How Faithful the Trees

I wrote a story when I was younger in which a character found clarity by physically climbing to a high place. From there, it seemed she could see all the possible paths of her life stretching out in front of her. From there, she could choose clearly and with purpose,  walk on in peace, with perspective that would not have been possible in the flat, Midwestern town she’d called home to that point. It was a simple metaphor of landscape, clear and uncomplicated.  It spoke to me at the time.

For the last two months, I’ve been planning a backpacking trip with a good friend. Last week, we finally set out to hike a short section of the Appalachian Trail. Our plan was to start at the highest point, along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, and continue from there to a point we had chosen, where we’d parked the car ahead of time.

At several points in my life, I’ve felt like that character wandering in the confusing flatland. The physical sacrifice of climbing upward has often led to revelation of one kind or another. And lately, since things have been feeling as flat as can be, as confused and lost, such a climb seemed the perfect remedy. I so wanted the perspective. I so wanted the familiar process of revelation and the subsequent downhill momentum where epiphany makes the path seem easy for a time.

There were some clues early on that it wouldn’t turn out that way. There were transportation issues, last minute logistical problems. Approaching the climb we realized coming down would be harder than we anticipated and would take more time. My friends knees ached on the downhill stretches while I struggled under the weight of my pack on the uphill. Eventually my body launched a full out rebellion. Feet blistered, muscles tightened, and food turned my stomach, making it hard to replace the energy I was losing on the day’s hike. I didn’t sleep. Sleet came on our first night and rain all the next day. Things took longer than we had anticipated, and our trek quickly turned into one long and arduous must-do list with a tight timeline.

It seems no matter how much I tell myself that what I want is peace, clarity, and gentleness, what I construct for myself is an incredibly difficult and urgent road. I convince myself that the clarity I need is over the next mountain and run to meet it, only to find another peak a little higher, a little farther off in the distance. In some ways, it’s easier to keep climbing than to just sit still.

Fortunately for me, there were others on my path who showed me more compassion than I was showing myself – my hiking companion who led the way and carried more than her share when I was too sick and exhausted to think clearly, the incredibly kind hiker who helped us find a simpler way down than the one we had planned, and my Aunt Sara, who provided impromptu assistance and a wonderful, peaceful place to recover.

Today I read a post by my friend, Wrensong, who wrote, “How faithful the trees are as they continue in their work in spite of us.” I considered the stillness and patience of these wisest of teachers, their willingness to stand still, through sleet and rain, through seasons, through decades and centuries, their faith in drawing nourishment always from this one place, and when more nourishment needed, in simply going deeper to find it. How brave this seems compared to my habit of arduous climbing. How faithful.

Rocks, River

 

Photo by Charles Sloan

At a meeting of my alchemy group, a friend who recently returned from a rafting trip told a story about some rapids she encountered. These particular rapids were quite dangerous, and it was the only place on the trip where the guides gave everyone the option to walk around the passage rather than riding through it.

My friend looked at the rapids coming up and immediately knew, felt in her body, that she should walk, not ride. Later, she questioned her choice. Had she let fear dictate her actions? Was she simply a wimp for not choosing the rough water?

These particular rapids had been class two until 1965, when a heavy storm caused a landslide that washed boulders into the river and changed the landscape under the water. A boy scout leader expecting to lead his group through a simple and well known stretch of river died in the attempt. Another group of rafters with inadequate equipment and experience were sucked under, raft and all, and spit back out downstream, minus the raft. The guides were very respectful of this place and approached it with care. 

As my friend talked about the natural history of this river, these rapids, I felt great respect for her choice. I heard the voice of a a woman with a deep respect for the natural world, very atuned to the landscape beneath the surface, and the way water moved over it, very willing to feel into the world with her whole body and listen to what it wanted to tell her. I thought of the psychological metaphor implicit in the story of how the river had changed.

