Eyes of Nature

Nov 19. frosty view just pre-dawn

Well, Duh! There’s a connection between the vision coming through the camera lens (edited with openness for revelations of Beauty) and with the selection of text moving past the eyes, particularly with submissiveness to the heart, and with all bowing to the spirit. 

Why be surprised when reading from sacred writings, from reflections of mystics, that the eyes are directed to light emanating from nature, to the lines that dance, shimmering between still forms.

Sam’ani says it: 

“O dervish, you will not see Him tomorrow until He sees Himself through you. By God the tremendous, if tomorrow you want to see, you must have pure vision. Pure vision is that He sees Himself through you.”...

     “Those who step into the road do not do so for any cause, only for love. . . Expecting compensation for obedient acts is a fatal poison. . . If you were to walk on this road for a thousand years and your obedience was not accepted and then it occurred to your mind that it should have been accepted, you will have been a status-seeker, not a road-seeker. You will not be a realizer in this road until you abandon your status with both the Real and the creatures.” 

(pp. 18, 29, emphasis in original; Ahmad Sam’ani, trans by William Chittick. The Repose of the Spirits: A Sufi Commentary on the Divine Names.)

fallen log fashioned into a viewing station

          Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation for today includes a quotation from Lisa Sharon Harper:

 “Evidence of the presence of the Kingdom of God is thick wherever and whenever people stand on the promise of God that there is more to this world—more to this life—than what we see. There is more than the getting over, getting by, or getting mine. There is more than the brokenness, the destruction, and the despair that threaten to wash over us like the waters of the deep. There is a vision of a world where God cuts through the chaos, where God speaks and there is light. There is a vision where there is protection and where love is binding every relationship together. (p. 205; Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. Cited by Rohr, “Jesus and the Reign of God," Nov 19, 2020. 

November 11, 2020

Winter Promises

Most years the advent of winter has evoked dread. Or, if and when approached in a spirit of surrender, it's inspired sighs, even commitment to long-suffering, a reluctant dedication to further the very important virtue of patience, to carry the hope of spring-coming. Yet often the chill in the air makes breathing out in those steam puffs. Perhaps they’re little smoke-signals asking permission to join the bears—how about hibernating until the world turns alive again? 

      But then this week late autumn’s falling, mostly fallen, leaves are sprinkling wonder. Today, as shown above, the woods’ opening increased witness of dawn’s beauty. And turning to the opposite western sky, a double rainbow arched to land both north and south, even before the rains arrive.

Yesterday the sun-lit woods, more bared to essence, showed a redbud reduced to a few leaves, looking like heart-shaped jewels were tracing out the bowing limbs in lines as graceful as ballerinas, almost weightless, defying gravity. Alongside it a young maple echoed the dance, yellow light against the dimmed exuberance of spring, the background of fallen leaves turning bronze and disappearing as if the superficial gives way, releasing the eternal.

      Instead of dreading winter, this year there’s an exciting sense of winter tracks wanting to be followed, the ones leading further into the “True Self.” 

Recent reading of Richard Rohr has prepared the way to welcome the closed-in season because it’s a time especially fitting for contemplation. In his book on the second half of life, Rohr explains how summer’s “loyal soldier” builds the container for a person’s winter work and how the soldier has to be thanked and dismissed.

“Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures. His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the ‘still, small voice’ of God (I Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.

The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. He does not even understand it. He has not been there. He can help you ‘get through hell,’ with the early decisions that demand black-and-white thinking; but then you have to say good-bye when you move into the subtlety of midlife and later life. . .

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of ‘common sense,’ of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful ‘Beatrice.’ The true faith journey only begins at this point…we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. (pp. 46, 48. Falling Upward; emphasis in original)

The passage invites return and deeper engagement in the resources such as the Mystical Languages of Unsaying  and to the Beloved, the stories of Layla… and forward into The Cloud of Unknowing and others.  Also, Rohr points particularly to Thomas Merton for guidance, especially to his New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also reveals tracks on the pathway including those of St. John of the Cross and in his translation/versions of portions of Chuang Tzu. In his introduction, Merton writes: 

“The key to Chuang Tzu’s thought is the complementarity of opposites, and this can be seen only when one grasps the central ‘pivot’ of Tao which passes squarely through both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’ (p. 30). A sample appropriate to the forced inactivity of winter:

“… No one seems to know

how useful it is to be useless.”

