On my spiritual journey, Kiawah Island has been sacred ground.
I have come to Kiawah Island, S.C., at the worst times in my life—during the four years my mother struggled with cancer; after long bouts of overwork that had depleted my mental and physical reserves; after the unexpected death of my younger sister. And whenever I brought my battered spirit to Kiawah, it found a measure of healing in the silence and the solitude of its beaches and salt marshes.
I’m not the only one who has felt this way about Kiawah. Surely members of the Kiawah tribe of Native Americans, who hunted and fished here as long ago as 5,000 years, felt it. Centuries after that, American troops trudged onto Kiawah during the Revolutionary War to rejuvenate their minds, bodies and spirits.
The shedding of everyday life always begins before I reach the island, on the drive down Bohicket Road on Johns Island. Kiawah is an island beyond an island, which gives it an added buffer from life in the frantic lane. Bohicket Road’s narrow lanes thread beneath a canopy of ancient live oaks so broad that you and I could not join hands around one of them.
On Kiawah, I am loosely held in the arms of a universe that knows abundance is found in a thin slice of moon glinting off the water or the call of one heron to another across the marsh. Kiawah is one of the few remaining places in this part of the world where I’ve experienced long spaces of silence so deep it is possible to hear the whisper of a breeze through the marsh grass or the plop of raindrops into a lagoon.
Kiawah is so still I can pause to watch a great egret, who glances in my direction, makes a hop onto the bank I occupy, and takes a few graceful steps toward me. I whisper, “Good morning,” a greeting she acknowledges with a toss of her snowy head. Then she lifts her wings like a goddess who never doubts that the wind will do her bidding and she is gone.
What Kiawah gives me is the simplicity of a perfect day, the perfection of a simple day.
You write like a goddess who never doubts that words will do your bidding. And they do. Your blog should be required reading everywhere.