Winter’s Invisibility Cloak

Our woods on January 30, 2018

For January 30, David George Haskell in The Forest Unseen, writes, “plant resurrection after a full surrender is so far removed from human experience…” (p. 22). And yet the Path of Attraction* calls to us humans, urging the full surrender of the ego-self. Instead of a contrast, I find that Haskell’s elaboration of the winter woods offers a helpful model for our development through wintry conditions.

   Haskell describes how most plants survive through freezing winter by moving the essential to the center: “Plants start their preparations several weeks ahead of the first freezes. They move DNA and other delicate structures to the centers of their cells” (p. 22). In similar fashion, in order to survive the freezing times that worldly life brings toward the soul, humans need to follow the example of the plants’ preparation. 

   Importantly, the testing times of winter demand the development of discernment. Purification of the human heart means discerning the individual’s spiritual DNA. Coleman Barks places a Rumi poem here in the midst of winter where it teaches us about the ability to discern true ecstacy: “There are thousands of wines/ that can take over our minds.// Don’t think all ecstasies are the same./ Jesus was lost in his love for God./ His donkey was drunk with barley.”** Yes, humans need the “fire” from wine in order to make our way through winters, but we have to choose the wine of spiritual ecstacy over the intoxications of pride, ambition, domination, as well as alcoholic drunkeness.

   If a human surrenders the ego, surviving the winter of life might be possible. Haskell’s elaboration of his woods in Shakerag Hollow offers helpful models for us. In addition to the way taken by perennials, he notes “a different path”: 

Leafcup herbs completed their short eighteen-month lives last fall and now stand dead, surrendered entirely to winter. They have sublimated into a new physical form, like snow passing into vapor. Like vapor, these new forms are invisible, but they surround me…seeds, waiting out winter…When spring sparks the mandela, the energy released will carry the whole forest, birds included, through another year. [p. 24]

   Haskell’s account stirs several themes worthy of meditation. For one, consider the value of going invisible. Of course we saw the power of the Invisibility Cloak for Harry Potter. Perhaps less apparent is the value of the quiet life somewhat protected from the storms of status, wealth, and winning. When we realize this, we have gratitude for not being seen, for not receiving the “merit” bonus, even for losing the world’s prestige. The authentic life of the individual soul has to be known in secret. 

        Or perhaps there are sightings or scents but only accessible to those prepared to receive them. The pathway toward God moves into the invisible, the inarticulate, the ineffable. I believe that human capacity for such movement develops, for example, when engaging Good Stories through increasing discernment of “resonance,” by discriminating the authentic, the holy. Although I’ve just discovered the book, I’m excited to open John Renard’s Friends of God where his Preface notes “when an author appears to have slipped off the straight path of ‘fact’ onto the mucky byways and quick sands of credulity” and going forward as “travelers in the realms of the religious imagination” guided as “smaller stories communicate the ineffable” (xiii-xiv). God’s light breaks through every instant but catching the rainbow spectrum takes special vision. These new forms wait out winter preparing to spark into spring.

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* Path of Attraction is “code” for following God’s light, for the “Religion of Love,” perhaps even signaled by the code-word  “resonance” that I use in Good Stories [clink on the resonance “label” at bottom of blog], and for continuing purification needed to track or to be drawn by the Source, the Truth… 

** From p. 40 for January 28 in A Year with Rumi, taken from Mathnawi IV, 2683ff. In the passage, Rumi warns us that these two “wines” (infidelity vs. true religion, line 2716; carnal soul vs. reason, line 2718) are “at war: take heed, take heed, and strive that the spiritual realities may prevail over the (sensual) forms” (line 2719, Nicholson’s translation).

In her notes for Hafiz’s ghazal 5, Elizabeth Gray comments on the symbol: “Wine has a rich array of meanings and resonances in Persian poetry, and is associated with light, illumination, and truth… The surface of the wine in the wine cup reveals the face of the Beloved, the reflection of one’s own face (which is a mirror of God as His creation, and therefore is Him)” (p. 147, The Green Sea of Heaven.)

Human-Divine Harmony

Part 3 in the year-long series of looking at our woods through the lens of David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen. 

   Haskell’s entry for January 21 focuses on comparing chickadees’ survival in extremely cold conditions with humans’ coping through fire, clothing, and food storage. In contrast with species that evolve to accommodate nature, I wonder about humans’ role in shaping the environment. When Haskell strips his clothes to simulate the bird’s experience, within seconds his body starts to shut down and soon he would have become unconscious and dead. Instead he covers up with warm insulating clothes and returns to his toasty kitchen, fueled by burning wood, powered by petroleum, sun, wind, or nuclear energy. When is this thing we call “civilization” in harmony with all-our-relations and when not?

