The steward of small things

THE LOVELY, WILD SCENT OF RAIN is wafting in the window on a south wind.

Rain. Lots of it. The rainiest year on record. Mosquitoes attack in wispy swarms. Even in full sun! I'm marked with welts, even a couple of kid-like scabs on my ankles (bony spots are usually itchiest).

Scratching insect bites: An ancient summer ritual.

(Just now, a tiny red spider crawls in wavering circles across my screen, searching for a smell, a texture, an object she recognizes. I lose her for a second when I look away but eventually find her on the table. She is escorted to a leaf outside.)

In April, I brought home two native chokecherries, knowing they're beloved by birds. Then I learned that chokecherry's leaves, stems, bark and seeds—every part but its fruit—contain cyanide. Poison to mammals, like my little cat, who is allowed in the back yard. So the seedlings stayed in their containers on my back porch as I fostered them, pondering where their true home should be.

In a wild field not far away, in the sun in an open spot amid the flowering clovers, trefoil, daisies and fleabane, I planted them today. 

I cleared the stones from around their roots, but they're on their own now. My wish is that they send their roots deep into that long-ago prairie soil and thrive, growing fruit for hungry feathered creatures to feast upon, making their home again on lands where they once grew.

Full summer snuck up on me. It was a surprise, like rounding a curve the other day and catching sight of a doe lit by morning sunlight, grazing in grasses high as her back, in the place above the river where the wild turkeys like to strut.

Driving to work. Rounding a curve. Ordinary. But then: heart-singing beauty. 

Like that. 

This moment was shaped like a bowl, as a bowl is shaped like a lake and a lake reflects the sky, and in its it hollow it held a handful of exquisitely ripe raspberries, with raspberry ice cream. Juicy with all that rain, sugared by rare days of hot sun, throbbing with life and summer. 

A body-shivering deliciousness: this is living. 

An overpowering feeling: this is a gift. 

Earth our home, let me thank you for the care you take of me. With such generosity and love you feed us, sustain us, delight us and fill us with joy. 

In reciprocity, I make this offering into your rich, dark, life-giving hands: Two small chokecherries. 

I commend these green spirits to you and place them in your care. 

Make them to flourish upon your breast, let them be part of the unending tale of wonder you tell. 

Of how you provide for all, for free. 

Of how each creature and each growing thing depends on your generosity. 

Of how there is a difference between taking what has been offered and taking what has not. And that the difference begins with gratitude.

With this offering, I give thanks. 

An abundance of gifts come your way.

Towers of bright clouds piled high in a blue sky. 

The glowing red of ripe raspberries, halfway between crimson and rose petal.  

The flashing flight of a blackbird past your window. 

Five bronze bells ringing noon from high on the hill every day—until one day, the chords suddenly cast soft white petals over your heart. 

Midsummer.

It's like this: So many things that matter can't be planned or scheduled. Can't be corralled or orchestrated, dissected or predicted or codified. 

You may just look up, or listen, or sniff the wind, and there it is. 

Freely given.

Please recognize and accept these gifts.

Yes, they're intentional.

They were made for you. 

Trust in doves

"Don't trust the pictures of doves on the decorative banners festooning your churches. Trust real doves."

"Don't trust any stained glass windows whose frames have been hammered into the shape of a rose, or that depict elegantly creeping vines or gentle lambs. Trust real roses, and real vines, and real lambs—things that breathe and eat and drink and live and die."

"Whatever you do, don't trust in your lofty ideas about this world, or in your abstracted liturgical metaphors about what it means to be living in it. Trust only—and always—in the real thing."

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"...I began to feel the stirrings of revelation. Instead of processing the urban environment as an agglomeration of sidewalks, storefronts, and apartment buildings—all of them combining to crowd out or tamp down nature—I became convinced that I was witnessing holy, irrepressible nature assert itself in response."

"In the cracks of the pavement before me, I noticed micro-gardens of tiny weeds sprouting up defiantly.

"High above my head, the clear morning sky had slyly appropriated the glass-paned sides of office towers, turning them into giant mirrors that reflected its bright blue light.

