If once you have slept on an island…

A layperson’s first sermon. Read at Evening Chapel on Star Island

June 22, 2026 By Alicia Heyburn

Good evening. 

I’ll begin with a poem by Rachel Field that I first read from a yellowed sheet of paper tacked up beside the door of a thick walled building on the Cranberry isles - east of here. I was standing in that space in my drysuit. My feet wet inside my paddling boots. My kayak pulled above the reach of tide on the shore. The poem has stayed with me for its truth. It names the change wrought in me by certain places. Whole places. Healthy places. Sacred places. I imagine some of you feel this here, at Star Island. 

If once you have slept on an island
You’ll never be quite the same;
You may look as you looked the day before
And go by the same old name,

You may bustle about in street and shop
You may sit at home and sew,
But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls
Wherever your feet may go.

You may chat with the neighbors of this and that
And close to your fire keep,
But you’ll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell
And tides beat through your sleep.

Oh! you won’t know why and you can’t say how
Such a change upon you came,
But once you have slept on an island,
You’ll never be quite the same.  

Do you agree? 

You have slept on this island. Many of you, many times. And you are not quite the same for it.

I am sleeping here for the first time.

And already — already — I feel the pull.

That pull is the POSSIBILITY this week offers us: Active Hope! 

A transformation - Not a self-improvement. Not just facts and science, invasives and estuaries. But a personal transformation. Metamorphosis. The kind that happens when a place gets into you. It gives, you receive, and feel compelled to give back. You’ve evolved! You’re an advocate!

Poet Rachel Field knew something that everyone in this chapel knows. The Island Claims You. And you let it. You trust it. 

What becomes possible when we fall in love with a place, and allow it to love us back? 

To feel that love we must first pay ATTENTION — 

Celia Thaxter lived on these rocks. She taught us something essential: before we can love a place, we must learn to see it.

She coaxed flowers from granite and watched the sandpiper walk the thin edge between sea and land, that liminal space neither fully water nor shore. And thinking of our stormy weather tonight, I’ll share a few lines from Sandpiper, 

Above our heads the sullen clouds 
Scud, black and swift, across the sky: 
Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds 
Stand out the white light-houses high. 

Those words were written by someone who really paid attention to the place she inhabited, symbiotically: She was of this place, raised on it and by it. Gave to it. and lived for it.

Attention is the first act of RECIPROCITY. 

Author, naturalist, and indigenous knowledge keeper Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “All flourishing is mutual.” In her teaching, love leads to attention, attention to gratitude, and gratitude to responsibility; that is the circle of reciprocity. 

A circle and cycle of receiving and giving. 

Receiving in and giving back. 

Receiving in and giving back. 

What place does this to you? What place has changed you?  Evolved you through love, attention, gratitude and responsibility? 

And what does that place that formed you, ask of you now? Can you hear its request? Can you feel its concern? 

When a place has changed you, what becomes POSSIBLE because of that change?

Not just appreciation. Or nostalgia. Not a feeling of “that was fun, I’ll see you next year”. 

But Action. Advocacy. Care. Stewardship. 

Of self, and soul, and space. 

Reciprocity turns attention and affection into RESPONSIBILITY.

Another writer I enjoy is Robert Peter Tristram Coffin. His evocative words describe places I know and love in the Midcoast of Maine, Brunswick & Harpswell - my home. 

Inscribed on his slate headstone, sunk into the shallow soils of Harpswell, is his place-based epitaph - 

This is my country, bitter as the sea
Pungent with the fir and bayberry.
An island meadow, stonewalled, high, and lost,
With August cranberries touched red by frost.
A juniper upon a windy ledge,
Splendor of granite on the world’s bright edge.
A lighthouse like a diamond, cut and sharp,
And all the trees like strings upon a harp.
I, made of clay inflamed with sun,
Something solid still have done.
I have kept the ancient Law,
I have written what I saw.

RPT Coffin wrote what he felt. He was moved by what he saw - his attention was sharp. The responsibility that he took was with words. 

—-------------------->>

Now I’ll tell you a little bit about the place that is the source of my spirit and then I will ask you to think of yours. 

Mine is an island in Maine not too far offshore, but distinctly an island.  Its boundaries with the sea are well defined. Skirted by seaweed.  Bladderwrack with its pimpled air sacks, and rockweed growing as tall as I, waving on the tide.

It is an island almost entirely covered in trees, Pungent with the fir and bayberry.

My place has a cedar swamp with a natural spring that drips to fill a small rock lined pool.  My grandfather’s enamel mug hangs by its handle from a cedar branch, ready to be dipped into the pool for a cool drink unless the dogs have gotten there first and stirred up the mud. 

My place has a rocky shoreline, whose varied minerals tell stories of violent upheaval, strikes and slips, intrusions and erosion of sediment - but not of trust.

This place has never let me down. 

And therefore I try to reciprocate.  I do all I can to give back to this Island as she gives to me. 

I hear her ask for quiet, and so visit only in the summer, leaving her to peace in the darker seasons

I see her vulnerable to seeds from invasive plants, so I pull thistle from the meadow in early spring and wrench bright yellow barberry roots from beneath the birch trees. 

I feel her roots compacted by our treading feet, so we prohibit vehicles and restore the trails by hand. 

Through this giving, I learn things—like rigor and vigilance and patience, but not tolerance.

I will not tolerate behaviors that denigrate or diminish this place.

For, to do so would be to diminish myself.

The old teaching says: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Tonight let us remember that “others” includes the places that have changed us.

May we do unto them what we wish for ourselves: attention, gratitude, and loving care.

And cast no stones…unless you are skipping them into the sea!