Category: Main blog

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)

 Earth Song 

Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of the fire, hear the voice of the water,
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:
This is the ancestors breathing. 
Those who are dead are never gone;
The dead are not down in the earth:
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the woman’s breast, they are in the wailing of a child,
They are in the burning log and in the moaning rock.
They are in the weeping grasses, in the forest and the home.
Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of fire, hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush. 
This is the ancestors breathing.   

(Traditional from Senegal, translator unknown)

Friends, there may be a gap in these blog postings until mid-April as I’ll be traveling.

 The Real Work 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 
The impeded stream is the one that sings.  

~ Wendell Berry ~ 

(Collected Poems)

What actions are most excellent? 

To gladden the heart of a human being. 
To feed the hungry. 
To help the afflicted. 
To lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful. 
To remove the wrongs of the injured. 
That person is the most beloved of God 
who does the most good to God’s creatures. 

~  Muhammad ~ 

 Wildpeace 

Not the peace of a cease-fire 
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, 
but rather 
as in the heart when the excitement is over 
and you can talk only about a great weariness. 
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. 
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows 
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. 
A peace 
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without 
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be 
light, floating, like lazy white foam. 
A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing? 
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation 
to the next, as in a relay race: 
the baton never falls.) 

Let it come 
like wildflowers, 
suddenly, because the field 
must have it: wildpeace. 

~ Yehuda Amichai ~ 

(The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell) 

From Panhala

 Ninth Duino Elegy
(excerpt) 

Praise the world to the angel: leave the unsayable aside.
Your exalted feelings do not move him.
In the universe, where he feels feelings, you are a beginner.
Therefore show him what is ordinary, what has been
shaped from generation to generation, shaped by hand and eye.
Tell him of things.  He will stand still in astonishment,
the way you stood by the ropemaker in Rome
or beside the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even a lament takes pure form,
serves as a thing, dies as a thing,
while the violin, blessing it, fades. 

And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
Transient, they are trusting us
to save them – us, the most transient of all.
As if they wanted in our invisible hearts
to be transformed
into – oh, endlessly – into us. 

Earth, isn’t this what you want?  To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose?  Earth, my love,
I want that too.  Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over – even one flower
is more than enough.  Before I was named
I belonged to you.  I seek no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

(In Praise of Mortality, trans. and edited Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

I found this so moving and beautiful. “God utters me like a word.” “God… has called us… into the unknown.

From Emergence Magazine:

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/on-the-road-with-thomas-merton/

In May 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Merton’s path, retracing the monk’s journey across the landscape. Amid stunning backdrops of ocean, redwood, and canyon, the film features the faces and voices of people Merton encountered. The essay offers a more intimate meditation on Merton’s life and the relevance of the spiritual journey today.

 The Way 

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place,
(The road leads on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on. 

~ Edwin Muir ~

(Collected Poems)

Vimala Thakar was a social activist and spiritual teacher born in India in 1921. In the 1950’s she was active in an organization that encouraged wealthy landowners to give land to the poor. They redistributed millions of acres through this program. She met Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1958 and decided she wanted to work on the inner life, but later she returned to her activist proclivities and worked with villagers throughout India teaching agriculture, self-rule, sanitation, and activism. I found these wise words that I originally posted in 2014 on Facebook and realized how timely and important they still are for all of us who strive for social change while holding our connections to the Divine.

“As soon as there is awareness of wholeness, every moment becomes sacred, every movement is sacred. The sense of oneness is no longer an intellectual connection. We will in all our actions be whole, total, natural, without effort. Every action or nonaction will have the perfume of wholeness.   

“In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success.    

“There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation.   

“As we deepen in understanding, the arbitrary divisions between inner and outer disappear. The essence of life, the beauty, and grandeur of life, is its wholeness. Life, in reality, cannot be divided into the inner and the outer, the individual and social. We may make arbitrary divisions for the convenience of collective life, for analysis, but essentially any division between inner and outer has no reality, no meaning.   

“The total revolution we are examining is not for the timid or the self-righteous. It is for those who love truth more than pretense. It is for those who sincerely, humbly want to find a way out of this mess that we, each one of us, have created out of indifference, carelessness, and lack of moral courage. “