WHEN NATURE SPEAKS – Echoes of Eternity

When Nature speaks, it’s for a reason. She's sharing things we need to hear—invitations, affirmations, lessons about truth, beauty, love and life.

While the human animal’s obsessed with how to stretch and bend her to create our own realities, Nature reminds us of one eternal reality, that everything is connected. Everything. That what we might fear in her we actually fear in ourselves. And that what we do to her we do to ourselves and others. 

What a joy our place in her should be, a position that, miraculously, both humbles us when we’re arrogant and ennobles us when we’re feeling unimportant.

BODY AND SOUL
Nature’s voice surrounds us, fills us, every day. She speaks to our minds, showing us immutable truths of how things always grow and move and interact. At the same time, she refreshes those ancient instincts that have always advised us on how to apply those truths. She tries as she can to show us both the portals and the boundaries of our intimacy.

            Only if we love her back will we 
            care enough to protect her as if 
            she were our own flesh and blood.

Sometimes the message is for our bodies, calling us to work with her, run with her, bask in her. She fills us with contentment, with exhilaration, and then reminds us that, while she may seem indefatigable, we are not.

Finally, she speaks to our hearts and our spirits, reminding us of our deep belonging to her. It is an unconditional love, that of the tenderest of gods, yet utterly indifferent to the values we humans have devised for ourselves—and so often fail to exemplify. 
 
WHAT TO SAY BACK
Don’t think for a moment that what Nature has to say to us has to be a monologue. In fact, there are many ways to hold up our end of the conversation. Perhaps the most obvious is through sound.

If we spot a beautiful bird—a cardinal, let’s say—we obviously can’t look like a cardinal; we can’t feel or taste or smell like one either. But we can sound like one. I do it all the time (and the cardinal nearly always comes closer).

When Nature calls us to our child side, we might answer her with playful cries and joyous laughter. Or we can welcome her accompaniment as we shuffle leaves, crunch acorns or splash water.

We can shout or clap our hands and listen as desert ignores, forest ponders or canyon mimics. Or we can offer Nature the one gift we have that might nearly rival birdsong and wolf call—our own voices in song.

                You know it's not really a 
                sound, but still you hear it.

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE   
Can we converse with Nature through silence? Have you ever experienced true, total silence? I’ve done so only a few times in my life. It leaves an impression. At first your brain doesn’t quite know what to do without the foundation of at least some ambient sound.

It’s kind of like being in total darkness. It makes you dizzy. You can almost feel your ears reaching out, expanding, cupping to detect something, anything, to get a bearing on.

Then, like the way we try to fill the awkward lull in a conversation with an “um-m-m” or an “ah-h-h-h,” Nature comes up with her own space filler, a sort of dull roar. You know it's not really a sound, but still you hear it.

How curious that, while total silence may disorient, near-silence—especially that infused with Nature’s whispers of wind through trees, water over rocks, the jabber and scurry of life—is where, more than any place, you will hear the sound of your own spirit, that reassuring voice that reminds you of your unique part in the oneness of everything.

MISPLACED FEARS
This is an era in which too many of us humans seem to be getting it backwards in our attitude toward Nature. We've come to fear her more than we love her. We keep our young ones indoors where we can keep an eye on them. We discourage them from the kinds of adventures that defined our own childhood, but which we now somehow believe are too risky.

        In her voice are the echoes of everything 
        that ever lived...or ever will live.

If we truly listen, we know that the truth is a different matter. In fact it is Nature that should fear us. Once again, she’s telling us—and we should be listening—how we hurt her through our arrogance, our greed, our short-sightedness and, perhaps most tragically, through those poorly-informed fears.

Nature is as benevolent as she has ever been. And, in this era of virtual experiences and connections, her presence in our daily lives is needed more than ever. Depriving our children of her nurture, her teachings, her healing spirit, is hurting them—and us—in ways we are only now coming to document, and to a degree that far, far outweighs any actual risks.

FLESH AND BLOOD
So keep your ears peeled for Nature’s voice. It’s there, not just in the forest, but in the heart of the city. You can hear it in creatures’ voices, including our own. It comes from growth and movement—the raspy rattle of tree branches rubbing shoulders in the wind; water’s cheery chortle as it charms its way over and around hard rock. Some folks even hear the trees, the clouds, the land.

