Toward Common Ground

The season to be…

In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like it.

I guess that after so many trees died or almost died in last summer’s hot drought or in the raging summer fires, those trees still here are now greatly rejoicing at actually being alive.  Or perhaps they fear that this is their last hurrah.  Either way, the forest is glorious, glorious in autumn splendor, and it just goes on and on and on, clear into winter.  There’s surely never been an autumn like this one.  Each day I think, “OK, this is the peak, this is as good as it gets.”  Then the next day, and then the next, another set of trees blazes forth with new vivid color.

Everywhere, the forest looks like it’s on fire, but this time it’s with turning leaves , splendid in red and gold and yellow and scarlet and umber and orange and a hundred other shades of color I can’t match with all my watercolors put together.  Week by week, the sheen from every deciduous tree, one by one, blazes out vividly against the dark evergreen pines around me.  Even the dogwoods that last summer I thought were dying somehow managed in the last few months to regrow enough leaves  to be now red in leaf and berry, as if to say, “I’m still here!  Look at me, I’m still here.”

I know, it’s true enough, not only the trees are behaving strangely, the whole vegetative world down here is confused with the severe climate changes we are experiencing.  The yellow jasmine is blooming, as though it were spring.   The faithful tomatoes, like the trees, suffered the severe summer heat ,and I got not a tomato one all summer, but this fall, amazingly quickly, the tomato bushes set fruit, and there were many tomatoes to be picked, however green, by the bucket full before first frost (something that I’ve never done before);  these determined tomatoes, survivors, have since stayed on the floor in my study, ripening slowly and sweetly, and now I have fresh homegrown organic tomatoes midwinter—another reminder that this is a December unlike any other I can remember.

The message is clear, of course.  Life holds on, and when threatened, puts forth its best and most amazing efforts.  Its beauty and vitality is most tenaciously revealed after there is the threat of its loss altogether.

A lesson I take to heart.  Walking today on a quiet trail, the wind tossing a shower of gold all around me,  I remember who I am, why I am, what this all is, and why I care.  I sing my praises yet again, in the chant that came to me years ago while walking, then, beside the Pacific Ocean, “…oh, so beautiful…how beautiful thou art….”

Of course, that is the proverbial message of the season.

From the beginning, there were the ancient celebrations of the winter solstice, when first humans began to realize that the freezing and darkening times would cyclically change back to warmth and light, no matter how unlikely that seemed.

Later, there were the Hebrews, celebrating  the magical replenishment of oil for light and heat long past time when anyone could imagine it possible.

And there was also the story of the birth of a godly child, not in a temple or a castle or any other imagined appropriate place, but in a stable, and this child was born indeed, not to a king or a priestess, but to a simple couple without a home to shelter them during the birthing.

When many in my world are homeless, hopeless, without the strength to reimagine their lives in a new strange season, I turn again to this winter message.  A message of hope.  Of endurance.  Of courage.  Of stamina brought forth by nature in trying times.  The message of the trees, the jasmine, the tomatoes, the survivors.

And so, because I care, I send you, herewith, a bouquet of golden leaves, a harvest of ripe tomatoes, a walk beside a natural spring of water that did not dry up, even in the terrible drought.  I send you,  setting aside occasional miscellaneous moods to the contrary, my own ecstatic joy,  my precious simple bliss at the miracle of being.

Here.  Still.  Look at me.  Look at us.  All of us.  In this life, and the life to come, wherever, however it may be, surely it is, will be, yet, shining, glorious, like the trees.

In the turning times, in the changing seasons and changing circumstances, we turn again to praise the beauty of the earth, of life, of each other, while every spiritual tradition, each in its own way, is saying, also, “Yes, this!  Rejoice and praise this!  Take heart and hope.  Raise high the anthem, any circumstance to the contrary, there is goodness, there is beauty, life and love are good, very, very good!”

May you have a peaceful, joyful, happy, fruitful holiday.  I hold you in my heart, most tenderly, most prayerfully.

