Fire

Civilization and its institutions of culture guide fire, at their best, channeling wisely our human passions, maturely directing these forces into constructive production, or at a minimum into non-destructive venting. We dare not attempt to extinguish passion. Without fire, the inner and outer worlds die due to lack of heat and light. Religion, education, and the arts should serve the function of tending fire. When these institutions fail to provide sufficient guidance, humanity and our environment burn up or freeze.

Last night, we viewed a 2017 PBS program on Yosemite.  Even three years ago, climate change was shown to threaten this incredible ecosystem. The warning emphasized rising temperature, drought, and the risk of excessive wildfire, but the program also noted the necessity of fire in the life cycle of the giant sequoias (e.g., to release the seeds from the cone and to open space for seedlings to get sunlight). Of course, without water the entire natural wonderland is doomed. Overheating of the environment threatens the imminence of this catastrophe. Fire, water, earth, and air are all needed in proper balancing.

  A similar threat to the natural world can be seen in the human ecosystem with the reduction of impulse control. Persons in positions of leadership in politics and in the media fail to exercise sufficient reflection on words prior to making them public. Irresponsible mediation results in fake news, distortion (intended or not), and divisions that prompt violence and harm especially toward vulnerable sub-populations. Of course, as voters and consumers we fuel the wildfire when we are not turning our passion into the force of love, when we allow hostile emotions to reside within our hearts, even in those impulses to feel the other as a fool.

A civilized society channels fire into constructive work as well as re-creational activity. For example, competitive sports contribute a vital venue for guiding youth into responsible self-management of power, learning to direct combustive energy that is capable of driving achievement; but violence from players and addictive engagement from the culture prove the failure from coaching and from the wider arena of fans, parents, and sponsors. Each person needs an outlet for passionate engagement that creates and nurtures.

The coronavirus pandemic relates to the overheating. The consequent stoppage of “March Madness” (in the broad sense extending way beyond basketball) offers an opportunity for reflection and reform. Time and space have now been set to ask important questions: 

• What is most essential? 
• How do we live into the depths of love? 
• How can we individually and collectively dedicate ourselves to attending the highest values, including our capacity for tending the human spirit tuned to the divine inheritance?

“And now

for other news…” 

Wednesday, March 18. 

Out here in West Virginia, signs of spring look to be a couple of weeks ahead of the past few years. Bloodroot and forsythia blooms already are bringing their early cheer. 

          Looking back two years these were opening further on into April

Forsythia in sunset, April 1, 2019

Bloodroot in full bloom, April 12, 2018

         We can also anticipate sooner than usual some other markers of special interest. These include the first migrants, especially the towhee, brown thrasher, and hummingbird. 

April 30, 2018

May 1, 2018

 In recent years, it’s been May Day when we’ve welcomed their arrivals, but perhaps for 2020 the red-flowered feeders should be in place by mid-April.

          And that coincides pretty closely with the time to start bringing in the sunflower-seed feeders each night so that the morning doesn’t show them splashed onto the grounds…

special visitor 2019

Continuous Creation

The beauty of dawn models the presence shown in each moment of creation as the evanescent, uncapturable essence spins past too quickly to catch. This morning the luscious red tones first glimpsed had already turned orange -gold in the brief time it took to find and focus the camera—and in the thirty seconds needed to turn the Scene dial to “sunrise,” the spectrum shifted into purple-blues. This might be frustrating but perhaps instead can be tuned to reassurance. As we used to say about the “winter” weather in West Texas: just wait, it’ll change soon enough.

     When I searched my recent documents for “continuous creation,” several treasures showed up. A frequent source on God’s revelation through Nature is Ibn al-Arabi. From William Chittick’s rich commentary:

“The cosmos, made upon God’s form, is His unveiling, and He never repeats the manner in which He shows His Face, for He is infinite and unconstricted. The Divine Vastness forbids repetition. The evanescent and changing nature of existence, or the cosmos as ever-renewed creation and never-repeated divine self-disclosure, is evoked by one of Ibn al’Arabi’s best-known names for the substance of the universe, the ‘Breath of the All-merciful’ (nafas al-rahman).” (p. 19, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination)

     Another reference to Ibn al-Arabi comes from an article by Ralph Austin on a poem of al-Arabi, one evoked by the death of a daughter of his. Line 3 of the poem is translated: “Bound to this moment we are in, caught between the yesterday that has gone and the tomorrow that is yet to come.” Austin comments on this line:

"Again, the sense in Ibn 'Arabi's thought of man's situation – man's being in between two enormous realities: the reality of creation and the reality of eternal essence. As a Sufi master once said, "The past is irretrievable – the future infinitely precious". Here is another state familiar to the Sufis of al-hayrah or perplexity, confusion – being in between two realities, being in a state where one doesn't know where one belongs, where to turn. Ibn 'Arabi is very conscious, in relation to the death of his daughter, of time – the way time cuts us down, the way time changes states, the way time often renders our hopes and ideals to nothing – he is addressing the pressure of the moment. Another Sufi idea suggested here is that of being the person of the moment, Ibn waqtihi. Implicit in this consideration of yesterday and tomorrow is the notion that the present moment is the only real time. The past is gone, the future is not yet here so if we don't enjoy or make full use of the present, then yesterday we will never have again and tomorrow perhaps we won't be here. This is the perplexity of time which is brought home to him by the death of his daughter." (Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society, Vol. VII, 1988.)

     And, while the references could go on and on, here’s one more. From my notes on Lewisohn’s Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, there are wonderful passages from the chapter by Leili Anvar’s “The Radiance of Epiphany: The Vision of Beauty and Love in Hafiz’s Poem of Pre-Eternity.”

"Utter perplexity is part of the pleasure when reading a Persian ghazal in general, and a ghazal by Hafiz in particular. The apparent disparity of the distiches enhances this feeling of a kind of nuclear aesthetics that lacks unity, giving the deceptive impression that these lines are but ‘orient pearls at random strung.’ [quoting A.J. Arberry] And yet there is unity, but in a very oblique way. In the same way as the primordial vision of beauty and the all-encompassing experience of love constitute the founding metaphysical principles of creation and the secret of the unity of being, aesthetically the same structure presides over the design of the ghazal: it seems complicated to the extreme, upside down, discombobulated, even chaotic like the visible world of multiplicity, but the underlying unifying thread to the paradoxical reality of love and beauty is always there." (p. 133)

The Far, the Near & All That’s Between

Near Snake Mountain Range, Nevada, Feb 17

While traveling across the states, a fine companionship came in reading Mingled Waters. An early section tells of “Maya” and its many faces: nature, multiplicity/union, love/desire, and magic.

“Maya is Magic that makes something seem other than it is…Maya is only the means; devotion, gnosis and union are the end… there is hope, as the Bhagavad Gita announces: ‘Composed of Nature’s qualities, My magic is hard to escape; but those who seek refuge in Me cross over this magic.’” (Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, Mingled Waters: Sufism and the Mystical Unity of Religions, pp. 25-27).

        In our journey, we crossed over rivers—Potomac, Ohio, Wabash, Mississippi, Missouri, Gunnison, Colorado, Snake, Columbia, Yakima—and traversed mountain passes—Monarch, Snoqualmie, and many without name. We were breathless in the awe of snowpeaked mountain ranges and in wonder at the rugged yet delicate hues in high desert and canyonland.

Yakima River, WA, Feb 19

Eagle in close-up from tree top in Yakima River photo

   It’s wonderful to imagine the crossing-overs that compose life as the wellspring of moving further in knowing God.

San Rafael Swell, UT, Feb 17