When a new acquaintance and I found that we shared a close mutual friend, I expressed my awe that our common bond was fewer than the proverbial “six degrees of separation.” That’s when he said something I knew was true: “There is no separation.”
While we may not always be made aware of our connections, as I was in that moment, certainly each of us in our lifetime will experience at least one occurrence of synchronicity—call it coincidence, mystery or miracle that cannot be traced to cause and effect logic. We are not only connected through our common humanity, but also through an undeniable link to all things animate and inanimate. “We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell sang back in the day, “billion-year-old carbon.”
I have become connected to a young woman who lived almost two hundred years ago. We certainly have no common ancestry, no documentation that links us in an association of any kind, yet I was led to her in a kind of butterfly effect or chaos theory, which suggests that random small changes can have large effects.
When I first set eyes upon the little New England town of Rockport, Massachusetts, a dream-seed was planted in me to live there. I returned year after year as the seed took root, then sprouted on one of those visits on a lovely spring morning in May. Walking past a quaint B & B, I noticed a hand-painted sign on the front gate: "Built by Caleb Norwood with pirate gold found at Gully Point." Not long after, I moved to Rockport and decided to explore whether the gold discovery was true or no. My research at the Sandy Bay Historical Society and libraries led me to a diary kept by Caleb Norwood’s granddaughter—the young Susannah Norwood Torrey, who had lived in that house, now a B & B, in the mid-nineteenth century.
 |
| Moss Design by Susannah |
 |
| From Susannah's Album of Botanical Specimens |
 |
| Susannah's Identification of Botanicals |
In her eloquent musings, she spoke of her love of mosses, on stone, on forest floors and in the sea, collected them on excursions into the woods, meadows and shores, then pressed them into designs on paper. She writes of her treks into nature for the mosses and for her one precious requirement: solitude.
She describes her experience of the ever-expanding circles of life: from the practicalities of home and hearth, to meeting her husband to be, Soloman to the loss of their child, William, before his first birthday, and always came back to the transcendent beauty and mystery she found, living as she did, at the edge of the earth in view of the expanse of sea and sky.
Though her diary recorded only a brief part of her life, I was slowly, but inexorably drawn in. The chaos theory suggests both randomness and unity, and maybe best describes how I was led to feel that there is no separation from Susannah. I understood her thoughts, felt her feelings and imagined her experience—her soul speaking to itself, but also unwittingly to others, like me, who might one day serendipitously come across her journal (as I had) on the dusty shelf where it had lain undiscovered.
Without a conscious thought or plan, I was compelled to write—to tell that brief part of her story, if not to the world, then at least to her own “native home,” Cape Ann and to honor her life and times. First, my curiosity directed me to explore the rumor of discovery of gold, which led me to Susannah’s journal of musings that seemed to be my own. I then wrote Moss on Stone, a tribute to Susannah I have here in reviewing her life—in an afterlife, with excerpts from her diary, expanded upon through my imagination and intuition.
Without a conscious thought or plan, I was compelled to write—to tell that brief part of her story, if not to the world, then at least to her own “native home,” Cape Ann and to honor her life and times. First, my curiosity directed me to explore the rumor of discovery of gold, which led me to Susannah’s journal of musings that seemed to be my own. I then wrote Moss on Stone, a tribute to Susannah I have here in reviewing her life—in an afterlife, with excerpts from her diary, expanded upon through my imagination and intuition.
I have even come to wonder at times: Could I be Susannah reincarnated? At least, I am deeply connected to her because “there is no separation.” I awoke one early morning to the cry of a child and almost started from my bed in response—only a moment it was until I became aware that it was a dream—or was it a memory?
My kitchen window in Rockport, where I now live part of the year, looks out on the house where Susannah wrote in her garret overlooking Sandy Bay. I can see the yard where the garden she describes must have been. I envision her there—dark-eyed beauty in white walking among the tall grass and sentinel outcrops of granite down to the sea. While I feel connected to her in a particular way, I must also ask: Am I, are we not all, connected in unseen, unfelt ways at every moment?
My kitchen window in Rockport, where I now live part of the year, looks out on the house where Susannah wrote in her garret overlooking Sandy Bay. I can see the yard where the garden she describes must have been. I envision her there—dark-eyed beauty in white walking among the tall grass and sentinel outcrops of granite down to the sea. While I feel connected to her in a particular way, I must also ask: Am I, are we not all, connected in unseen, unfelt ways at every moment?
Neither stars nor stones, neither atoms nor waves, but their belonging together, their interaction, the relation of all things to one another constitutes the universe. No cell could exist alone, all bodies are interdependent, affect and serve one another…even rocks…are full of unappreciated kindness, when their strength holds up a wall. (Heschel 188)
We have only to pause—by our own volition, or by chance, by the opening left in us through pain, loneliness or grief to become aware that: There is no separaton.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Man Is Not Alone. Farrar, Straus and Geroux. 1951.
