Category: Main blog

Please enjoy this wonderful tribute to our dear friends the trees:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” 

― Hermann Hesse

This is from my friend and spiritual companion Rabbi Ted Falcon’s blog.

It is so important to hold to unconditional love in these challenging times.

Follow this link to his blog for today

I was blessed this last week to spend time with my lovely friends and cohort for my Spiritual Direction certificate program and the Interfaith Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley. At the beginning of one of our sessions, our instructor Scott read this compelling and beautiful poem that I wanted to share with all of you.

May you know these miraculous things: That you are YOU!

That your soul is a deep, dark, quiet forest.
That your known
self will never be more than a little clearing in that forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest
into the clearing of your known self, and then go back.

That you must have the courage to let them come and go.

May you never let those who strive for too much order
have the power to stifle the life deep inside your forest,

and may you continue to try always to recognize and submit
to the goodness, the gods, in yourself and in other men and women. 

(Adapted from D.H. Lawrence “Studies in Classic American Literature”)

As I’ve been walking the streets of Berkeley this week I’ve opened my heart to what might be possible. What might it look like if I recognized the divinity in each flower, in each stone, in each human whose eyes met mine? Holding that, this happened.

My brother lay in a doorway, 
Barefoot, curled against
the cold concrete.

In wonder, recognizing God 
I couldn’t
not see.

The Divine guided me:
Target store with a comforter for sale
Comforter that belonged
to my brother

And when I laid it gently over
his prone divinity
My other brother
looked at me
in wonder

And shook my hand
and blessed me.
I am truly blessed.

 No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away. 

~ Wendell Berry ~  

(Collected Poems)

May this day bring you light and guidance on your path. Enjoy this from David Whyte:

EASTER BLESSING

The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place you know and have known
in the darkness and that that carries all you need.

May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may that hidden darkness be your gift to give,
may you hold that shadow to the light
and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,
may you join all of your previous disappearances
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new and newly alive.

…

© David Whyte
From EASTER BLESSING
In Memoriam John O’Donohue
In
THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD
Poetry by David Whyte
APRIL 2018 © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Waking here in the Yorkshire Dales in a quiet village, on a warm spring morning, amongst the birdsong and the cockerels crowing, the rooks beginning to wake and call to one another and build their nests, I am having my own private Easter Service just by listening through the open window. Easter morning to me, has always seemed to gather every other morning of the year in its arms, to sacralize that everyday but crucial threshold we cross in waking into the world again. If we are not caught in our own bubble of enforced ordinariness, abstract insulation and closed protection, this is an astonishing world always waiting for us to join our own voice in the taken for granted, but extraordinary privilege of speaking, living and breathing. DW

Innocence is not a fixed commodity to be replaced by experience, innocence is our ability to allow ourselves to be seen and heard anew by a continually reawakened world, by birdsong, by a familiar loved one’s face, even by our own searching eyes looking back at us from the mirror, again and again, in new ways. To be surprised, transfigured, and astonished. Innocence is our ability to be found by the world. DW
…

Awake in Grenada
Photo © David Whyte
Carrera Del Darro
Grenada, Spain April 2nd 2019

In our Sufi practice, we often use the Arabic mantra estoferallah, as a way to forgive ourselves when we forget we are divine and connected to all.

This poetry reminds us again how important it is to forgive unceasingly.

The Hard Truth

The hard truth is that we all love poorly . . .
We need to forgive and be forgiven
every day, every hour – unceasingly.
That is the great work of love
among the fellowship of the weak
that is the human family.
The voice that calls us the Beloved
is the voice of freedom
because it sets us free to love without wanting
anything in return.
This has nothing to do with self-sacrifice,
self-denial or self-depreciation.
But has everything to do with the abundance of love
that has been freely given to me and from which 
I freely want to give.
— Henri Nouwen, “Forgiveness: The Name of Love in a Wounded World,” excerpt from Weavings, March/April 1992

Dear friends,

We had a unique and wonderful experience that many have asked me to describe. I’ve created this travelogue to share with all of you, though of course there are many more pictures and stories.

This will give you a taste anyway, and we can share the rest of the stories and pictures when we meet again in person. May that be soon!

Jordan-Lebanon Travelogue

Blessings,
Wakil

Dear friends,

I have just returned from a profound experience in the Middle East during which we heard the stones speak of ancient cultures and sacred events. On my way back home, I read an excerpt from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “Braiding Sweetgrass” called “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.”

Today, I wanted to share with all of you this idea of recognizing and hearing the vibrancy and life force in everything that surrounds us. Kimmerer notes that in the language of the Western world, we emphasize nouns and objects, thus allowing ourselves to separate, objectify, exploit, and use up nearly everything we encounter.

However, in her native language and in most indigenous language, the emphasis is on verbs. For instance the word for Bay in her language actually translates as ‘being a Bay.’

So the way our indigenous people here in the Northwest might refer to the Salish Sea on which we all depend is ‘being the Sea.’

Why does this matter? Because, by recognizing that these entities that surround us are not dead objects, but living energetics we can no longer use them without knowing that we are exploiting a living being.

Kimmerer says it best:

“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise – become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.
“… in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”*

As we walk in the forest or wild areas, this concept is easier to feel and hear but we can also find this aliveness and hear the voice of the living energies in the urban environments if we take the time and allow ourselves to sink into the deep awareness of our living world. I offer you all the encouragement to try listening to your world in this way, and report back in the comments how it has affected your perception of the world.

Kimmerer notes that when you find yourself in that place of remembering that we are not separate, you suddenly know that you are never alone. All around you are living teachers ready and willing to share their wisdom. What a sweet and beautiful thing to remember!

I end this post with this beautiful paragraph from the beginning of the Kimmerer piece that demonstrates this way of hearing life:

“I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pine, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear voices outside it: the shh of wind in needles, water trickling over rock, nuthatch tapping, chipmunks digging, beechnut falling, mosquito in my ear, and something more – something that is not me, for which we have not language, the wordless being of others in which we are never alone. After the drumbeat of my mother’s heart, this was my first language.”*

*Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013)

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, from the other side of the planet I offer this beautiful poetry from Saint Mary Oliver via Panhala:

 Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way 

If you’re John Muir you want trees to live among. If you’re Emily, a garden will do.

Try to find the right place for yourself.

If you can’t find it, at least dream of it.

When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

Anything that touches.

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely.

Some words will never leave God’s mouth, no matter how hard you listen.

In all the works of Beethoven, you will not find a single lie.

All important ideas must include the trees, the mountains, and the rivers.

To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition.

For how many years did I wander slowly through the forest.

What wonder and glory I would have missed had I ever been in a hurry!

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still it explains nothing.

The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Felicity)