the wisdom of the wood...

It is a clear, frigid, and sunny day in the old hills of western Massachusetts - a perfect one for staying inside with hot tea and piñon incense. When I put Lucie our dog out this morning, the wooden deck warned me not to linger as it snapped and groaned under my feet: "Get your ass back inside, man, and stay there if you can" it crackled. I have come to believe it is wise to heed the words of the wood - its been around these parts much longer than I - so I did. Maria Popova's eloquent blog post, BrainPickings, notes that: 

In the years following his stroke, Whitman ventured frequently into the woods — “the best places for composition.” One late-summer day in 1876, he finds himself before one of his favorite arboreal wonders — “a fine yellow poplar,” rising ninety feet into the sky. Standing at its mighty four-foot trunk, he contemplates the unassailable authenticity of trees as a counterpoint to what Hannah Arendt would lament a century later as the human propensity for appearing rather than being. (https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/11/06/walt-whitman-specimen-days-trees/)

Driving to and from Canada this week gave me the chance to gaze upon a host of stark, winter trees. Some were barren, others cloaked in snow, each and all were fully present to this season inviting me to join them n simply being here now. As Whitman wrote: "Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think. One lesson from affiliating a tree — perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he/she likes or dislikes." Fr. Richard Rohr calls this living into non-dual thinking: greeting every experience without judgement and receiving it as just what it is, what it is, what it is. When I wasn't watching and listening to the trees, I was taking in similar insights on Krista Tippett's brilliant podcasts: OnBeing. One opened with this poem/prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama:

So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus: let us pray. (https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-and-marilyn-nelson-a-new-imagination-of-prayer/#transcript)

These invitations to be fully present now without judgment, fear, exhalation, shame, anxiety, or anticipation point to the significance of nourishing the soul of a counter-cultural contemplative. What a gift it is for women and men to move through time as a non-anxious presence even within the current whirlwind of 21st century culture. That was once the point of religion Rohr observes - to help us grow-up into God's grace - but our various traditions have clearly failed us. No wonder many have abandoned the ship of faith. For at least the past 300 hundred years, religion has trained us to remain as infants lost to our emotions as well as the ruthless manipulation of the masters of culture and commerce. The late, great Frank Zappa once quipped presciently that,"politics is the entertainment branch of industry" - and 2020 confirms it in spades.

So what are we to do? Our current experience throughout much of Western society feels "like an earthquake underneath us" says the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in NYC. It is like everything is breaking apart and dying. Much like Valarie Kaur, Jones believes that even the collapse points to an emerging new world. The operative metaphor is birth rather than death. She suggests that contemplatives have been called to live as "midwives to the world that wants to be born."

Today feels to me like we’re in the middle of the Reformation. But people in the middle of the Reformation didn’t know it. It was only afterwards. And they couldn’t have imagined what was going to come. We’re in the middle of that. There is the crumbling and — and the new can’t emerge without the old breaking down. But (we can) turn a moment of fear and terror into a moment of exuberant hopefulness (because) something is coming that completely rewrites the story of who we are...

All of the trauma of American history - racism, sexism, genocide, greed, shame, oppression, fear, misogyny, anthropocentrism, violence, and ethnocentrism - is now rising to the surface of consciousness. Our masks and illusions are falling in public and none of the traditional ways of the dominate culture know how to guide through this trauma. We've been cloaked and addicted in denial for too long. Left to ourselves, the magnitude of this grief terrifies us. Further, even our religious traditions have forgotten how lead us honestly from grief into mourning. "To move from grief (into) mourning," Jones says, "is to move from a place of sheer loss to a place of acknowledging the loss, for in mourning the permanence of the loss (remains), it can’t be fixed, but it also creates a space... for you to make sacred the pain so that the rest of your life is transformed by it." (https://onbeing.org/programs/serene-jones-on-grace/#transcript)

Rohr reminds us that if we do not transform our pain and grief, we will transmit it. Think the sins of the mothers and fathers being passed down to the third and fourth generations - and more!. To which Ms. Tippett sagely suggests that some of us are being called by this moment to be "calmers of fear." Cut back to those trees: I believe that the cultivation of inner silence and outward trust in a love greater than ourselves is salvific both personally and socially. As we practice grieving this moment fully, holding the joys and sorrows together in our flesh as well as hearts, we give our pain the sacred meaning it deserves. We also create the space for the Spirit to touch our hearts in new and as yet un-imagined ways. As we choose the quiet and tender path where grace abides, a love that is stronger than violence, history and shame takes shape. It invites us to own and then relinquish our past. Ó Tuama puts it like this: "There’s a beautiful phrase from West Kerry where you say, “mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne” — You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.” That is soft and kind language, but it is so robust. That is what we can have with each other." 

We can be like the trees, standing starkly in the winter, receiving what is real and responding with quiet strength and presence and healing. I cannot help but reclaim the words of ancient Israel's royal prophet, Isaiah, who in his closing revelations sang: 

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live...
Seek the Lord while he may be found,
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake their way,
and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
Then you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands!

As part of the Revolutionary Love movement: Today I rise up with thousands of artists, activists, and thought leaders to reclaim love as a force for justice! On Valentine's Day, we reclaim the words of James Baldwin: 

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense, but as a state of being, a state of grace, not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.