Sometimes things cause the inner landscape  to shift. Sometimes things don’t flow over us in the same way from year to year, and water that is innocuous and easy to navigate in one season rages in the next. It takes courage and wisdom to know when to dive in head first and when to respect something that has the power to suck us under and hold us away from light and air. There are gentle ways to inhabit both self and world, and though we may prefer the reckless heaviness of swinging a sledgehammer to crack open what every passage, maturity teaches us to use other tools as well.

Though as this woman talked about hiking around the passage, climbing over boulders on dry land, another friend asked, how do you know yours wasn’t the harder way?

Rattlesnake Prayer Beads

A few years ago, the Artist made me a string of prayer beads. Near the end of the string, she included a single vertebra from the skeleton of a rattlesnake.

At the time, I was about to head out into the wilderness of New Mexico alone for awhile, and one of the fears that surfaced, as fears do at such times, was a fear of snakes. As the trip grew closer, I had vivid dreams, and when one night when I dreamed about a mongoose, the fear of snakes began to fade away.

In the last year, I’ve encountered more snakes than probably in my entire life prior to this point. One showed up in the parking lot outside my office building. Last month I encountered four on a three mile hike to the bottom of a small canyon and back. Another appeared in a dream and bit me, directly over the heart.

It’s said that working with snakes in the way that snake handlers do is about developing the ability to transform or neutralize poison. There’s a powerful magnetism in that idea for a would be healer/therapist, cultivating the ability to handle virulent stuff that would otherwise paralyze, inflame or kill a person, the way trauma and abuse tend to do. The catch is, to develop or discover this ability, one must at some point be bitten, and some don’t survive. It’s a mistake to brazenly tempt the snake, to ask for the bite out of egotism or  bravado. Best to cultivate a relationship, to handle the snake with respect and let the snake choose what it’s going to do.

There are many types of prayer, and many ways of praying. The rattlesnake prayer beads are for times when I know I’m going to be picking up a snake. They’re for prayers about wisdom and courage, and the ability to survive a poisonous bite. They’re for handling the old stuff, the dangerous, poisonous stuff that has caused wounds before, the stuff I can’t help but go back to, again and again, until I learn how to change its poison into something meaningful.

Photo by Timo Balk

The New Wilderness

It seems most everything gets  lost in the shadow of the economic news these days, but driving home from work, I heard a wonderful news item about pending legislation to designate more than 2 million acres of land as official wilderness. 

There’s a scene in the movie Dead Poets Society in which the Robin Williams character tells his students that science, law, and finance are all necessary to sustain life, but art, poetry, love… these are the things we live for. In my estimation, wilderness belongs in the latter category as well. 

It’s wonderful to know that in a time when financial wealth is diminishing, we can still recognize wealth in its other forms, and respect t it accordingly.

Learning Discernment

In Practicing Peace, author Catherine Whitmire talks about discernment, which she describes as the Quaker practice of determining which inner nudges come from a higher power, as opposed to those that come from anxiety, ego, etc. The problems of the world are so overwhelming, she says, and God does not ask any one of us to tackle them all. 

Reading this, I was struck by the similarity to what Rev. Carlton Pearson said when he was interviewed on This American Life. He had been a Pentecostal minister but lost his following when he stopped believing in Hell. Pearson described feeling overwhelmed by the number of people who needed help, who needed to be saved. He described prayerfully asking God how he could really be expected to reach all those people. He said God answered by asking him if he really believed that He would let all those “unreached” people burn in hell. Pearson found he didn’t believe that at all. After that, it’s fair to say his life, his ministry, and his beliefs were completely rearranged. 

Learning discernment is the beginning of the end for the ego-centered self. When ego-thinking is dominant, the pattern I most easily recognize in my own thinking is believing I know what the possibilities are in a given situation. My ego-mind begins to strategize right away. It says, either this will happen, or this, and it suggests that the outcome is up to me, that it’s just a matter of determining which outcome I want to invest in. In truth, the outcome is rarely up to me, and there are almost always more possibilities than I ever knew existed. 

