A loop-do-loop of joy

September 1st, 2025
by John Thweatt

I am often on a quest for solitude. Living in a home with my beautiful wife, two of my four daughters, two cats, and three dogs…it is often a futile search…that is unless I get up early.

Almost every day Kim and I take our “carriage ride” on the golf cart, KJ and I either go before or after, but the ride takes us over the slew on the back side of Treasure Island. It is one of my favorite places…quiet, shallow, turtles, and always a heron stalking over the water.

If I believed in “spirit animals” mine would be a heron…quiet, alone, in the lake contemplating. I’ve thought about putting my baptism waders on and joining them, but I’m afraid Betty Butler would post a picture!!

I was re-reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Art of the Commonplace,” the other day and was reminded of these words,

“I sat one summer evening and watched a great blue heron make his descent from the top the hill into the valley. He came down at a measured deliberate pace, stately as always, like a dignitary going down a stair. And then, at a point I judged to be midway over the river, without at all varying his wing beat, he did a backward turn in the air, a loop-do-loop. It could only have been a gesture of pure exuberance, of joy – a speaking of his sense of the evening, the day’s fulfillment, his descent homeward. He made just the one slow turn and then flew on out of sight in the direction of a slew farther down in the bottom. The movement was incredibly beautiful, at once exultant and stately, a benediction on the evening and on the river and on me. It seemed so perfectly to confirm the presence of a free nonhuman joy in the world – a joy I feel a great need to believe in – that I had the skeptic’s impulse to doubt that i had seen it. If I had, I thought, it would be a sign of the presence of something heavenly in the earth. And then, one evening a year later, I saw it again.”

I’ll admit, I’ve never seen a heron do a loop-do-loop, but I would love to! Here is my point…the heron was created to do what he does…we were created for community, but as Jesus often showed us, we also need solitude and quiet. Find some time to be alone, to just talk to Jesus, and if no one is looking…do a joyful loop-do-loop or whatever form your body can accomplish!

Posted in solitude, prayer