The Secret in Woodlands

“the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds over all the world” (from Merton’s Dancing in the Waters of Life, quoted on p. 23 in Thomas Merton, Writings on Nature: When the Trees Say Nothing, edited by Kathleen Deignan, Sorin Books, 2003).

     I’m absorbed further into Merton’s vision in a morning like today (shown above, looking toward the sunrise amid the woods below our home; and again, just below, viewed over our mailbox, westward into the beyond).  

     In a few moments, I’ll walk among baby chestnut oaks and other white and red oaks, too young to name. I’ll feel within a joy coming up because these sprouts are reclaiming spaces where they’ve been missed, after being crowded out by invasive vines, and worse, by human insensitivity, greed. . .  Their absence marks a terrible, unfortunate alienation from the secret heart.

      A couple of years ago, I talked about this God-given project that had been offered fifteen-years earlier when we moved to this property. Parts of the land could even have hidden Sleeping Beauty’s castle due to the tangled thicket of invasive undergrowth that had gradually taken over after the native forest had been cut. Somehow, even then, I was called into reclamation and began building awareness of how these

semi-conscious engagements with nature sustained me during the time from leaving the family farm for college in 1965 for forty years until the move from D.C. suburbs to our West Virginia 4.5 acre sanctuary. By 2005, my being was pretty desperate for the solace of nature, and my consciousness had awakened enough to push for significant and difficult commitments to the natural world. 

         Our new homeland already featured several organic gardens, but it also presented woodlands that were infested with thickets of invasive plants choking out the native oaks and maples. As we stewarded these grounds, nature more than equivocated by tending our souls.

     Looking back at “Transforming Sanctuary of Nature,” (the blog of Oct 28, 2018), I see how the work of clearing underbrush was complemented by the library on sacred texts. A slow articulation was coming forward toward and into the secret:

Almost certainly, the particular lines from Rumi struck me because of the reading I’d been doing in Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature. As mentioned in the “The World Turning Gold,” Nasr’s text widens the window of nature as it informs the way humans have been cut off from feeling God’s presence in nature. Although I have long sensed my need to commune in the natural world, I’d been veiled from opening my heart to the treasure. Imagine the revelation made increasingly possible when we enter the holy place trusting that it’s “a living creature with soul and intellect.” 

Nicholson’s elaboration in the commentary focuses on attaining knowledge of God (p. 83) and adds “the physical heart has an immaterial soul (jani rubani), which, when purified and illumined by love, develops another heart, viz. the spiritual organ that perceives the Unseen.”

      Kathleen Deignan notes an interesting moment in Thomas Merton’s experience in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky that developed about ten years after he entered there:

“But in 1951 in response to Merton’s request for greater solitude, Abbot Dom James nominated him ‘forester’ which entailed restoring the woodlands that had been stripped a decade earlier. The job radicalized his experience of solitude, no longer perceived as privacy for intellectual pursuits, but an opportunity for embodied engagement with a whole community of wisdom in silent participation in the vitality of living things.” (p. 31)