The Sanctuary of Nature

Autumn flowers, September 23, 2018

Recently I’ve been drawn to reading books on beauty and on art, especially as connected with spirituality, e.g., Frithjof Schuon’s Art from the Sacred to the Profane East and West. The book collects excerpts from a dozen of Schuon’s works, and it has been lavishly illustrated with cross-cultural images from visual art, sculpture, dance, apparel, and architecture. Art from the Sacred has been particularly helpful to me because it articulates key reasons why I do what I do, especially involving the extensive time spent in tending gardens and woods as well as the devotion given to photography that focuses on these grounds. Schuon says it’s “the role of virgin nature” to remind us of where our center lies. As quoted in my previous blog, he says that “the mystery of artistic creation” brings a person back “to the proximity of his own Divine Essence” (p. 30). 

     From the days we first began living in our West Virginia home with its four acres of woodlands & gardens, when walking in the woods we were drawn to (if not driven to) removing invasive vines and bushes that were crowding out the native oaks and maples. It was as if some instinct of stewardship pushed for closer movement toward that essential nature—both ours and the woodlands. Schuon helps explain this drive with the assertion that, like artistic creation, virgin nature also offers communion with our “own Divine Essence.” 

     Schuon further specifies an important quality of nature: “but in fact its language is only grasped where it assumes traditionally the function of a sanctuary” (p. 132). A sanctuary! That’s why this labor of love in tending the woods and the gardens feels so compelling, why the work feels sacred, and why the time spend with it feeds the soul. 

     Although Schuon does not give special attention to photography as a visual art, I believe it fits within his treatment of sacred art. He says, “the two perspectives—sacred art and virgin nature—are not mutually exclusive, as is shown notably by Zen Buddhism; this proves that neither can altogether replace the other.” For me, tending the woods has this sacred reciprocal dynamic with making artistic representations involving nature using the camera. As often happens, I already knew that on some level, and yet having it elaborated and articulated so well by Schuon gives delicious confirmation and reassurance.

A Moment of Autumn

“For God, His creature reflects an exteriorized aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man so to speak fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests itself in the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself, and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own Divine Essence.” F. Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane East and West, p. 30.

Breaking Beauty

I’m setting up for a photo on the back porch that will show fall harvest, holding the Diné pottery from Monument Valley that will highlight the display, when a squash rolls from the bench and I move to stop its fall. Although I feel no impact, the pot shatters—as if it had long been holding its breath, anxious to break apart. I can only cry out. It’s another reach into the great Why? that never answers more than to demand further movement into the Mystery.

     I’m reminded of the reading last night from Attar’s Manṭiq al-ṭayr  (Conference of the Birds), about the sigh that goes up as a human's special offering to God. Preparing for the journey, one traveller asks about taking along a gift for the Presence, and the guide advises the seeker to take “that which is not found there. . . the burning soul and agony of the heart. . . If out of a spasm of yearning a single sigh is fetched, it carries the smell of a burnt heart to that Court” (Avery, Speech of the Birds, lines 3163-3167). The Darbandi/Davis translation has “If one sigh rises from the inmost soul, that man is saved, and has attained our goal” (Conference of the Birds, p. 177).

     We are after all but vessels waiting to dissolve; and anxious to voice our separation from the Divine, a shudder waits trembling just aside every breath. S.H. Nasr includes in the section on African Religions:

“As for the Bambara, ‘The heart of the esoteric teaching consists of the mysteries surrounding the Word. All of the universe is generated by the primal (and still continuing) vibrations that make up the Word. . .’  When these vibrations double back on themselves in thought, consciousness is established. . . ‘Yo is the silent word that ‘speaks’ all that we know and can detect in the world.’ . . . Beyond the noise of the world lies that silence or Yo, which is also the harmony and order underlying all outer discord, while man himself is the image of Yo and contains this primordial harmony and order within himself.” (Religion and the Order of Nature, p. 36)

     Beauty, of the sacred direction, flows toward the Creator. Schuon says it’s expressed in the vibration of living.

“Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, fundamentally belongs to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being. Thus, one must live the experience of beauty so as to draw from it a lasting, not ephemeral, element, hence realizing in oneself an opening towards the immutable Beauty, rather than plunging oneself into the current of things; it is a question of viewing the world, and living in it, in a manner that is sacred and not profane; or sacralizing and not profanating.” (F. Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane East and West, p. 23)

The closing prayer from the Navajo Way Blessing Ceremony tells of Walking in Beauty. I see the dance of yellowed leaves falling, through a mirror, to the Source.

