trusting that the season of new life is calming creeping into its fullness...

Earlier this week, when the temperature was a balmy 65F and the skies sunny and blue, I began my annual outdoor spring cleaning: piles and piles of decaying leaves and assorted tree branches and twigs were gathered from the front of the house and hauled to the edge of our wetlands. There's more landscaping to do over the next few days, but a semblance of visual order has been restored to what had become a pale reminder of last year's winter, wonder land. Today beckons me to the far side of our property where another two days of effort will be required as I reintroduce my chainsaw to a new crop of bracken. There's another few tons of leaf detritus destined for the wetlands, too along with maybe a hundred pine cones crying out to be collected. 

It's a small but satisfying way to embrace Earth Day 2024: a time to touch the earth and listen to the silent wisdom of creation; an embodied prayer, if you will, that "restoreth my soul." (Psalm 23 KJV) At about the same time as I was in the garden, I came across this blessing from the pen of William Safford who calls it: "What the Earth Says."

The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other. (Some people call their scenery flat, their only pictures framed by what they know: I think around them rise a riches and a loss
too equal for their chart — but absolutely tall.)

The earth says every summer have a ranch that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape that proclaims a universe — sermon of the hills, hallelujah mountain, highway guided by the way the world is tilted, reduplication of mirage, flat evening: a kind of ritual for the wavering. The earth says where you live wear the kind of color

that your life is (grey shirt for me) and by listening with the same bowed head that sings draw all things into one song, join the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy way,

the rage without met by the wings within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.

Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.

It's torn jeans, mud-crusted railroad boots, and a black sweatshirt for me as the earth invites me to wear the colors of my life. To be sure, I also have a brilliant new white Irish grandfather's shirt for worship. And a host of vintage rock'n'roll t-shirts for our upcoming gigs. But for the most part, its ragged denim and flannel for me until it is too hot to bother. Right now, this will suffice say the pale green and reddish brown buds of the trees in the wetlands and the nearly white-brown straw and weather-beaten greys nod in agreement. 

Over the nearly two decades that we've lived at the foot of the Berkshires, I have come to cherish the early days of spring. What some call "mud season" feels to me like a thin place where the sacred is palpable. Not in the extravagant abundance of summer nor the expanding melancholia of autumn. No, this is a quiet season in spite of the chorus of peepers singing mating songs from the marsh. The colors are tentative. The transformation of the woodlands from barren to fecund incremental. The return of the birds and the sunshine itself measured. My soul hungers for this season. It's wisdom and solace are simultaneously spiritual nourishment and antidote to the poisoned madness of our politics. 

I need both comfort and cure in order to be engaged "in the world but not part of it." For that's the invitation, yes? It is always both/and - refreshment as well as challenge - not the privileged illusion of either/or living where the hard and broken realities are left to others while I revel in peace. Even while my psyche yearns for solitude, my conscience calls me towards embodied solidarity. Wendell Berry gets it right when he writes:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world,

and am free.

It's about a rhythm: entering and leaving, action and contemplation, acceptance and challenge. Not one only - or the other. That's what I sense from Mary Oliver's "Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches." It is brilliant.

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ of other lives— 

​​​​​​​ tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ hanging 

​​​​​​​ from the branches of the young locust trees, in early summer,

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ feel like? ...

​​​​Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? 

​​​​​​​ Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot 

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself 

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ continually? 

​​​​​​​ Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed 

​​​​​​​ with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? 

​​​​​​​ Well, there is time left—

​​​​​​​ fields everywhere invite you into them

I still am not very good at both/and so I keep practicing. Mostly I don't grieve over my limitations and lack of nondual vision - that's part of balance, I think. All we can do is simply use what and who we are at this moment, keep at it, and trust God with the rest as the season of new life calmly creeps into its fullness.