Month: May 2020

Dear friends,
I’ve just finished a wonderful and profound 5-day silent meditation retreat in a cabin near her Majesty Tahoma (aka Mt. Rainier). After a 12.5 mile hike to see this wondrous site pictured below, the following poem came to me in the early morning after a deep contemplation practice.

I am
I am singing a robin song.
A nuthatch song
A pigeon song

I am reaching my roots deep into the Earth.
Intertwining
Connecting
Feeling
Hearing
The critters
the mycelium
the dirt

I am pulling the sap up through my bark.
I am reaching toward the golden sun.

I am reflecting green light in a million different hues.
From leaf
from moss
from fern
from needle

I am feeling the breeze on my bare skin.
I am feeling the cold in my toes.

I am singing a creek song.
I am singing a breeze song.

I am the breeze.
I am the song.
I am delight.

I am light
I am heart.
Only heart

I am

This is from Richard Rohr’s blog. I love the concept of restoring our right balance with the earth by creating a spiritual ritual around the planting of trees.

Practice: What Happens When You Plant a Tree?

While we may continue to practice physical distancing from other humans, most of us can still safely spend time in nature. The Journal of Health Psychology confirms what Franciscans and mystics have long known: interacting with nature is a great stress reliever. Just thirty minutes of gardening lowers the cortisol released during stress-induced fight-or-flight responses. Today’s practice, written by poet, writer, and educator Trevien Stanger for the book Order of the Sacred Earth, invites us to make a very specific contemplative contribution by planting trees.

Ethnobotanist, author, and Potawatami elder Robin Kimmerer asserts, “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of [the] earth’s beings.” [1] . . .

I contend that every individual can participate in [the] Great Turning, and that one of the great challenges of our time is for each of us to figure out how and where we plug into this psycho-spiritual current. . . . I, for one, plant trees. . . . In my more recent work as an environmental studies professor at a community college in Vermont, I’ve had a hand in planting just shy of 100,000 trees over the past 12 years. . . .

What happens when you plant a tree? What happens when you wield a shovel in one hand (a human artifact) and a tree (a provisional mystery) in the other? What happens when you dig a hole (a Kali-like destruction) and plant a tree within it (an act of creativity)? What happens when you learn about your local ecology not just as an observer, but also as a participant? What happens when you embrace the wildness of a tree-being and integrate it into the semi-wild streets and streams of your local community? What happens when you crack open your isolated sense of self and plant within your heart this symbol of our ever-branching inter-being? What happens when you consider your actions in terms of your ecological and cultural legacy? What happens when you move beyond your concerns of today and inquire as to what type of ancestor you will be? Nelson Henderson posits that “. . . one true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” [2] Under whose shade do you sit beneath today? Whose shade shall you help gift for tomorrow?

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions: 2013), 195.

[2] Wes Henderson shared his father’s advice in Under Whose Shade: A Story of a Pioneer in the Swan River Valley of Manitoba (W. Henderson & Associates: 1986, ©1982).

Trevien Stanger, “Tree Planter,” Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action, Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug (Monkfish Book Publishing Company: 2018), 184-186.

Image credit: Legend of St. Francis: 15. Sermon to the Birds (fresco detail), artist unknown, formerly attributed to Giotto di Bondone, c. 1297–1299, Upper Basilica of San Francesco d′Assisi, Assisi, Italy.

For Further Study:

Bonaventure, The Major Legend of Saint Francis, 8.6. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2 (New City Press: 2000)

Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer (Franciscan Media: 2004)

Pope Francis, Laudato Si′: On Care For Our Common Home (Our Sunday Visitor: 2015)

Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, The Ten Green Commandments of Laudato Si′ (Liturgical Press: 2019)

Sallie McFague, “The Universal Christ and Climate Change,” “The Universal Christ,” Oneing, vol. 7, no. 1(Spring 2019)

Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Wildfire: 2019)

Richard Rohr, with Brie Stoner and Paul Swanson, “Environmental Awareness Rooted in Franciscan Spirituality,” Another Name for Every Thing, season 3, episode #7 (April 4, 2020), audio podcast.

Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of St. Francis of Assisi, (Franciscan Media: 2014)

Richard Rohr, “Franciscan Mysticism: A Cosmic Vision,” the Mendicant, vol. 5, no. 4 (October 2015)

Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019)

My friend and wonderful spiritual guide, Jamal has a new blog that I’m really enjoying. I wanted to share this most recent one as it speaks to systemic racism.

Another good friend, Ananda Mariam from Portland and I are going to start a book group on June 22nd. It will be an opportunity to use Robin D’Angelo’s book “White Fragility” to create discussion around the challenges those of us at the top of the privilege ladder often face in understanding systemic racism and our part in it. All are welcome – please let me know if you’d like to join us.

Below is an excerpt from the latest post in Jamal’s  Spiritual Fragrance of the Qur’an. This week, they are sharing Cleansing the Heart

“God will not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in their hearts.” (Qur’an 13:11)
“All your life, O Ghalib
You kept repeating the same mistake
Your face was dirty
But you were obsessed with cleaning the mirror.” ~Mirza Ghalib
To heal and change the conditions of social injustice and planetary degradation, we simply have to do the work of transforming the ego and opening up the heart…

Continue reading this post here: http://jamalrahman.blog/05/18/cleansing-the-heart/

I found this lovely poem this morning after my meditation and wanted to share:

Earth

John Hall Wheelock

Grasshopper, your fairy song
And my poem alike belong
To the dark and silent earth
From which all poetry has birth;
All we say and all we sing
Is but as the murmuring
Of that drowsy heart of hers
When from her deep dream she stirs:
If we sorrow, or rejoice,
You and I are but her voice.