Glenda Taylor

Earthsprings Retreat Center

Winter, 2011

A comment on fear, attributed to Native American Dragging Canoe

“Wisdom tells us to get out of harm’s way at times, but it never tells us to weep with fear.  Once we turn to face it, a quiet determined strength pours in to end the terror.  Fear is terrorism.  It is not running from it that cripples us but refusing to call it what it is.  When fear takes over it flows through all our thinking…Faith will grow when we charge it with determination and powerful words…Turn around right where you are and faced the frightening situation.  Don’t waver and doge.  Look the problem in the eye and call it nothing.  Speak to it in definitive words so that there is no doubt that it must go!”

Dragging Canoe,  chief of the Lower Cherokee from 1777 until his death in 1792, was a pre-eminent war leader among the Indians of the Southeast of his time.

Sing, when birds are silent…

A poem by Margaret Crawford

Sing

when the birds are silent

Dance

when the wind is still

Laugh

when the rain is long coming

Bend

to the Spirit’s will

Open

when the day is closing

Thunder

when the sun shines full

Ground

when a wild wind spirals

Surrender

to the moon tides pull

Earth and stone

live long and slow

Stars cycle

through a trillion dreams

Water

knows not boundaries

Breath air

a constant stream

Honor

each passing second

Honor

above and below

Honor

the past and the future

We all serve

long and slow.

Timeless Quotes

Timeless Quotes From the Buddha from Gerald Penilla on Vimeo.

Teaching, A Sacred Trust

Wisdom From A Dream

Wow! Hang on, folks, what a year, right? Are you crisis weary?

I have been, for some time now. Getting up early each day to water what few trees and plants my water hose will reach, with one eye toward water conservation and the other toward my responsibility to those things I had previously planted…watching world news and political news and weather news…month after month of no rain and triple digit heat…tragic news here and there and there…I remember being in the National Cathedral, and the thought of its being damaged in an earthquake, along with the Washington monument…the Washington monument???

Good thing today happened for me here at Earthsprings. Several things happened, actually. It started off when I awakened from a dream that was most instructive, and then it went from there.

I dreamed that I was at the home of friends, along with a whole group of others dear to me. We were having a great time, until I accidentally dropped and broke a precious dish that I knew had belonged to my friend’s grandmother, handed down to her for generations. I was distraught and so was my friend. She wandered around trying to act as though it was alright, while I came undone, weeping, withdrawing to another room, telling everyone that I had broken several things lately, and that I was obviously getting untrustworthy and unsteady, that I needed just to stay home from now on, and actually that I wasn’t ever going to go anywhere again, and so on. This went on for a good while, with me crying and all the other women sort of clucking around trying to comfort first me and then the owner of the broken dish. Finally, my dear wise friend, Steve Nash, came charging into the room and said something exactly like this: “Alright now, this has gone on long enough! Yes, that was a precious dish, and I’m sorry it got broken. But you know, Glenda, it’s not only your fault; we should not have left that priceless object sitting around where it could get broken. Any of these children might have broken it instead of you, and would you want them never to leave their home again? And OK, yes, you’ve dropped a few things lately, and I know what you’re feeling. You’re just scared, really scared, feeling less capable, more fragile, less in control. But , you know, having those things get broken may have nothing to do with your age or the condition of your brain. It could be coincidence, it could anything. And, you know what, if it does mean you’re getting shakey, and if you do get more helpless, well then, we’ll just baby-proof the house before you come, because I’m not having it that you aren’t coming here anymore! If you don’t, I’ll come get you! Just because you are getting older, maybe more fragile, doesn’t mean you aren’t necessary to us, or that you don’t still have responsibilities to all of us. You’ve still got work to do, girl; you can’t quit. You can’t get to feeling too sorry for yourself and just give up! Now, everybody, pull it together here, all of you, and let’s get on with what we came here to do, have some fun!! The rest of you get on out there somewhere, so Glenda and I can get ready to go take a little boat ride together!” And with that I woke up, tears in my eyes, and with my instructions from Steve (and Life) sounding in my ears.

So I got up, went outside, and did my morning chores with a will. And there I found several other happenings that touched my heart.