And only if we listen—truly listen with ears, hearts and souls open—will we learn about Nature and our belonging in her. For in her voice are the echoes of everything that ever lived...or ever will live. Then, only when we know and trust that eternal bond, will we be able to reciprocate her love. Only then will we know enough to protect her as if she were, indeed, our own flesh and blood.

LIFE AS A PALINDROME* – Why We Need Nature Both Coming and Going

My recent work as a hospice volunteer has me thinking more and more about life, and how wonderful it is that the hospice movement, regardless of how quickly or slowly life may wind down, focuses not on the process of dying, but on the process of living until one dies.

The difference may seem subtle, but for hospice patients it is not. One of the reasons I’ve always feared the idea of aging is that, nearly every time I’ve visited
a nursing home, no matter how nice the accoutrements, the residents seem so isolated, so stuck inside those cheesy-art-strewn walls with companions not of their choosing, so unplugged from Nature.

MIRROR IMAGE
Have you heard this comedy shtick—attributed to several sources—about why life really should be lived backwards?

“I think the most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What’s that, a bonus?
I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work for forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement!
You go to college, you do drugs, alcohol, you party, you have sex, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating…and you finish off as a gleam in somebody’s eye.” **

Isn’t that a wonderful notion? Why can’t life be more like that?

Of course, I can’t help but bring to this reflection my Nature-loving, quasi-pantheist point of view—that we come from Nature and, whether we’re smart enough to stay engaged with her throughout our lives or not, we inevitably go back to Nature.

  We’ve always been here and we always will be.

It's not exactly the scenario laid out in the comedy bit; there, even though that ideal life is reversed, it still has a beginning and an end. The advantage of my truth is that, far beyond our blink-of-an-eye, flesh-and-blood presence here on this blue-
green pinprick of light in the deep black fabric of the cosmos, we’ve always been here and we always will be.

As I suggest in my previous post here, The Stuff of Stars – What Every Human Wants—this amounts to nothing less than immortality. Not the fuzzy going-home-to-God-in-heaven version I was brought up with, but one that’s equally positive and, for me at least, considerably easier to believe.

NOT JUST FOR KIDS
These days, as the Children and Nature movement and its “Nature Deficit Disorder” diagnosis of screen-bound kids gain traction around the world, it’s easy to believe that Nature is most essential to human beings when they’re young. After all, they say it’s then—mostly before the age of five—that the essential building blocks of a healthy, happy life are laid down. And Nature is, indeed, a master mason.
 

In the U.S and many other cultures of the “developed” world, we then grow up, we tie ourselves to our work and our homes, and many of us forget what it was like to be one with Nature.

But if we could accept, for a minute, that the end of life is—or should be—the mirror image of its beginning, wouldn’t it make sense that Nature play as big a role in our health and happiness when we’re very old as when we were very young?

Take me outdoors...where Nature can replenish my soul with her perfect, timeless beauty and wisdom.

My hospice training urged us volunteers to bring with us to patient visits a “tool kit” of things to read, pictures to look at, music to listen to, perhaps a few games to play. And, depending on my patients’ particular likes, I will have those things.

But the most important device I will bring is the turning of a door knob. For it is only outdoors where all of one’s senses are brought to life at the same time, where a person whose horizon draws near is reassured, not just of being thoroughly in each moment, but of an essential sense of belonging—today, tomorrow, forever.

      

COMING HOME
I hope with all my heart that this will be the case for me, that when I’m too feeble to easily get out and use my precious abilities to walk and climb and paddle, someone will be kind enough to lend me those capacities. Take me outdoors, with the animals and plants and moving air, where Nature can replenish my soul with her perfect, timeless beauty and wisdom.

The end of my life may not be, as the quote imagines, the gleam in my parents’ eyes, but I’m convinced I’ll see a much deeper intent, that of a benevolent universe, welcoming home, after his briefest of visits to this earthly life, one of its own.

* The word “palindrome” comes from the Greek palin dromo, which means “running back again.”

