Musings

The Original Fascination

In a rented car, I drove into the country to visit South Side School.  I walked out on the grass behind the one-story brick building.  In the fifth grade, I gazed out the windows of the classroom at that field, and at the woods and rolling farmland behind it, and daydreamed about the world beyond. 

A few days ago, I drove across Pennsylvania for a short visit to the town where I spent most of my childhood - Columbiana, Ohio, population 6,000.  It looks much the same as it did when our family moved from there to California in 1966, and as it did when last I visited 30 years ago.  I had dinner with my best pal's mom and sister: the kids in our two families grew up together.  I swapped stories with the scoutmaster of my Boy Scout troop, thanking him for his strongly positive influence in my life.  He was a major inspiration for my love of the outdoors.

I walked all over the town, which didn't take long.  It looked so much smaller than it did when I was a child!  I walked down the abandoned rail line to the woods where we built forts and caught minnows in the stream.  I wandered around the spacious, lovely Harvey Firestone Park, where we fished for little bluegills from the pond and tossed them back in the water.  I visited the Presbyterian church where I asked more questions of the Sunday School teachers than they could answer.  I savored the town's serenity, and felt gratitude for having been blessed with a happy childhood in such idyllic surroundings. 

During recess at South Side School, often my best buddy and I would go out to the edge of the field by the woods.  We were in the first batch of kids to attend the brand-new school.  There were still piles of dirt remaining from the construction, perfect spots for rock-hounding.

The town of Columbiana is located on the terminal moraine, the line across the Midwest where the glaciers stopped flowing south from Canada during the last Ice Age.  The melting glaciers dropped a jumble of Canadian rocks on the landscape, without any other geological rhyme or reason.   My best friend and I collected fossils, rocks and minerals we found around the town.  In those days, my career goal was to become a geologist.

One day, at the edge of the school yard by the woods, I found a strange little rock that looked like a hornet's nest.  A mail-carrier in town, a serious rock-collector who helped me earn my geology merit badge for Boy Scouts, later identified it.  It was the fossilized calyx of a crinoid, a flower-like animal that attached itself to the sea-bed like an urchin.  In the palm of my hand, in that school yard, I was thrilled to hold the remains of a creature that lived perhaps half a billion years ago.

On my visit to my hometown, I had a powerful urge to go back to the spot where I found that fossil, to see if I could find another.  At the edge of the school yard, right by the woods, were freshly-dumped piles of dirt and rocks.  I pawed through them to see what I could find.  After half an hour of poking and pulling, I discovered a rock with some indentations it it.  It was covered with tiny, delicate impressions of ancient sea-shells.  I held it in the palm of my hand and put on my reading glasses.  As I studied it in a sunny spot in the woods, I felt the rush of my original fascination. 

The fossils and rocks of Columbiana thrust me into the grander context of space and time that surrounded my youthful, small-town existence.  They drew my imagination beyond the circumscribed horizons that my eyes could see in that relatively flat landscape.  Looking at them with my mind's eye, I sensed the long sweep of natural history from the Pre-Cambrian to the Post-Holocene eras.  Contemplating them, I got a glimpse of the divine point of view: a hint of a perspective beyond my own.  Those fossils filled me with holy awe.

As I stood there a few days ago, I felt that awe once more.  Having returned to where I began, I felt the pieces of my life being drawn together.  The original fascination remained, interpreted by the intervening strata in the story of my life.  My trajectory shifted from geology to theology as I grew up.  But returning to that school yard, the two came together.   Perhaps now I should call myself a geologian - a term coined for himself by the late Thomas Berry, a writer on the spirituality of nature.

 

The town of Columbiana was a bright window into my past, helping me to make sense of my present.  The fossils of Columbiana were windows into a past and future far beyond my own.  They awakened me to my brief and small place in space and time.  I left that little town to wander the wide world of my childhood daydreams.  But as I stood by the woods with a fossil in my hand, I realized that in the scale of geological time, my life is hardly bigger than it was when I was in the fifth grade in that little Midwestern town.  It is through our hearts, burning with sacred awe, that we are able to reach beyond the horizon.

Wider Love

If you feel like your love is forever, and you memorialize that sentiment by carving a heart with the names of your lover and yourself on the trunk of a beech tree, keep in mind that forty years later, your inscription is going to look different.  Not unlike the bodies of you and your lover, your marking will spread horizontally more than vertically as the tree matures. 

Yours will be a wider love.

So I mused as I gazed at a spread-out heart, dated 1974, carved on a beech tree.  I noticed it, and other carved-up trees, while hiking along Ridley Creek in the rolling green countryside east of Philadelphia today.  Beech trees attract this abuse from humans because of their smooth bark.  Surely there are better ways to make love last.

But as I walked along, I meditated on wider love.  I thought about the love between my wife and myself, and how it has blessed family and friends and even people we hardly know.  We didn't plan for it to spread, but love isn't something that two people can keep entirely to themselves.  I've witnessed this reality at so many of the weddings I have officiated over the years. 

I thought also of the church to which I belong, Mt Hollywood Congregational in Los Angeles. Everyone who comes to our little church brings some love with them.  But the church's love is wider than the sum of its parts.  It spills over and touches anyone who comes near.  I felt it right away when I visited this church for the first time, four years ago.  Roberta and I had just moved to Los Angeles, far away from most of our family and friends.  I walked into the sanctuary, sat down, and within a half-hour I was weeping with joy.  I felt like I'd come home.  I was surrounded by a love wider than any of the loves within it.  A love bigger than that shared by any two or three folks in the congregation. 