Living with Bewilderment

The congregation of woodland sunflowers determined to stand at our derelict picnic table, abandoned mostly due to the persistent love of gnats for that moisty space, slightly downhill from our higher-ground backporch refuge. 

a wider view 

Does good stewardship include abandonment?

& more toward the inner

I like looking, yet not sitting over-close, to the lichened slats; the admittance of decay intertwined with beauty emits musty whiffs of reassurance. Also, having never reveled in parties much larger than four, this worship of near silence more nearly bows. The whispers I want cross from the other world.

     In Chapter 4, “Ibn ‘Arabi’s Garden among the Flames: The Heart Receptive of Every Form,” Michael Sells moves into the Ringstone of Noah and especially considers “mystic perplexity or bewilderment (hayra).” He translates Ibn “Arabi into blank verse (pp. 101-2, Mystical Languages of Unsaying), in this passage beginning with the prayer “Lord, increase me in bewilderment in you” as a paired companion/contrast with the more comfortable “Lord, increase me in knowledge”:

     For the bewildered one has a round [dawr]

     and a circular motion around the qutb [the pole or axis of reality]

     which he never leaves

     But the master of the long path 

     tends away from what he aims for

     seeking what he is already in

     A master of fantasies which are his goal

     He has a ‘from’ and a ‘to’

     and what is between them

     But the master of the circular movement

     has no starting point

     that ‘from’ should take him over

     and no goal

     that he should be ruled by ‘to’

     He has the more complete existence

     And is given the totality of the words and wisdoms.

Sells brings this together in a note ending with “The highest understanding is the deepest awareness of mystery” (p. 257). A few lines later (p. 104), another passage focuses the way of the seeker:

     “… in every breath, in every time, in every condition

     he is the image of what that breath, time, or condition requires”

Of Butterflies and Polishing Mirrors

A butterfly, this one or one much like it, lit on the corner of the opened book resting on my knee, page 66. The butterfly crawled out of sight, down onto my knee, then back up onto the page, and soon enough flitted off. The butterfly: symbol of transformation, of psyche, beauty and the transitory life. A reminder, perhaps, to take this moment to open the wings of awareness. 

     Of course, we need not read anything into this visitation, but it might be worth looking again at the page. To wonder. I would anyway because sticky tabs were already marking passages in these opening pages of Chapter 3, “Ibn ‘Arabi’s Polished Mirror: Identity Shift and Meaning Event,” in Michael Sells’ Mystical Languages of Unsaying.

     The particular pink sticky tab near where the butterfly lit marked phrases concerned with “the issue of the divine image.” What might we make of the image involved in creation? Not considered on Sells' page but coming to my mind are relevant Biblical passages beginning with Genesis 1:26-27.    Passages also might include Eph 4:24 (“and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness”), II Cor 4:4 (“The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”), and many others. Since in this chapter Sells focuses on Ibn “Arabi, he works from the saying of Muhammad “Allah created Adam in his sura [image, form]” (p. 65).

      Sells develops the issue by pointing out that theologians ask: “How could a transcendent, unbound, absolutely unified deity have an image or form?” Did God create Adam “as a fully developed human, rather than having him develop through various embryonic and postembryonic stages of development” (p. 65)? Instead of focusing the meaning of “image” on either the deity or the human, on page 66, Sells pushes for something beyond:

“the issue of the divine image… is at the moment of mystical union, symbolized by the polished mirror … His/his image is constituted. The constitution of this image occurs within the heart of ‘the complete human’ (al-insan al-kamil).”

These passages invite me to wonder about ways I can participate with greater frequency and depth in the divine inheritance. How can I more fully realize the Presence? That’s why my desktop gets littered with books on mysticism, the holy, beauty, as well as teaching stories (e.g., Rumi’s “Mathnawi” & Attar) and poetry. It’s also the reason for my dedication to horsemanship and stewardship of these woods and gardens. 

     Of course, it’s easy to get distracted, distanced from the divine, by books and in words. Sells prefaces his close textual study in Chapter 3 with the reminder that “the absolute unity” is “beyond the dualistic structures of language and thought, beyond all relation” (p. 64). And yet our God-given languaging can participate in the mystical dance, flowing into it and with it. It’s a bit like the moments in riding when, after years of study and work, I finally find the awe of not-knowing, a kind of aporia, about whether it’s the horse or me that's transitioning. It is the time to breathe as long as possible in the “ahh.” Be watchful for the flow, for the time of the butterfly. Perhaps in some form this is always present and yet it's so easy to rush past without even noticing.