First are the “grandson trees,” the little redbud transplants my grandson Jacob brought from the garden and planted all around among the dogwoods near the driveway about a year ago. They made it through last summer and the hard winter, so I’ve been dragging a hundred-foot water hose around every other day, watering them. And I see that despite the 105 degree days, they are hanging on. They first lost all their leaves, but as I watered them, within a couple of days, they dutifully put out two or three new little leaves. But then, those new leaves a get browned up. So, I water, and then, some of them put out more new little leaves, only to dry up. But they keep trying, and I keep watering. So courageous are those little trees. I may have lost some of them, but some of them may make it. And every time I water them, I notice that, scurrying out from around their bases, where the water is filling up the little low place around them, come all sorts of bugs and lizards and tiny creatures that temporarily evacuate their oasis. I had no idea that my watering the seedling trees might be life- saving to others too. We never know the result of our actions. When I got animated over the morning glory vines completely covering over an azalea bush and jerked off the morning glory vines, I discovered that those vines had been shading and protecting that particular azalea, so that it was the only one that was still green and healthy looking!! We just don’t know what’s what, we make mistakes that way, thinking we are doing what is right. But we have to trust the deeper wisdom of nature, of the eternal, and just keep on keeping on, somehow.

The other thing this morning that underscored that (and I really don’t know what it portends), is that the “bliss bestowing tree,” so named because its blooms, in spring, smell so wonderful, well, last week it lost every leaf; the leaves just suddenly turned crisp and fell off. The tree had been busy, as usual, in the year long process of making its flower buds for next spring, and that’s all that was left on the tree, those tight little buds all over the tree, still wrapped in their protective husks, trying to grow. I was devastated, feeling I had failed the tree as I tried to get here and there and water everything and missed it too long. So I put the soaker- hose on it for a good long while, hoping desperately that the tree itself would not die. Well, I went out this morning, and there before my eyes was the little tree, blooming!! Those tight little buds, instead of waiting for spring, were opening up, small and not fully developed, were nonetheless blooming, in the autumn heat, not a leaf to seen, but they were blooming!! What does that mean? Is it the tree’s last hurrah, its final gift? Is it Life, saying yet again, “Never give up, do what you can, don’t wait till conditions are favorable, if you must, do what you must, but BLOOM! Give forth your gifts!” Sort of the same message I got from Steve in the dream, with the sweet smell of bliss added. I wept, even while I kept going to try to save something else.

Bliss in the midst of mayhem. Wow! Be here now. Live now. Don’t give up! Bloom!

Now this is, again, a homely little homily. But you know what? I used to be one of those out there storming the barricades, so to speak, taken up with BIG things, and I value that way of being. But there is also another way, a quieter, more earthy way, a more gentle, Taoist way, I guess. That way is just to be with what is, however it is, however hard or sad or challenging it is, and somehow see the good, and do the good, and feel the Presence of Life, in all events and all circumstances. Not being a Pollyanna; I don’t mean that. It does hurt when a precious thing breaks, a precious one dies, when so much suffering is abroad. It is important to be with that too. Looking it right in the eye, experiencing that deeply. And also. And also. And also, finding a Yes! Somewhere, a “Yes, and, “ my life motto, “Yes, and…there is also the good, always some good, some beautiful, that deserves our notice, our commitment, our responsibility to keep on keeping on.”

At least that’s what I’m telling myself, even as a hurricane bears down on the East Coast of the U.S. shortly after an unusual earthquake and a wild war in Libya and a famine in other parts of Africa and my giant oak tree that is dropping limbs, dropping limbs, maybe dying.

Nonetheless, I’m holding on to my dream, the dream of last night, and the dream of my lifetime. I stand with the bliss bestowing tree, living and dying.

Let us all bloom! Now! No matter what, let’s do our best. Let’s “pull it together” as Steve said in the dream, and do our best.

And, also as Steve said, don’t forget, we’re here to have some fun, no matter what breaks!

Amazing!

This is too wonderful! In publishing the post below, the one called “A Way Forward,” an item on a list in the post involves “a sense of humor.” Well, somehow, (HOW?) the post now appears with a little smiley face next to that item! I didn’t put it there, I don’t know how to put it there, and I can’t edit it out or get it to go away!!! It looks kind of silly there, but it’s insistent, so there it is! Spirit moves in the most delightful ways sometimes. Gratitude!

A Way Forward

“The way forward…” An expression we’ve heard frequently on television this week, spoken tentatively, as pundits, professionals, and politicians, like all the rest of us, grapple with the uncertainty of the present moment in our national history.