   In our woods from January 20-23 in 2018, snow was melting, then temperatures peaked at 60 degrees, about 20 above normal, followed by rain and overnight freezing. On the warm days, I was working up a good sweat removing invasive plants from our woodland. This thing called “civilization” is crazy-making, and then perhaps it also allows a place to find/receive God.

   Perhaps humans just have to fall; in other words, to learn harmony, we first mess things up. Most of the mess in our woods came in by humans who thought they knew better. For example, "bush honeysuckle”:

…first introduced into the United States in the mid to late 1800s from Europe and Asia for use as ornamentals, wildlife food and cover, and erosion control. . . [But] Honeysuckle out competes and shades out desirable native woodland species, and can form pure, dense thickets totally void of other vegetation. . . While honeysuckle fruit is abundant and rich in carbohydrates it lacks the high-fat and nutrient-rich content that most of our native plants provide migrating birds. Wherever invasive honeysuckle shrubs displace our native forest species there is a huge potential impact on these migrating bird populations due to the reduction in availability of native food sources.  https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/F-68 

   Soon after we were adopted by these woods, the missing native trees along with our birds asked me to take care of a thicket. While doing this has produced buckets of sweat, effects of poison ivy, ticks, etc., it’s also brought the joy of stewardship and thus the presence of the Divine. Tending these woods and being tended by them: that’s a divine harmony. In my view, it’s allowed one of the “very special human doorways to true religious understanding…and finally as God’s true earthly ‘stand-ins’ or ‘Stewards...’” The passage comes from James Winston Morris’ forthcoming book, Openings:

"First, and most importantly, it is human Hearts (the Qur’anic qalb al-insān) that are the locus of true spiritual ‘Knowing’ (‘ilm) and of our awareness of God and Truth: that is, it is not simply our mind or intellect or passion. Hence the decisive practical importance, throughout the Nahj al-Balāgha, of Ali’s constant stress on the purification of our hearts, through inner surrender to the divine Will (taslīm), as the underlying spiritual purpose of the many divine commandments. Divine, inspired ‘Knowing,’ however it is outwardly acquired, can only be perceived as such by the Heart that has been ‘polished,’ emptied of this world’s distractions and attachments, and thereby opened up to the full significance and reality of the divine Word—and to the further rights and obligations (another dimension of the Arabic al-Haqq) flowing from that opening. 
     Second, the practically indispensable key to this human potential for religious Knowing is the real existence and efforts of a limited number of divinely guided individuals—again, not of particular books, rituals, doctrines or worldly institutions, none of which are even mentioned in this intimate, highly personal lesson. Ali refers here to those very special human doorways to true religious understanding by several profoundly significant Qur’anic expressions: the ‘divine Knowers’; the ‘Friends of God’ (awliyā’ Allāh); God’s ‘Proofs’ or ‘Clear Signs’ on Earth (hujja, bayyina); God’s ‘True Servants’ (‘ibād Allāh); and finally as God’s true earthly ‘stand-ins’ or ‘Stewards’ (khalīfat Allāh).” [reference to Qur’an 6:165]

   While Morris is not explicitly talking about tending woodlands, I find very helpful his elaboration of stewardship in the context of searching for the heart-space that connects the human with the divine. What a blessing it is to feel the peace, beauty, and harmony in mature woodlands.

“Pileated Woodpecker…a keystone species in mature and old forest”

Divine Intoxication

Our Tavern of Woods, Jan 17, 2018

In comic-strip pith, “Word” signals “That’s it!” as in “Truth!” But in real life, words only approximate and often miss the mark, frequently crafted with intention to deceive, witnessed poignantly in the discipline of rhetoric. Her cousin, Religion, focuses on guiding discernment into truth, plumbing the eternal word becoming flesh, tuning the human voice toward resonance with its Source. Both rhetoric and religion testify that not all, not even most, scratching on surfaces  approaches the sanctity of “Word.” And yet this writing and reading, this employment of words sometimes corrects a false step, sometimes allows a a scent or taste of the water of life, the "mystical intoxication."