"As I waited at a crosswalk, my newly acquired X-ray vision enabled me to look down at the street and to see, inches below it, the continent-wide expanse of rich, black, living earth."

"At that moment I was made to understand: the kingdom of heaven isn't some plane in another dimension, understandable only through symbols and reachable only upon death. The kingdom of heaven is here on earth. The natural paradise that surrounds us is our true home, both physically and spiritually."

"But if we're to partake in all the glorious gifts it would bestow, we must acknowledge its sacredness. Every plastic six-pack ring that makes its way to the ocean, every gallon of toxic waste that leaches into an estuary, every tenth-of-a-degree rise in average global temperatures represents another step away from the garden...."

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Excerpted from the article Back to the Garden by Michael Ellick

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Mr. Ellick also wrote: "I recalled learning that the pillars and arches of some of Europe's grandest medieval cathedrals were intended by church fathers to evoke towering tree canopies and forest groves—trees that had to be cut down so the very cathedrals evoking them could go up."

Which put me in mind of another cathedral dedicated to St. Paul that I visited a year ago in London. And how when there, at the risk of sounding churlish, I spent most of my time wondering why humans spent so much effort creating a sacred place, when every inch of this earth is already sacred and shining with life and spirit.

Was it because they'd fallen in love with the symbol so deeply that it crowded out their natural human affinity for the physical? Loved the thought and the word, and rejected the blooming rose, the fruiting vine, the lamb who hungered, all outside the doors?

I'm minded of the Fool in Twelfth Night, who sings:

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter.

Present mirth hath present laughter.

What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty.

The door in the tree

“It was as though each feature of the landscape had a special significance, a role to play in some eternally unfolding drama. And if they carried on walking into the arena…they’d be given their own parts to play. Perhaps this was the great lesson to be learned about all of nature...."

—Phil Rickman, The Remains of an Altar

I was a child who loved fairytales, stories where the landscape itself was magical.

I was also a literal child.

So in my woodland wanderings, I always kept my eyes open for the door in the tree. A real door in a real tree, with a stairway leading down into a world of magic.

I was disappointed every time I did not find them. Maybe they existed in the lands of my ancestors, where the tales were written. But this land has different tales, different magics...different doors.

Now I know that what I really sought was wonder. Magic and doors in trees seem to me now as metaphors for wonder.

Maybe "magic" is no more and no less than the earthly wonders that surround us...the songs the world sings to us all the time.

Maybe the landscape is alive and loves us. Maybe the land feels us loving it, and nurtures us with rain and sun and food and endless beauty in a great ouroboros, a Gaian feedback loop.

Maybe the door in the tree is whatever it is that opens our beings to wonder.

I think we're encouraged to embrace wonders in a book or a film, but to dismiss them, or even the possibility of them, when they are there right under our noses. We embrace a dualism that separates the magical and the mundane. We decide wonders aren't there, thus rendering them invisible to us. That is how powerful our minds and beliefs are...we can actually render reality invisible and our eyes will simply skip over what we've decided doesn't exist.

But how reborn we feel when we drop the intervening screens or beliefs or depression or whatever else has separated us from our birthright of wonder. Immense relief to find that we have not lost it forever as we feared, that the magic hasn't gone out of the world. It's been there all along, it is there every day, still. Do you feel that?

That there really is a door in the tree, and we possess the key that unlocks it.

Yesterday, my door in the tree was my first spring robin, pouring out his mating song in the morning sun from atop an evergreen tree.

What opens the door to wonder for you?

"…we are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a story…along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world."

—David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Photos of stick dwelling taken on the Mississippi River bluffs, November 2013. To see another stick dwelling I came upon on another Samhain, go here.

Wild as the wind

We release the birds on the equinox.

It is a day of tossing winds, a fresh coolness blessed by a scintillating flood of warm, golden light.

Evidence of the acreage's history as a farm shows up in rusted implements grown over by grasses. Old pasture. Empty barn, tumbledown fences.