Deftly does the dust express
In mind her hidden loveliness,
And from her cool silence stream
The cricket’s cry and Dante’s dream;
For the earth that breeds the trees
Breeds cities too, and symphonies.
Equally her beauty flows
Into a savior, or a rose —
Looks down in dream, and from above
Smiles at herself in Jesus’ love.
Christ’s love and Homer’s art
Are but the workings of her heart;
Through Leonardo’s hand she seeks
Herself, and through Beethoven speaks
In holy thunderings around
The awful message of the ground.

The serene and humble mold
Does in herself all selves enfold —
Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds,
Great dreams, and dauntless deeds,
Science that metes the firmament,
The high, inflexible intent
Of one for many sacrificed —
Plato’s brain, the heart of Christ:
All love, all legend, and all lore
Are in the dust forevermore.

Even as the growing grass
Up from the soil religions pass,
And the field that bears the rye
Bears parables and prophecy.
Out of the earth the poem grows
Like the lily, or the rose;
And all man is, or yet may be,
Is but herself in agony
Toiling up the steep ascent
Toward the complete accomplishment
When all dust shall be, the whole
Universe, one conscious soul.
Yea, the quiet and cool sod
Bears in her breast the dream of God.

If you would know what earth is, scan
The intricate, proud heart of man,
Which is the earth articulate,
And learn how holy and how great,
How limitless and how profound
Is the nature of the ground —
How without terror or demur
We may entrust ourselves to her
When we are wearied out, and lay
Our faces in the common clay.

For she is pity, she is love,
All wisdom she, all thoughts that move
About her everlasting breast
Till she gathers them to rest:
All tenderness of all the ages,
Seraphic secrets of the sages,
Vision and hope of all the seers,
All prayer, all anguish, and all tears
Are but the dust, that from her dream
Awakes, and knows herself supreme —
Are but earth when she reveals
All that her secret heart conceals
Down in the dark and silent loam,
Which is ourselves, asleep, at home.

Yea, and this, my poem, too,
Is part of her as dust and dew,
Wherein herself she doth declare
Through my lips, and say her prayer.

Richard Rohr is one of my favorite teachers and in these liminal times, this meditation seemed important to share. Here is a link to his Daily Meditations site. Enjoy.

Practice: Nondual Seeing

One of the gifts of liminal spaces is that they soften the boundaries between ourselves and others, revealing our interconnectedness in the present moment in new ways and in the simplest of things. In her book The Fruitful Darkness, American Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax offers some wisdom on how we might recognize and honor our shared existence:

The wisdom of the peoples of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the postmodern world, one that we must begin to accept as the crisis of self, society, and the environment deepens. This wisdom . . . is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony, and vision.

One of the ways we can characterize what [the Oglala Lakota visionary] Black Elk called “a sacred relationship” is by the term nonduality. What I mean by nonduality is that we are intimately connected; . . . We abide in each other. . . . Many of us, no matter the skin color, no matter the culture or epoch, have found that we have to leave society to retrieve our innocence. Our minds and bodies need to be refreshed; they need to be restored to each moment. Gurdjieff [mystic philosopher] once said that the only way you can get out of jail is to know that you are in it. Jail here is not our daily lives but the alienated relationship to the world of the familiar. We must retrieve the magic of the ordinary and rediscover sacredness in each thing. . . .

According to [environmentalist] Paul Shepard, “Ecological thinking . . .  requires a kind of vision across boundaries . . . as part of the landscape and the ecosystem, because the beauty and complexity of nature are continuous with ourselves . . . we must affirm that the world is a being, a part of our own body.” [1]

Our skin is a membrane that connects us with the world around us, just as the space between you and me actually connects us as well. But we have protected “our skin” and “our space” at the expense of our own lives. We are discovering that we are already in what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called the “Collective Flesh,” the world itself as an intelligent body. Earth now is revealed as a vast being who is the ground of our perceiving, dreaming and thinking.

We share the same body and the same self. Ch’an-sha, a ninth-century Chinese Zen monk, said, “The entire universe is your complete body.” . . . Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large. . . . I contain multitudes.” And Thich Nhat Hanh says in the Zen gatha [prayer]he composed to be recited before eating,

In this plate of food,
I see the entire universe
supporting my existence. [2]

Richard again: I pray you are finding support in this time, possibly from unexpected sources. It seems that it is only when what we are used to is taken away from us that we awaken to new possibilities, even if they were available all along.

[1] Paul Shepard, “Introduction,” The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man, ed. Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (Houghton Mifflin: 1969), 2. As cited by Halifax, 234.

[2] Thich Nhat Hanh, “Earth Gathas: Eating,” Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Allan Hunt Badiner (Parallax Press: 1990), 195.

Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1993), 148, 150, 152–153.

Image credit: The Swan (No. 17) (detail), Hilma af Klint, 1915, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

For Further Study:

Paula D’Arcy, Waking Up To This Day: Seeing the Beauty Right Before Us (Orbis Books: 2009)

John Philip Newell, The Rebirthing of God: Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings (Skylight Paths Publishing: 2014)

“Liminal Space,” Oneing, vol. 8, no. 1 (CAC Publishing: 2020)

Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation(The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004)