It’s uncomfortable, sometimes, to learn discernment. It causes the tower of the ego to fall. It lets us know we aren’t actually in charge much of the time. But once it’s over and the tower has fallen, it feels awfully good to be standing on solid ground.

Chance and Terror

It’s the glitch in engineering through which chance
And terror enter on the world. 

Robert Hass, from “For Czeslaw Milosz in Krakow”

 

The evening of last year’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I spoke to a good friend who lives there. Thankfully, she called me right as I got home, before I had even seen the news and had time to wonder if she had been on that bridge when it fell. We talked for awhile as she watched the news and learned about the school children that had been involved. Wouldn’t that mess with your head, she said, if you were a kid and you were on a bridge that collapsed? Wouldn’t you then grow up thinking that bridges just collapse sometimes, like this possibility is right up there with other small, unpleasant things, like getting stung by a wasp, or falling and skinning a knee? 

In Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, he catalogs the various natural disasters that could cause mass extinctions and wipe out huge swaths of inhabited land on our planet: super volcanoes, collisions with meteors, etc. The amazing thing, he says, is that it doesn’t happen more often. 

The truth is, bridges do sometimes collapse. Chance and terror do enter on the world, and there is real danger in things. To get through it, to go on with our lives, we tell ourselves and our children that we feel sure things will work out, because they always have. It’s as good an answer as any. And somehow, it is often true. Mysteriously, things do turn out fine. Most bridges don’t collapse. Large scale disasters do not visit us everyday, and when they do, there are miraculous stories of survival. 

To really touch that mystery, it seems necessary to sometimes peel back the veil of the everyday world, to remember the chance and terror inherent in being alive, then to take a deep breath, utter a thank you, and go on living in this amazing, raucous, temporary and beautiful world of ours.

 

In Appreciation of Hestia

In Ancient Greece, the center of the home was a round hearth from which everything that nourished the home and the people in it, namely heat, food and light, emanated. Hestia was the goddess of this hearth, and its fire was considered sacred. When a couple married, the bride’s mother lit a torch from the family’s hearth and carried it to the couple’s new home, lighting the new fire before the couple entered. “Hestia” became the word not just for the goddess, but for the center of something.

As godesses go, Hestia is rather boring, which is probably why we don’t collectively remember her. There were no love affairs for Hestia, no dramatic stories of turning mortals into animals out of rage or spite, as Artemis and Athena were apt to do. Hestia was introverted; she stayed home and disliked drama.

This last year or so, I haven’t spent too much time at home. And as always, returning home after holiday travel, I came home to a pretty big mess. In the days before leaving for Christmas, things always get a bit frantic. So I manage to get the big chores done – the dishes, taking the trash out. But clutter and chaos abounds. Last weekend, I did some spring cleaning, which for me has always been New Year’s cleaning. (In spring, I tend to want to be outside, not at home doing chores). I reorganized closets, took old clothes to Goodwill, and scrubbed floors.  I had to keep myself from getting too caught up in this effort, from powering through it because I wanted to be done, to go on to other things. Hestia, I reminded myself, made housework meditation. I tried to follow the example.

Sitting in the cleaner space when I was done, I felt clarity return. I remembered that I sleep better when my space is in order, that I feel more relaxed at home and am happier to be there. I realized I had fallen into a familiar pattern of being extremely busy in the outside world, then coming home to crash when I’d exhausted myself. Although I don’t have a hearth, I lit a candle at the center of my home, to make the lesson of Hestia stick, to remember to come home every now and then, to be nourished by a return to my center.

New Year, New Mind

Photo by Lauren Luton Stinson

I got to ring in 2009 with family, including my fabulous new niece, Elisa, who is just a few weeks old.

I watched her experience everything in the incredibly complete way only a new mind/body can experience things. She can get lost in an interesting pattern on someone’s shirt, or the contrast of black and white in a picture. Watching her process the sensation of being lowered into a warm bath was amazing (she still isn’t quite sure how she feels about the whole bath thing).

