifting each of us a spark of divine energy visible in the eyes of others and in the millions of galaxies just now being more extensively documented. Embracing this Love provides me spiritual connection most readily experienced in Nature but also experienced in relationship with others and in houses of worship, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or any other. A corollary of this Truth is that my spiritual connection is diminished to the extent I disregard another’s spirituality.
And, so, I am privileged to daily observe much from our home on Indian Creek in Cedar Rapids. In the winter, eagles nest in the forest across the creek. One year I observed a pair of eagle parents patiently watch their eaglet learn by repeatedly landing on ends of branches too far from the tree’s trunk to support the eaglet’s weight, forcing the eaglet to fly off and try again. Another year I heard the boom of thick ice breaking and went outside in time to watch a huge floe being thrust on the bank. Every year two pair of Canada Geese noisily compete for the privilege of rearing their young, with the losing couple settling two or three blocks to the east while I watch the prevailing parents and their goslings cruise our little stretch of the creek. This summer, a single great blue heron graced us with its presence all summer long. The great blue heron, the Canada geese, and now adolescent goslings have migrated on, and I watch for the eagles.
—Frank Nidey