   Concerning taste, this preoccupation with “word” came about, perhaps, due to the trouble stirred up by Hafiz choosing to feature “tavern” when “temple” is meant—isn’t it? Franklin Lewis, in his chapter in Hafiz and the Religion of Love (Ed. Leonard Lewisohn), comments:

“Thus the wine tavern becomes the locus—the ruins on the outskirts of town, where the non-Muslims drink clandestinely so as not to offend public morality, the liminal space outside society—while the dawn becomes the poetic moment when divine intervention arrives, allowing wine and relief, or mystical intoxication. [Lewis illustrates with the first line of Ghazal 479] ‘At dawn a call from the wine tavern, wishing good fortune/ It said come back, for you are an old haunter of this court.’” (pp. 274-5)

The next line from the ghazal extends the purpose of Hafiz playing the word “tavern.” In Peter Avery’s translation:

“A draught from us drink like Jamshid, so that of both worlds’ mystery/ The beam of light from the world-seeing cup might inform you.” (p. 580, Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz)

Of course, in the spirit of good mythopoesis, Hafiz wants to shake us, to wake us, in order that we might search out hypocrisy, alert for hidden idols, finding the ones that continue to separate us from the Love of God; that we might come back to the source of inspiration, walking in the mystery of both worlds. 

God invites us every moment to do this, to purify in order to live more cleanly. To help me enter the invitations, as explained earlier, I’m intending a year-long project that connects (A) David George Haskell’s study (The Forest Unseen) of his forest mandela with 

~14 cardinals

(B) the woods that illumine our windows. We’re now on his second entry, the one for January 17. On this date, his woods like ours are filled with snow. We wonder how the snowflake reaches its essential uniqueness, turning through the spirit wind, glistening in the illuminating light.

Haskell’s meditation (pp. 8-11) flows back to Johannes Kepler (1611) who “wrote that snowflakes are showing us the spirit of the earth and God, the ‘formative soul’ that inhabits all being.” Yet Kepler was frustrated in not showing “a material explanation” and still his “musings on the snowflake…contributed to the development of our modern understanding of atoms.” Haskell brings our contemporary X-ray analysis to the design of matter: our woods, water, and us.

“The basic hexagonal shape of snowflakes is elaborated in varied ways as the ice crystal grows, with the temperature and humidity of the air determining the final shape… Other combinations of temperature and humidity cause the growth of hollow prisms, needles, or furrowed plates. As snowflakes fall, the wind tosses them through the air’s innumerable slight variations of temperature and humidity. No two flakes experience exactly the same sequence, and the particularities of these divergent histories are reflected in the uniqueness of the ice crystals that make up each snowflake.” pp. 9-10

As a side note, Kepler has also received recent attention in relation to his role in enlightening dark consciousness evident in witch hunts, including the one involving his own mother.* 

The human defines the authenticity of word as the individual resonates uniquely back into the original promise, the timeless covenant between God and human, the affirmation of sovereignty. Humans also revolve through cultural drafts and shadows that challenge each of us to sound the authentic word that is true to the Source. Thus, again, the purpose of religion. 

        Sufis talk of this walking as the Path of Attraction. But life abounds with attractions, and so many are bewitchments from the impurities picked up in the currents of culture. The true calling is to discern, to follow, and to voice the Word. God is Everywhere. The purification back to the Source leads to and follows from entering more deeply into Beauty, Truth, Love, and the array of qualities endowed uniquely in each individual.

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* Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch, Oxford, 2015.

James A. Conner, Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother. Harper, 2005.

Heartbeat

The gospel for busy people: Love God.

How? Keep the commandments.*

In a world that lives by quick concrete answers, I fear that religion too often gets reduced (semi-consciously, at best) to this simplistic formula: loving God equals following rules, mostly the “Do Nots.” When this reduction happens, the Devil must be gleeful because the spiritual heart turns to stone. The experience of the Divine then remains surface-level, too superficial to overcome the materialistic, “carnal,” self.

     Let’s not be fooled by another simplistic move that flips to “Anything Goes.” No, that’s not the answer either because sacred scriptures does emphasize keeping commandments “for your good”*; and still the call of Love demands so much more. Yes, giving and following orders often provides safety in situations where a wiser one commands the more naive to stay clear of potential dangers such as the street, drug use, and fake-news; but to stay in that controlled zone limits Love’s dimension. Mature love expands freedom, enters paradox, and manifests God-given individualities.

     So, how do we learn to love God in ways that include and extend beyond the follow-rules-religion? I think that an initial step involves recognizing when dogma has dried up. For example, persons who call themselves Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or …) when doing racist, sexist, and other self-centered acts might wake up. Fake religion is not the path to God.