A few days ago, I happened across some notes I had made years ago in preparation for a lecture I was about to give. Right at the top of the page was this penciled phrase: “Uncertainty as a sacred state.”

Well, it’s been a long time since that lecture, and though I know, of course, that all states are sacred, still, when one is in the midst of challenge, as we are now, uncertainty can feel anything but sacred. Sir Laurens van der Post once talked about people “running amok” out of a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of despair , and that seems to be much the case today.

My refound lecture notes take this into account, and then point to another way, beginning with a quotation by Ghandi: “…Life is governed by a multitude of forces. It would be smooth sailing if one could determine the course of one’s actions only by one general principle…But I cannot recall a single act which could be so easily determined.” Uncertainty.

Uncertainty is inevitable, he says, and he isn’t the only one. Plato recognized that “… the generation of this universe was a mixed result of the combination of Necessity and Reason.” Necessity? The necessity for something other than reason?

James Hillman helps us find the distinction between these two principles. Commentators on Plato, he says, use, for the principle of Necessity, such words as : rambling, digressing, straying, irrational, irresponsible, deviating, misleading, deceiving, irregular, random. Necessity, Hillman says, “operates through deviations… We recognize it in the irrational, irresponsible, indirect…”

Necessity, then, is seen as a kind of wayward, often difficult giveness, a recognition that “here we are, this is, and we must deal with it, like it or not.” Plato and many others, all the way back to the beginning of the earliest written accounts of the meaning of things and all the way forward to modern physicists, insist that we cannot avoid times of uncertainty, insecurity, chaos.

What, then, is Reason to do in the face of such Necessity, of “irrational” things over which we have no control, of Chaos?

I don’t pretend to have “the answer,” but it feels right to share the few insights in my recovered notes, to make whatever offering I can to you today. (This is, of course, no place to recreate the whole lecture I gave, even if I could, but my notes do point to a way forward, to other ways available to us.

My notes list what I called “some qualities of the new way.” Here are some of the things on the list. (I’m no longer aware of how I developed these themes back then, so you can expand upon them for yourself, but there were some interesting quotations listed for some of the items on the list, which I will include.)

So here’s the roughly organized, penciled list, from long ago.

1) Humility is Power.

““The acquisition of the spirit of non-resistance is a matter of long training in self-denial and appreciation of the hidden forces within ourselves. It changes one’s outlook upon life. It puts different values upon things and upsets previous calculations. And when once it is set in motion its effect…can overtake the whole universe. It is the greatest force because it is the highest expression of the soul…” Ghandi

2) Careful and proper placement of trust

“Picasso was right when he said that we do not know what a tree or a window really is. All things are very mysterious and strange (like Picasso’s paintings), and we overlook their strangeness and their mystery only because we are so used to them…” Ernesto Cardenal

“I believe in a new world. I do, yes I do. And I live in this trust: that although everything I see may turn to dust, we are moving inexorably, inexorably, inexorably, toward a new world.” Al Carmines

3) Avoid absolute statements and rigid principles

“There is an art to wandering. If I have a destination, a plan—an objective—I’ve lost the ability to find serendipity. I’ve become too focused, too single-minded. I am on a quest, not a ramble. I search for the Holy Grail of particularity and miss the chalice freely offered, filled full and overflowing.” Cathy Johnson

4) Keep childlike openness.

“Devotees of all ages, approaching the Mother in a childlike spirit, testify that they find her ever at play with them.” Yogananda

5) Awareness of and interaction with more subtle realms (energy fields that are non-human but interactive with us)

“In a recent article on astrophysics, I came across the beautiful and imaginative concept known as ‘the butterfly effect.’ If a butterfly winging over the fields around Crosswicks should be hurt, the effect would be felt in galaxies thousands of light years away. The interrelationship of all of Creation is sensitive in a way we are just beginning to understand. If a butterfly is hurt, we are hurt. If the bell tolls, it tolls for us.” Madeleine L’Engle

“Our lives extend beyond our skins, in radical interdependence with the rest of the world.” Joanna Macy

“Even before reason there is the inward movement which reaches out towards its own.” Plotinus

6) Silence as a gateway to the subtle.