** This bit has been attributed to George Carlin, Woody Allen, and even Andy Rooney, but there’s a pretty convincing case for its actually having been written (and performed on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the early ’80s) by lesser-known comedian Sean Morey. 
At any rate, I found this a particularly nice version of the life-backwards story, as it is audio-only—allowing one to conjure one’s own imagery. LIVING LIFE BACKWARDS

SACRED COWS, SACRED WOWS – Finding Your Soul Space

        “The unspoken poverty in our culture is a poverty of spirit, a real hunger 
        for what the West has forgotten: that not just individual life but all of 
        creation is sacred. This connection to a sacred Earth always made us feel 
        and know we are part of the great mystery of creation, of its rivers and 
        winds, its birdsong and seeds. How could it be otherwise? And how can 
        we now regain this simple but forgotten element, this ingredient as essen-
        tial as salt?” ~ LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE, Sufi teacher and author

                                             —//—          —//—          —//—

Recently, Sally and I went to the Sacred exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which explores the people, places, ideas and values we human animals choose to bestow with special power or divine status. And I’ve been thinking about sacredness ever since.

Sacred sites, sacred rites; sacred vows, sacred cows. What do you hold sacred? How do we decide what’s sacred to us? And what does “sacred” even mean?

YEARNING FOR MEANING
Do you sense, as I do, the deep yearning many people are feeling for something more profound in their lives than the common pursuits of success, recreation, social connections and even some aspects of family life? Despite the considerable appeal of the status quo, most people are hungry for meaning. Some of us are starving.

But we’ve lost touch with so many of the quiet, natural places and unhurried moments we once enjoyed in which real meaning so often dwells—those moments of discovery, of curiosity and wonder, in which our true capacities for contemplation, reverence and gratitude feel safe to come out from hiding.

         The door to the sacred is not one leading 
         out of us; it’s one leading into us.

I find such places—I call them my divinity vicinity—nearly everywhere, but especially in Nature. You don’t have to become a reclusive Buddhist monk or go on an exotic vacation to do that. For those precious times and places exist as much in one's spirit as in real time and space.

In other words, the way to connect with what’s sacred is not through a door leading out of us, the one we take when we're seeking something; it’s the door leading into us, the one we take when we're learning. And it’s our consciousness, our openness of spirit, that opens this door and makes a place for things transcendental. 

SOUL SPACE
Problem is, the more complex and “wired” the world becomes, the greater a challenge it becomes keeping that door open. Just as there remain fewer and fewer tangible Edens on the planet, so are we losing those spiritual Edens. Marketers and ideologues fight over every imaginable surface, every second of silence, every blink of our awareness, like hyenas on a fresh kill.

Have you noticed how easily we fool ourselves into thinking we're always so busy? At least for me, if I take an honest look, it’s often things of very little consequence—futzing with unnecessary perfection, taking care of all the stuff I accumulate, watching TV...

Sometimes I wonder if I'm simply trying to fill all those empty times and spaces with something—anything—before someone else does. The shame is that it's exactly those empty, silent spots where anything worthy of becoming sacred to us most often settles and takes root.

So, how do we keep those fertile spaces open for such inspiration? Whether it's a quiet place in the forest, true intimacy in one's marriage, or a new Porsche, even if we already know what’s sacred to us, where is there any time, any room, any quiet corner of consciousness left to tend to it and be fully present with it?

Very simply, we must choose to make that "soul space." We've got to clear at least some of the trivial, albeit more certain, things out of the way. And then we have to maintain and defend that space.

        When it comes to the sacred, faith is 
        the essential bridge between symbol 
        and substance, intention and conviction.

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
The notion of the sacred can be intimidating, at least in the abstract. We tend to think of it as pretentious, too perfect perhaps, for a mere human to comprehend. But isn’t sacredness, after all, a completely, uniquely human concept, one which, like the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest, would not exist without some form of consciousness to experience it? Nothing pretentious about finding and using a capacity that already exists in each and every one of us, right?

So what about all those odd things people seem to worship—celebrities, places, institutions and objects which may seem silly or even downright bizarre to someone else? Still, no matter how busy or broke we may be, we still manage to honor such things with our time and resources.

Can anything tangible really be sacred, or do such things just represent the sacred? Aren’t they all, in the end, just symbols, devices to help us visualize the invisible, perhaps distill incomprehensible ideas and powers down to a manageable scale?

