Early Morning Watch, 1992

Around 1990, I paddled my canoe down the river that I was living on to a weathered old cedar stump where I knew a Great Blue Heron hung out . Before the heat settled over the salt marsh, I sketched her standing in the brackish shallows. For nearly twenty minutes, she did not shift a single feather. She was entirely present to the water, waiting for the subtle ripple of silver that would reveal her daily fish.

When I returned to my riverside studio to prepare my palette (acrylic paint in those days) I laid out raw umber, titanium white and ultramarine blue for the painting that would become Early Morning Watch. A couple of years later, I sold it at a local art show to a woman who knew where that stump was too and used to visit it on her jet ski. Though our paths never crossed. It was my first big sale and encouraged me to go on painting.

Back then, I couldn’t have imagined the contrast between that quiet morning, anchored by the heron’s holy patience, and the constant disruptive pings and frantic rhythm of our modern lives.

Now in 2026 as a painter and a student of theology, I begin my mornings with readings from the Book of Common Prayer.  I am increasingly grieved by what we surrender to the digital hum. Christ warned us about getting consumed by what we will eat, drink, or wear—all these other things that the world obsessively chases. Today, that anxiety has taken a new shape. We are consumed by notifications, algorithmic outrage, and an endless stream of disembodied noise. Our attention, which Simone Weil called “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” is fractured into a thousand restless pieces.

In our Episcopal tradition, we speak of outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. But what happens to the soul when the inner citadel is so cluttered with chatter that the small, still voice has nowhere to land? When we lose our capacity for silence, our faith thins out into mere opinion, and our capacity to love our neighbor dissolves into digital reaction.

Painting a bird or a fading coastal horizon has become my act of spiritual resistance. Standing before an easel forces the eye to slow down. You cannot rush the way morning light diffuses through a cathedral of live oaks, nor can you speed-read the subtle shifts of value in a heron’s wing. The canvas demands unmediated presence.

We must begin to build deliberate sanctuaries of quiet in our daily lives. Leave the phone in another room. Walk out into the morning air. Pray the ancient readings of  the Daily Office without a screen flashing in your peripheral vision. Sit by the water and watch the heron wait.

When we quiet the noise and seek first the kingdom of God, we come to know that all these other things are only shadows and incapable of satisfying the longing in our hearts.