“It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent…If we want to listen to the still small voice that is always speaking within us, it will not be heard if we continually speak…A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech….” Ghandi

“Cultivate the art of deep listening in which you lean toward the world in love. All things in the universe want to be heard, as do the many voices inside us.” Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

7) Courage and Tenacity.

George Matthew Adams says that enthusiasm is “a kind of faith that has been set on fire.”

Sense of Proportion, a sense of humor

I read somewhere about a Greek Orthodox tradition in which believers gather on Easter Monday to trade jokes, because the best joke of all happened on Easter, the triumph over death, so people gather to tell stories with unexpected endings and a sense of humor.

The Apaches say that the Creator was not satisfied with humans until they were given the ability to laugh. Only then were they “fit to live.”

9) Dare to fantasize, imagine, recreate

…We’re so bogged down in traditional ways of doing things, we don’t know what’s buried in the human spirit or how much capacity there is for change.”

“Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” St. Paul

10) Retell the story, reframe the meaning.

Maya Angelou records that she was raped at age seven, and after the rapist she named was later found dead, she stopped talking, for five years. She notes:

“…To show you how out of evil can come good, in those years I read every book in the Black school library; I read all the books I could get from the White school library; I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes; I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets; I memorized Edgar Allan Poe, all the poetry—never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling—it was a catholic kind of reading. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say, and many ways in which to say what I had to say. I listened to the Black minister, I listened to the melody of the preachers, and I could tell when they meant to take our souls straight to heaven, or whether they meant to dash us straight to hell. I understood it. …there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case, I was saved from that muteness. And out of this evil, I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself.”

At a conference on the topic of facing evil, Chungliang Al Huang once said:
“…We are often looking in the wrong place where we miss the truth right under our nose. ..Often people say, ‘just another lousy sunset. I’ve seen it. …’ Our heart closes, our mind closes. We become small human beings. And when an individual becomes internally small, he or she turns evil. But when we continue to open our eyes, open our spirit, there is no chance evil can breed. We can also influence others to open up. Let’s all open. This time, let’s say ‘another lousy sunset in paradise!’ Of course, you have seen a sunset, but this time it is different. It is always different.”

Patriotism and Religion

On this Fourth of July weekend, I reread the words of James Madison, written in a letter to Dr. Jacob de la Motta and Mordecai M. Noah in 1820:

“…Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect. And it is particularly pleasing to observe in the good citizenship of such as have been most distrusted and oppressed elsewhere a happy illustration of the safety and success of this experiment of a just and benignant policy. Equal laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony, and most favorable to the advancement of truth…”

An important read

I’ve been reading a book recently that, despite all my previous exploration of this subject, has really given me new insight, information, and cause for hope. It is Dr. David Liepert’s book Muslim, Christian and Jew. In a very personal voice of experience, Dr. Liepert presents a balanced and very readable assessment that I highly recommend.

Here are two reviews of the book:

“An honest and wholehearted attempt to fulfill a task that is incumbent upon us all, whatever our faith: to get beneath the layers of self-righteousness and defensiveness that have accumulated over the centuries, to learn from the complexities of history, and to make our traditions speak with compassion and respect to our dangerously polarized world.” — Karen Armstrong, New York Times bestselling author of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“One danger of interfaith dialogue is that differences in theology or dogma can be so smoothed over or diluted that the integrity of each religion is sacrificed for the sake of an ecumenical consensus. Dr. David Liepert’s Muslim, Christian, and Jew takes a very different path. As much a fascinating spiritual autobiography as a plea for interfaith understanding, Liepert (who has been engaged in interfaith dialogue for many years) confronts rather than waters down differences in a textual criticism of the three Abrahamic religions. This often takes the form of an internal dialogue, particularly when dealing with his own conversion from an evangelical Christianity to what might be described as an evangelical Islam. The binding thread to this book is a recurrent and impassioned plea for the practitioners of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to transcend their undeniable differences and relatively recent past histories on the basis of that ‘Common Word’ shared by all three religions—love of God and love of neighbor—and to apply this core conviction existentially and not just affirm it.” — S. Abdallah Schleifer, Reviewer for the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, Distinguished Professor of Journalism at the American University in Cairo, former Cairo bureau chief for NBC News