Whether the symbol's profound or profane, the more difference there is between its crudeness and the depth of meaning it represents, the more investment our belief demands of us. That investment is nothing more or less than faith, the essential bridge between symbol and substance, intention and conviction.

AN EMPTY VESSEL
This all reminds me of something I used to tell my graphic design clients when I developed a logo  for their organization. I counseled them that our goal was to create a mark that would be engaging, unique and memorable. Beyond that it could not, by itself, be expected to convey every nuance of their organization’s purpose, values, mission or reputation.

       It matters less the icons we choose than 
       the fact that we worship anything at all.

It would be, I explained, an empty vessel, one whose ultimate meaning and value would come from what the organization chose to fill it with: constant, consistent associations with the quality and value of its products and services; the way it dealt with its customers, employees and vendors; the manner in which it gave back to its community.

In other words, the power of the logo lies less in itself—its appearance, its symbolism, its promotion—than in something it taps into in the life experience of the beholder.

Isn't this the way our perception of the sacred works? Why two people can witness the very same object or event and experience two completely different realities? Why one of them might find it spiritually stirring while the other barely notices?

EVERYTHING
Whatever symbols we might devise to represent the sacred—and some of them, I must say, escape me—it matters less the icons we choose than the fact that we worship anything at all. Still, even if some symbols are inane, I wish more folks could at least find the humility to have them represent ideals bigger than our own self-absorbed, cosmically inconsequential interests.

It helps to acknowledge that, even beyond the company of our fellow human beings, none of us is alone. It becomes clearer by the day that every one and every thing in creation is part of one interconnected reality. Everything we do, for good or for ill, affects that entire reality. I know that’s a hard concept for many to get their minds around. But that belief alone is something I hold sacred. For me at least, it is a good place to start.

So let us choose wisely what we worship and adore. It may be a precious few things…or it may be... everything.

                                             —//—          —//—          —//—

Of course, this is all just my take on things; nothing sacred about that, I guess. 
I just hope I haven't offended too many more than one would expect when the 
topic is as personal and deeply felt as spirituality. In any case, I'd like to hear 
what you think.

WHY I WONDER – In Two Places At the Same Time

         

A PATH WITH NO END
Wonder's like the two ends of a path—or maybe I should say like the point where you start out and another point somewhere along the way where you think you might end up. Let me explain:

Any time you go somewhere, meet someone, experience something or process an idea it's like setting out on a journey. Sometimes you know where you're going; sometimes you think you know but end up taking an alternate route; and sometimes—often this turns out to be the most fun—you just set out on the path and have no idea where it will lead.

This is the other end of wonder, the place where your conversation with your surroundings turns from asking to listening.

In any case, when you take off on this wonder journey, something in you is thinking, I wonder. At this point it's all about curiosity, intrigue, adventure. If you're in Nature, the conversation between you and your surroundings here involves mostly asking: What is that thing? How did it get here? How does it feel or smell? What's under it? Why did it just move? How does it experience me?

Maybe we could just call this end of the path wondering.

OWNING WONDER
Okay? Now let's jump to the other end of the path. The first thing you need to understand about this place is that it doesn't exist, at least not in a linear-thinking, rational way. It's like heading for a point on the horizon; by the time you get there, you're headed for a new point on a new horizon.

So you have to decide for yourself when you've arrived. Most often the only way you know is when you experience something profound, a sense of being that seems to originate outside of yourself. This is the other end of wonder, the place where your conversation with your surroundings turns from asking to listening.

The wonder you've just experienced is no longer 
a place on the path, but a place in your soul.

It's at this point that what might seem, semantically at least, a subtle distinction becomes quite pronounced. You've moved from wondering to experiencing wonder.

This is where you realize the spiritual meaning of wonder. And it's where you make a critical, albeit tacit, decision: what will I do with these feelings? It's here that most people seem to feel their transaction with Nature is complete. They've come; they've seen; they've experienced something that made them feel small.

But don't let your path of wonder end there; pick up these experiences and take them with you. In other words, the wonder you've just experienced is no longer a place on the path, but a place in your soul. For in fact, that's where it's been all along.

(Watch for the next post in the Why I Wonder series: Believing Is Seeing)