Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

On this day of gratitude for our mother earth and our earthly mothers I found this practice from Richard Rohr’s blog simply exquisite. Please follow the link to listen the the absolutely beautiful rendition of this choral piece while reading and meditating on the words of e.e. cummings.

Practice: Alive Again

This Easter week we’ve explored Jesus’ resurrection as an archetype of the universal pattern all life follows. In the midst of suffering, grief, or depression, it can be hard to remember that this, too, shall pass. While we can’t skip over or rush through pain to get to a happy ending, sometimes it helps to focus on resurrection. Can you recall a time when you came out the other side of a hard experience, a day when you suddenly felt free? Can you imagine joy and healing and actually feel it in your body?

From this space of hope and possibility, read aloud and listen to a choir sing this poem by e. e. cummings. Try whispering and shouting the words. Listen in stillness or while dancing. What is it like to be “alive again today”?

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes 

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened) 

Listen to the audio recording here. 

The Book of Endings

Some time while you read this page 
or the next one, a species — 
a species as vast as your life 
and the lives of all your ancestors 
chasing bison across Old Europe 
or huddled around a fire — will disappear. 
A species that has found its own 
ways of eating, of moving, of hiding 
from predators; a species 
that meets itself and makes love 
in the bark of a tree or on the leaves 
of the canopy or in the humid dirt. 
And it has come with us for millions 
of years, for millions of years, 
it has watched the night 
and day follow each other, it has breathed 
with the frogs, it has wrapped 
the stars around it like a blanket, 
a patterned music, a map. 
At the beginning of this page 
there may have been three or four left, 
but now there is only one. 
And if you read this page again, 
it will be another one, another species, 
another story of four billion years 
telling itself for the last time. 
Wherever life began — a word, a wish 
breathed into water, a seed falling 
through space — it was all of us 
there — as it is now 
in this unknown last one. 
It has bored into wood, it has carried 
water on its back, it has drunk 
the dew from its back in the desert, 
it has fed its young with strips of 
leaves, it has built homes out of bark, 
it has caged the sky into a song, 
it has spoken in ways no man has heard. 
it has emerald wings 
it has sapphire wings 
it has wings of night 
you will never see it 
it is already gone.

— Sam Taylor

in Song of the Universe

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.