I was reminded of the practice of beginner’s mind, which entails putting away preconceptions, beliefs and expectations in favor of experiencing the moment fully and directly. At this point, Elisa has little choice but to experience a great deal fully and directly. She brings her new mind, her new body, to everything. We lose this new mind of ours quickly; we have to if we are going to thrive in the world. We can’t be endlessly fascinated with things all the time. But I also believe that developing into an adult doesn’t mean we lose our younger selves. We still carry the ability to be fascinated by simple experience on that level. We can chose to go through the world that way for short periods of time.

Watching Elisa’s beginner’s mind at work at the start of the New Year provided a timely image for me. Usually the new year is my time to return to basics. I clean up my living space, throw out what I don’t need, incorporate some new ideas, and remind myself of how I want to live my life.  This year, I returned home with a powerful reminder of what beinnger’s mind is, and what it means to experience life fully. I take that into the new year with me.

A Yellow Tree

Photo by Jeff Hire

I had planned, some months ago, a quiet few months after graduation. It has been a hectic year, and I was looking forward to winding down towards the end of it. Reality has been very different. Work has taken its toll. There is much to do for the holidays. On top of that, if I am even going to consider the possibility of more graduate school, I need to get applications finished in December, which is a tall order. Last month I found myself with a free day, a bunch of applications essays to write, and nothing but resentment about having to write them. In a effort to change my attitude, I went to the park near my apartment and found a beautiful yellow tree to sit under with a notebook and a pen. 

After a few minutes of silence, I asked the tree, why do I have to do this, anyway? What if I just give up, decide to shut this particular door altogether? The tree answered me, you can do that, but it is in your best interest to write these essays anyway. What are they really asking you to write about? It’s about what  you want to do, and why graduate school is a good place to do it. It would be good for you to know that, to have to write about it.

So I opened my notebook and started to write, as if I were writing to the tree, about what I wanted to do. When I got home, I had some translating to do. What a yellow tree will understand, a graduate admissions committee may not. But I left some of it as-is. I didn’t give in too much. If I’m not honest, how will I know if acceptance by an admissions committee really means I’ve found a place where I can pursue real, meaningful work?

Today, I have only one more application, and then I’m free… for now. It’s cold outside, and a bit icy, and I miss my tree. I would be a very good day to go sit under her branches, and ask her to remind me, again, why I need to do this.

An Advent Dream

I dreamed I was taking an acting class that met in the dark back room of a coffee shop. There were two rows of chairs, and I was perpetually late. Fortunately, the instructor was also perpetually late, so by chance, the class never started without me. A very cheerful woman was sitting on the dark stage talking to us in a very cheery manner about being artists. A man behind me, in the second row, said he was just not ready to make a change, to actually own an identity as an artist, or as anything other than a contractor, which was what he had been for the last decade. This stunned everyone into silence because he was universally acknowledged as exceptionally talented. Yet he said the one thing that was taboo, that change is frightening, that being an artist is frightening, that he wasn’t yet prepared to face that fear. I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t yet ready to face it either.

The cheery woman wanted to exchange phone numbers with me. I grudgingly obliged but found her annoying and thought her cheerful attitude was likely the result of delusion or denial about the difficulties in the world. Then I learned that she had a fellowship of some sort, that she actually made a very good living as an artist, and she was truly willing to support the idea of my doing work I loved as well.

I’ve had dreams before where a dream figure hands me a phone number. It seems to be an attempt by various pieces of my psyche to communicate with me, or with one another.

This strikes me as a particularly appropriate dream for the Advent season because Advent is all about the time of gestation and preparation before giving birth. When giving birth is understood as a metaphor that can apply to the act of bringing anything new into the world, it speaks to our lives in a new way.

Apparently, my psyche has a project that is gestating in the dark back room of a coffee shop in my mind. There is even an annoyingly cheerful fellowship recipient who knows how to do work she loves and make it pay. I’m not ready for any big changes just now, but I do have her phone number.