Wider love leads us to care even for people we've never met, and never will meet.  It leads us to shape economic and political systems that serve everybody.  It's love gone public. It's love that's ungated and unalarmed.  It's love that won't be contained and controlled.

As the beech trees grow, the hearts carved in them become more spacious with the years.  So may our love for each other spread in ways we never dreamed...

 

Am I Here?

"Am I here?" I asked myself as I walked down the mountain yesterday.

It's a question I ask myself often when I go on hikes. It's a vital part of my spiritual practice. If I don't ask, very often my thoughts about the past and the future race ahead of me faster than my footsteps. I am flung from one thought or emotion to another, totally absorbed in each one. This isn't a bad thing, but if it is the only thing my mind is doing, life itself will pass me by. "Am I here?" Paying attention to what is inside and outside of me? Really noticing the sounds of the birds, really savoring the sight of the mountain looming above? Really noticing what's going on in my mind?

So I sat down next to the trail on a patch of grass and did an inventory of my experiences in the moment. What did I see, smell, and hear? What urges did I feel inside? What scenarios were playing out in my head? Within me I noticed a strong desire, an almost painful longing, to be present, to be fully aware of the beauty of this redwood forest through which I had been walking. I watched that longing. I let it be. I stopped grasping for a way to be spiritually present. Then my soul was opened to the presence for which I had longed.

And in that moment an insight flashed. It's the perennial wisdom of the saints of the world's religions. It's nothing new. But it manifested anew to me as I sat by the trail. The bright light-green needles freshly emerging from the older, darker needles hanging from the branches of the redwood trees - these were experiences I was having. The whipping of stalks of drying grass in the wind - these were experiences. My thoughts about yesterday and tomorrow were experiences. The world around me and the world within me were of the same substance. My thoughts were as natural as the flowers and the bees. The butterfly that silently crossed my visual field was an experience I was having. And it was having its own experience of me. The distinction I usually make between my mind and the outside world fell away.

Then I was taken deeper. I saw that my experience was itself an experience. The way I saw things within and outside of me was but one way to encounter the world. The butterfly had its way. The birds each had theirs. Then I felt awe in the presence of the cosmic Experience who experiences me and butterflies, birds, and sighing air. This Presence brought all together in one great communion.

Then I had another experience: the sudden awareness that I needed to keep hiking down to my car. I realized it was time to drive to meet a friend for lunch. Could I stay in the Presence after I got in the car? Would the insight stay bright in my soul? Would I be there, wherever I was - hiking, driving, or talking with a friend?

Am I here... now?

Selfless Service

 You know the difference.

 

You go to a clothing store and visit the shoe department.  The sales person greets you warmly and asks how she can help you.  She brings you the shoes you want to try on, patiently shuttling between your seat and the back storage room as you go through several pairs, none of which is quite right.  Gently she asks if you have any special needs or preferences.  You are torn between shoes that are comfy and shoes that are attractive, not yet finding a balance between the two.   “Take your time, try on all you like,” she says, making suggestions about shoes to check out, but without being adamant or pushy.  Finally you find a pair that might work.  “What do you like about them?” she asks.  You answer, and decide to buy them.  With warm smiles and thanks to each other after she rings up the purchase, you leave with your new shoes to go upstairs to the clothing racks.

 

There you are inspecting pairs of pants when a sales person approaches you and hustles you over to a different rack.  He pulls out a pair of pants and extols their virtues and price and urges you to try them on.  Talking fast, he leads you to yet another rack and pulls out another pair, which he says are also perfect for you.  He rushes you over to the fitting rooms and ushers you into one of them.  The pants look okay, but you feel like you have not been given the time and space to browse at more options.  

 

Sometimes people think they are being of service, but they are so lost in their own presumptions about you, and what they think you need, that they lose sight of your otherness.  They project their own desires and values onto the people they aim to help, and as a result, they disappoint or disempower them.  

 

But when someone really comprehends that you are someone else, and humbly seeks to know your otherness, this “selfless” attitude can enable them to be especially helpful, both practically and spiritually.

 

One path to selflessness is to read and write poetry.

 

A poem is a receipt to God, or the universe, for a precious experience.  The experience comes as a gift, and the poem is the grateful response.  It is inspired by something or someone other.   It points to a reality in the other that is beyond the poet’s full grasp.  The poet gives the poem to an other, whether it is a reader or to the heart of the cosmos.  Through the poem, the reader is drawn out of the ego and into the experience of the gift and the giver.

 

Among my favorite poets is Antonio Machado, who wrote in the early 20^th century, and is very beloved still in his homeland of Spain.  His “proverbs”, such as these, are receipts for his experience of the nature of poetry itself:

 

It is not the fundamental “I” that the poet seeks, but the essential “you”.

 

The eye you see is not an eye because you see it.

It is an eye because it sees you.

 Poetry is an exercise in honoring the deep otherness of everything and everybody.  It gets me out of the way, so I can begin to understand more of the nature and needs of others.   The breathtaking linguistic leaps of poetry provide aerobic training to prepare me for service.