And then there are the outside enclosures, where the rehab birds gain the strength to fly away.

Black wings circle overhead. A crow who had been released a week earlier is coming back to the enclosure to look for food. On this equinox, he is still in limbo, in transition between two worlds...no longer living fully within the world of humans but not yet entirely committed to the world of crows.

We gather in a circle by the lake. Girl children in gaily colored jackets take turns positioning themselves around the small basket cages set on the ground. One cage at a time, the girls lift the unfastened tops.


The House Sparrows zip off into the trees quick as a thought, and sit preening their gray feathers.

The American Robins fly off in three different directions, trailing their characteristic, chuckling whistle.

The mourning doves whir slowly over the heads of the onlookers. They seem confused by this sudden change in circumstance. One lands on a lady's shoulder. Another touches down on the large camera lens of a man photographing the event. These are shooed gently on until they flap up into a nearby tree.

But one mourning dove--cage open to the sky, urged to fly--would not leave.

She was not ready.

I lift the gossamer milkweed seeds into the wind and set them free. They float over the grasses and tiny, bee-buzzed asters; catching on withered stalks or unfurling indefinitely for all I know, all the way into November, where they will freeze hard to the ground until winter's scouring hammer cracks them open. Thus tested, they will wait in the dark, in the ice, in the cold. Until they are ready.

The hours unspool in the wind and air as the planet spins beneath our feet. Twelve hours of light, twelve hours of darkness.

Seeds harvested. Seeds planted.

I think of this poem. And I wonder: Is it time?

How did it escape me that we were walking in Eden

plucking ripe apples on the equinox

one foot in darkness, the other in light

strolling down a country road in the Days of Awe?

How did I fail to faint with wonder

when our sister the snake waited for us

halfway across the road, stubborn in her staying power

seeking the safety of the grass only when we'd passed?

When will I learn that life is like a dream

full of strange and curious wisdom, wild as the wind

and just as liable to slip through our fingers

when attention wanders from the precious present?

When will I remember that no one sees it all?

We need one another to make the dream real,

to rise up in joy and in power, rubbing

against one another until we shed our skins.

—Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

What is sacred and eternal

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man." — Richard Feynman

I stumbled upon the Evensong service at St. Paul's Cathedral on Wednesday, open to all who wish to attend. 

Sitting in the visitor's section toward the back of the church, I gazed at the gold leaf dimly gleaming far above in the images and words painted on the domes. I listened to the choir singing the service, above the murmurs and whispers and shuffles of people from all around the world who had wandered in to see the magnificent interior, been caught by song for a moment, and then wandered out again.

I stayed through the lessons and verses and prayers and canticles and the chanting of the Apostles' Creed, and more spoken prayers.

Let it be said that I was present as an observer, open to beauty and peace, but not as a believer in a supreme being. To paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright, "I believe in the Divine, only I call it Nature."

I thought, churches are made in echo of nature's glory and creation. Some, like this one, are a kind of gilded grove of stone trees, catching jeweled light in their branches. So, why then build churches instead of just going to the grove itself to experience the sacred?

What would the world be like, I mused, if humankind had remained on a path in harmony with our bodily existence, our planet, and all its creatures—rather than devaluing our senses and experience on earth as "less than" what is to come in an afterlife? 

What if people believed that this is our paradise, right here, right now, and that living with kindness and compassion is our daily reward? That every living being has its own divinity and right to exist? That the planet is our home, not our possession? 

What if church choirs went out under the open sky to sing our sacred connection with the earth back into the land—in forest, meadow and mountain, on river, lake and sea?

How would the world be different if religions taught us to honor the miracle of this inexpressibly precious, life-nurturing planet and all its blessed life forms—the transcendence of every green person, every living creature—which through death, nurture new life, and are thus eternal and immortal?

What if we embraced the beauty of now—with all its pain, laughter, loss, creation and endless change?

How different would human history, human lives, and the lives of everything else on this planet be, if all those "ifs" were so?

Thank you, St. Paul's, for calling forth these questions in me.