     Keeping to the Path to God demands hard honesty. True love is truth-telling; it’s not Hollywood, not SuperBowl, not status, drugs or money. At the birth of our first child, I knew without doubt that a powerful gift entered my heart. Why would I expect less in my relationship with God? Cold ritual, going to church/temple/mosque does not make the Religion of Love.

     Our spiritual guides try to tell us this over and over. Antonio Machado capsulized Jesus’ teaching: “I love Jesus, who said to us: Heaven and earth will pass away. When heaven and earth have passed away, my word will remain. What was your word, Jesus? Love? Forgiveness? Affection? All your words were one word: Wakeup.” Perhaps to love God, then, is to wake up, to feel gratitude both for the contraction as well as the expansion (but that’s a topic for another time).

     If we wake up and realize that the Love for God is missing, we might notice the dirty house, the veils, the extent of hypocrisy, within and around. Hafiz “considered hypocrisy in the form of the ostentatious display of religious piety to be the worst moral evil” (Lewisohn, p. 174), “the supreme sin” (p. 175).*** Lewisohn also quotes Ansari who “characterizes hypocrisy as shirk or ‘polytheism’” (p. 175) and Khurramshahi who says that Hafiz extended hypocrisy to include “self righteousness, smugness, conceited self-satisfaction, putting on airs, ostentatious displays of ascetic piety, vaunting one’s learning, considering oneself to be holy and sacrosanct, bragging of and setting stock in one’s own acts of pious devotion, superciliousness, mendacity, imposture, deceit, duplicity in one’s relation to God and man, cruel lack of feeling, being without love and wisdom, and so on” (pp. 174-5). Waking up leads to light coming in, feeling the hard realization of distortions, and bowing.

     When something terrible has become commonplace, what is a sacred poet or prophet to do? With Hafiz, I’m reminded of Hosea and his marriage to Gomer, considered “an adulteress, a common harlot, or a temple prostitute.” Gale A. Yee says the text and interpretation possibly call “into question the authority of traditional interpretations, which are embedded in the sexism and misogyny of Western culture, and calls for new ways of thinking about the body, woman, and the sacred.” ****

     To love God cares about that.

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* Deut 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good.” (New JPS version). See also, Jn 14:21 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (English Standard Version)

Qur’an 3:31 “Say, ‘If you love God, follow me, and God will love you and forgive you your sins; for God is Forgiving, Merciful.’" (3:31) See The Study Quran, p. 140, for elaboration of this passage.

** Antonio Machado. Translated by Robert Bly, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, Wesleyan University Press, 1983, p.109.

*** Lewisohn, Leonard. Hafiz and the Religion of Love. 

**** Gale A. Yee. “Gomer: Bible.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gomer-bible

Faces of the Beloved

photo from when Joseph & Leg’cy first partnered up,
circa 2007. Taken & framed by beloved Belqis.

The Religion of Love pretty much says it all, and at the same time leaves one free-falling, ecstatic, as if intoxicated, calling for imagery of taverns, love-making, and (especially for me) horses.* The Persian mystic poets leave me breathless that way. From a random page of Hafiz:

“…From the demonic rival, I take refuge in my own God;/ For the sake of God, that gleaming star might grant some help.//  If your black eye-lash has our blood in its sights,…/ When you set your cheek alight, you burn up the heart of a world…” **

Avery’s footnote to “cheek” states: 

“The “cheek”, izar (also rukh ): Shabistari defines the cheek as the stage on which the Divine Beauty is revealed. The cheek is the jamal, the beauty of God, the vestibule to God’s jallal, His Glory and Power. The cheek is the Divine Essence manifested in its names and qualities.” **

         This wonder-full especially happens when life-experience throbs deep in the heart and calls up in its inimitable, undeniable way: “Truth!” Within each individual, a feeling that eludes the meaning-making of the schooled-mind waits to be owned and known through the heart. It may have to wait a long time, to the end of time? Searching out, forging a good connection with passion deserves high priority. 