The Way of Chuang Tzu, p. 59

These guides join others who teach and inspire in the way to the Beloved, the pathway home. This winter promises opportunity to re-trace ground turned years before, intent on deeper reflection. For example, these lines noted in last year’s autumn are calling:

“When the servant comes to know himself, thereby knowing God, he does not know God in Himself. Rather, he knows Him as his own Lord. This is the God who discloses Himself to the soul, and the self-disclosure is different from that experienced by any other soul. The God that I come to know through knowing myself is the God of my own belief, the water which has assumed the color of my cup.” William Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, p. 344 (cited in Light Enough, Sept 24, 2019). 

Faith: Light Seen by Heart

“… faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” 

 Thomas Merton is simply a treasure, speaking profoundly to timeless questions and now particularly into the immediate moment with our nation endangered by hatred. This season, the next few days especially, cry for compassion toward persons caught, unconsciously or not, in the terrible web of hate. Merton points out how our perception of haters also usually reflects darkness in the beholder. 

 “It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 112). 

     Cleaning the mirror and “seeing into the mystery at the heart of life," then, marks an essential work of a person who hopes to pray, to contemplate, to draw nearer to the Divine. What a time this is! 

      I was drawn to his New Seeds of Contemplation because Richard Rohr and others reference it as a primary text in discerning the “False Self” and the “True Self.” The book has so many gems. Today I’m touched by his teaching on the nature of faith. Faith needed, perhaps most of all, in a darkened time. 

“Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God’s own light and truth… But, above all, faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” (pp. 128, 130, New Seeds of Contemplation). 

     It’s a good season to listen for, to look for, and to soak up the special light, so manifest in the yellows of leaves, in the spaces created by fallen leaves, by the break in clouds and in the glistening given by stormy skies.

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)

Com-posing Comm-Union

 

8:05:52AM, October 14, 2020

     Imagine being drawn by the invitation of Truth into the composing of beauty in nature. It’s an open doorway any moment to play with and into recognition from the inner eye that joys as the form comes into focus, into being, the liminal reality that evinces invisible lines of universal connection, that lifts off the physical plane into the radiance of pure light. This participation in the Divine nurtures the soul; without this devotion, without dedicating creative belief and love, the inner spirit languishes.This ever-present Eternity awaits even when veiled by impurities ashen over the heart.

     About the time of my conception, three-quarters of a century ago, Aldous Huxley called it

“… the one divine Reality substantial to the material world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit” (The Perennial Philosophy, p. viii).

Beauty and Brokenness

At least twice I noticed these dried-up flowers, planned to take them out, and forgot. Old age, memory slip? Or a subtle gift? Getting old pushes further into beauty, loving 

“in a certain sense, between all living things. Life is attracted to life. Beauty is attracted to both beauty and brokenness—which is a good description of all that lives./ Life is fragmented and finite and yet part of a larger and attractive whole. We long to be with this wholeness” (Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, p. 33). 

This third time noticing the flowers, not just dried-up, but broken-beauty breaks through shuttered sight. Having read the passage and taken it in, I'm taken out, camera in hand, as an opening allows a certain further sense, a searching, even longing, toward the sense of beautiful brokenness, a window for wholeness--

Transformation of Consciousness

“…now it is just a matter of time till false power falls apart.” As I’m reading the final chapters of Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, the possibility of transformed consciousness, like the beauty of butterflies emergent from the dark cocoon, offers a ray of hope in this time darkened by blind hate, these dark nights when brothers and sisters are veiled by superficial differences from celebrating our connection, from living each moment knowing the essence that unites all of God’s creation. If only Love were to break through. Rohr tells of the transformation beyond the blinders of selfishness, fear, and oppression.

“I have witnessed much of this evolution of consciousness in my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of the shadow side of things. This is the gradual ‘second coming of Christ.’ Our present highly partisan politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm.” (p. 198)

Transformation may be, perhaps always is, hard. Scary. The demanding tone comes through the spiritual teaching: “Die before you die.” 

The creature that only knew caterpillar crawling unbelievably floats on angel wings. 

Old consciousness has to surrender to knowings that had been impossible. Apparent opposites can be contained. “The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness” (Rohr, p. 148). 

Almost impossible, and it would be if one had to do it alone. But the good news is that the Way is Love and Love is never alone. This transformed consciousness unites with the Creator in the creation. The Way demands that we love, that we love more deeply. Passion.

“In the practical order of life, if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth. . . They are [God’s] primary tools for human transformation.” (p. 207)