The wishes of birds

I follow the wishes of birds.

I hear them calling to me in the morning, to bring out seeds, cracked corn, suet, when the low sun spills its amber across the blue-shadowed snow.

Giving to them is a gift to me. Always, they touch my heart with their joyful presence. I watch their thrilling flights from branch to feeder. Recognize the life in them—their bright eyes, quick flutters, down fluffed against the cold, foraging to survive as does every living thing on this earth.

When you look at any being with eyes of love, you witness its divinity, its personhood.

You recognize the animating sacred spark of life you share. You feel akin. Then you want to help.

So you bring seeds.

It helps each of us to survive winter.

Before dawn, in spring, the lone voice of the cardinal singing out in darkness means everything to me.

How can this one song pierce my heart so with joy and sorrow? I lie awake and listen.

While he sings, the whole of my life feels held within that song, beginning with the most precious gift we are given: the sweetness of being, of life throbbing through us, in oneness with the cardinal and every other being. Because this loneliness, this sense of separation is an illusion, say spiritual masters, philosophers, quantum physicists.

Coming out of my dreams, wakened by by this heartbreaking beauty, every sadness floods through me, every happiness, what feels like the deepest measure of my existence as a living being in this world.

My heart then whispers its own kind of song in return, reminding me how brief is the life of a songbird and a woman, but how beauty remains despite grief and death. The feeling of the beauty and the grief together, its poignance, the sense of timelessness and eternity and oneness: I cannot put that into words at all, only tears.

Sorrow sweeps out your house so that new joy can find space to enter, said Rumi. As they beguile open our sleeping hearts and call forth joy and sorrow, singing to us of how ephemeral yet eternal life is, the birds bring us even more gifts: To weep is a gift. To love, a gift. To sorrow, a gift.

Seeds. Also a gift. But perhaps a small one, considering what wonder has been received.

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.

Thus we banish winter

On this, the first fire festival of the year, some alignment of time and energy helixed together, manifesting in my reading a book in which a character described Imbolg as "the kindling in the forest of winter."

Ahhh. Lovely.

Yet, a little strange. Since coincidentally, I was reading the book with the Kindle app, and on the festival of Imbolg.

As I read, a wistful feeling crept over me. I was wishing that I had felt up to attending the St. Brigid's/Candlemas ritual last week at the college where I once worked, instead of being down with a cold. The college was founded by the Catholic order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a community of women who are perfectly okay with acknowledging and even celebrating the pagan roots of Christian holidays and who conduct lovely if slightly earnest ceremonies with a touch of mystery.

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In one ritual, I read elsewhere, she representing the Maiden sweeps deosil around the circle, symbolically brushing away the old and outworn.

Earlier today, again by coincidence, I performed a similar action. On hands and knees, I used a wet cloth to wipe up the accumulation of sand, salt and snowmelt just inside the back door. Juniper, my familiar, sat near me and watched the motion of my hand, circling around and around--every revolution sunwise, or deosil.

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After the sweeping comes the chanting.

Thus we banish winter,

thus we welcome spring,

say farewell to what is dead

and greet each living thing.

Thus we banish winter,

thus we welcome spring.

I say the words aloud,  to myself. Just as I write this, I say them, for any who are listening to hear.

I am not burning incense, or anything else, yet I smell incense burning.

Strange and strange.

It is a hint of woodsmoke creeping in round the edges of my old window frames from outside on this fine, frosty night.

Or is it?

I need more magic in my life. I choose to think of this phantom whiff of sacred smoke as one more part of this Imbolg ritual I seem to have been participating in all day without even realizing it.

Until just now, as I wrote this.

Welcome, spring. Let the fire in the forest of winter be kindled.

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.