         Natural horsemanship requires collection. While driven by passion, my horsemanship demanded many years of riding and groundwork before I could claim to be true the subtle vibrations that my body had long known but could not get through to my conscious knowing because the schooled mind refused to yield. I say “schooled-mind” because Reason must not be devalued. The mind, when cleaned, plays a crucial role in discerning the path. It’s when a person’s thinking (or any other function) presumes to know more than God that it has to be dethroned by surrender. David George Haskell gives a marvelous example of this: “Lichens master the cold months through the paradox of surrender” (The Forest Unseen, p. 4; for elaboration, see These Frosty Woods). ***

         Usually, perhaps optimally, in order to feel heart-resonance fully, the surround space stands still, silent, as if bowed, waiting to be witnessed. Yet in a rushed, distracted world, this deep-bass-voiced “Amen” from a Hallelujah chorus risks never being heard. That’s why I look long into the winter woods, the patient leaves, gold-toned, drawing me further and farther in. 

It’s remembering dreams, both kinds. For me (as in Good Stories), it’s also returning to traditional tales, allowing old ones to come true again, at any moment, as they tell the meaning of otherwise inarticulate experience.

"All the tales of great lovers and the fables of the heroic champions of yore thus become part of the soul’s psychohistory. They pertain to the inner journey of the poet…These are not legends, but living facts of the heart that appear constantly in their verse; they are, as Emily Dickinson says, ‘Bulletins all Day from Immortality’. . . in the Religion of Love such circumstances fill the mystic’s presential awareness. These legends are tangible issues of the present moment that facilitate the lover’s pursuit of Eros, food for his soul that he consumes hoc tempore in the pursuit of knowledge, goodness and beauty, which incite him to excel in the only serious sport: Amor. "  Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, pp. 100-2.****

         When passion marks the pathway, the meaning of “God is love” continues to unfold. Even heartbreaks trace the mystery, perhaps more than the good times. Jesus is alive in any religion that has Hafiz.

"Likewise, the Sufi poets consider the appearance of Jesus as an ever reoccurring event sustaining them in the present, using in this context the metaphor of the Messiah’s breath of inspiration’ (dam-i masih). Hafiz alludes to this in two verses: ‘Love’s physician is compassionate and endowed/ With the breath of Jesus,/ But whom should he assuage/ If you are without pain?’  and ‘To whom may I relate such a subtlety?/ She killed me—my stony-hearted mistress,/ Yet possessed the life-giving breath of Jesus.’ "Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, pp. 101-102. ****

         When I trace passion’s pathway, I re-see my falling in love with horsemanship as it revealed the delicacies of power, more through the body than the mind. Another touch comes in the tender yet ecstatic touch of Beauty that clicks any second in the shutter release of a camera open to the master artist’s palette. The Beloved appears in the faces of whatever lines have been pre-formed in each human’s origin. From Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei’s section “The Primordial Disposition of Man and the Religion of Love”:

"According to the Qur’an, man was created with an ‘original disposition that God instilled within him’ (fitrat Allah ) and formed with a ‘fundamentally immutable God-given nature’ (la-tabdil li-khalqi’illahi , Q30:30). Basing themselves on this evidence from their holy scripture, Persian poets drove this classical theolgical doctrine up several theosophical notches higher, maintaining that man’s nature had been already moulded and framed to develop according to the nature of the divine attributes of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and inclined to follow the ‘Straight Path of Love and Mercy’ (‘ishq, mahabbat, rahmat ) long before birth."  Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, p. 87 ****

         In last night’s dream, I set a herd of horses free but with insufficient preparation for their safe passage to the intended pasture. Perhaps the dream meant to guide me toward providing context around the metaphors of intoxication: the tavern, the love-making, fast horses. My first taste of riding came in cantering narrow woodland trails and ducking branches. It was intoxicating and served to hook me. Without the wild taste it’s unlikely I’d have dedicated myself to a ten-year discipline of riding slow circles in arenas that was necessary for me to develop and to trust “feel.” I don’t recommend riding wild, and I no longer drink alcoholic beverages. Such experiences and images are meant to be contained and translated into the Religion of Love.

"If we approach the transcendental significance of some of these symbols, how the process leading to the sublimation of these metaphors occurred—and thus the raison d’etre sustaining them—is easy to discern. The phrase ‘it is delightful to be mad’, for example, poetically speaking conveys a self-evident sense. Understood spiritually, however, the phrase makes no sense whatsoever unless we understand it to imply a madness above and beyond reason, rather than below reason: the lower, irrational—psychotic—insanity. Likewise, the expression ‘the joys of intoxication’ makes perfect sense to every secular sensibility attuned to wine’s bacchanalian pleasures. But to the philosophical temperament focused on progress in the spiritual life, it makes sense only when it refers to the drunkenness that contemplation of the Beautiful inspires—or, as the Sufis say, the ecstatic rapture that the sight of the beauteous visage of the Cup-bearer (saqi ) rouses in the beholder—stimulating intoxication without any hangover. In the same vein, the joys of freedom extollled by the Sufi poets involve their liberation from the vices of greed, anger, pride and emancipation from the vanity of ambition for honours and high rank…That wanton witness-of-beauty (shahid-i harja’i ) celebrated in Sufi mystical poetry is that icon of supreme loveliness, whose ravishingly attractive countenance is everywhere reflected, both in man and nature alike." Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, p. 92 ****

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* Although I’m not finding it as evident in Lewisohn’s volume on Hafiz, references to horses and riding are abundant in the Persian mystic poets. For example, see Riding from Passion to Compassion.  Also, as I progress into the next chapter in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, “The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Hafiz’s Poetry” by Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, pp. 107-121, I find reference to Ahmad Ghazali: “Love exists first in an unadulterated form which flows to existence from God. Lingering on the border of existence, love waits for the human Spirit so that it can come down to the world. In Ghazali’s metaphor, the Spirit is depicted as the steed of love, which transports love to the earth. Here on earth, love assumes many faces—sometimes it is a sensual love, sometimes love between parent and child, and so on—but ultimately love seeks to return back to its place of origin. In its return journey, love is the steed and spirit is the rider, bringing love to its original abode” (p. 110). 

** Peter Avery, “Poem VI,” p. 27 in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, Archetype, 2007. For a more accessible sampling of Avery’s translations, see Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Peter Avery & John Heath Stubbs, 1957/2003. Also, Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez. Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn. HarperCollins, 2008.

*** David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen, 2012.

**** Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei’s chapter “The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry,” translated by Lewishohn in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, pp. 77-106. The ghazals that are quoted come from Hafiz, Khanlari’s ed., #182 and #59. These ghazals, in complete form, can be found in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Peter Avery, #182 on p. 242 and #59 on p. 96.

These Frosty Woods

Jan 1, 2018 viewed from upstairs study

          For friends who notice the photos I post on Facebook, my love affair with deciduous woodlands will come as no surprise. The view from the upstairs desk mesmerizes me, even taking me from the mystical readings; maybe it’s not a separation but rather a union! These two must be of one spirit. The best pages breathe their origin, the inner fiber of tree; both transmit inspiration.

          My romance with books often gets teased by the spell of Maria Popova’s reviews. About a month ago, she featured David George Haskell’s recent book, Song of Trees. The tease enticed me to chose his earlier book: “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Viking, 2012, https://dghaskell.com/theforestunseen/), winner of the National Academy of Sciences’ Best Book Award for 2013, finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award, winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, runner-up for the 2013 PEN E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award…” 

         The book has 43 short chapters, each based on his observations and musings focused around a spot “of old-growth forest in the hills of Tennessee.” Every few days through the year, Haskell watches this forest mandela that is about a meter across. He connects this to Tibetan mandelas (p. xii). My intention is to read his book throughout 2018 and to ask this reading to inspire my walking in our woods. 

         Haskell’s first entry comes on January 1. He features lichens whose “vibrancy contrasts with the winter-weighed lethargy of the rest of the forest.” He continues:

Supple physiology allows lichens to shine with life when most other creatures are locked down for the winter. Lichens master the cold months through the paradox of surrender.” (p. 2) 

          Our woods, some 600 miles northeast from Haskell’s forest, look pretty locked down on January 1, 2018, still frosted with snow, temperatures below freezing all week, dropping to near zero at night. It is cold. Still I look for lichen, trying not to lock down for winter.

lichen on rocks ?

lichen on tree trunk ?

close up of lichen (?) on rocks 

          Haskell enriches his observation about the lichens’ paradox with an anecdote about a fourth century BCE Chinese Taoist philosopher and then elaborates the biological explanation. He comments on their means of survival:

By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world conquering union. . . the lichen partners have ceased to be individuals, surrendering the possibility of drawing a line between oppressor and oppressed. (p. 3)

hmm...what's this?

Interesting...but sacrifice of individuality? Yikes--but that does sound rather like the Sufi mystics on surrendering the self. 

         While we might celebrate the “winning partnerships,” Haskell keeps us from imagining only unseen rosy hints when he also notes the presence of piracy and exploitation. And yet: “Even piracy is powered by collaboration” (p. 6). 

When you look out (and in), can you see these fascinating happenings?

Next up: “January 17—Kepler’s Gift” pages 8-11. The woods keep calling.