Monthly Archives: November 2015

Hidden Forest

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This is a photograph of the courtyard behind the apartment house where we are staying in New York City on a brief trip to visit family. I’m always surprised in NYC at the amount of green that there actually is in a forest of buildings. Last night walking in the dark on the streets, we came across trees whose wide girths testified to their age; someone had imagined they would be needed, those trees, for the future. And they planted them. Yesterday was Martin Luther’s birthday. He may have said something apocalyptic about tree-planting, like this: even if the end of the world were tomorrow, I would plant a tree today. We don’t actually know whether he said it, but he might have. In any case, someone who made this complex of buildings remembered to include courtyards, atriums, inner sanctuaries of surprising green, varieties of foliage, and the humans living here have also added potted vegetables and flowers to their small squares of patio or fire escapes. The effect is comforting and inviting. A sabbath place, or a refreshing place. There are some children’s toys, too, so it’s a playful place.

I love that we remember Eden: somewhere recorded in our primal DNA, we remember the greening place of our origin, a place of peace, a savannah of wide grasslands and sheltering trees with streams of clear water, a garden of life. A real memory traced into our bodies, deep within our bodies, of the first landscapes where humans arose, mythic and otherwise,   where four rivers mark the center of the world, where we all came from between the great rifts of time and space. The memory is still there.  The person who designed the open air atrium, here, remembered those wide green places of Eden, when he or she planted it. Now, this small square is a hidden forest, unseen from the streets, but growing strongly here inside, a sheltering dreaming place, green with life, and today with rain, some mud. Eden will out, given half a chance.

Time Changes

All Saints, Time,

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On Sunday morning, in church, we prayed for people in transitions.  The person who offered it prayed for people going through job transitions, or who were moving, or entering a new marriage, or having a baby, or people who have had a change in health, or have lost a loved one.  It was a prayer that reminded us that any change, even a change we initiate, and look forward to, like the birth of a child, or a new relationship or a new job, brings some turbulence with it. A prayer for transitions seemed like a wonderful prayer, too, for a transition of the season. We’re more than mid-way through autumn, and on the far end of fall foliage; there’s less leaves on trees now, and more on the ground to rake. Today because of the end of daylight savings time, the sun rises earlier by the clock, and sets earlier, and like other animals, I’m feeling the transition, too, moving inwardly towards hibernation, and stillness. In our church, we just passed through the three-day observance of All Saints, possibly one of my favorite feast days in the Christian calendar. In Celtic spirituality, it honors the thin places and thin times, where, as they say, the veil between worlds is very thin, and the passage between them is easier. The Feast honors Christian community and its transitions through time, like birth and death, baptism and burial, the sense of generations rising, dying, rising, walking together through the ages, the extraordinary ordinary saints, perfectly imperfect, graced and in need of grace.  It honors, too, the sense of eternal in the every day; despite disconcerting practices like setting clocks backward or forward, there’s a stability in time, though time is always changing. In church, which has its own strange notions of time, we sometimes sing at All Saints a hymn based on St. Patrick’s Breastplate. While the whole hymn is incantatory and invigorating, one verse in particular speaks to me of the eternal within time, impermanence permeated with ultimate reality:
“I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun’s life giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth,
the deep salt sea,
around the old eternal rocks.”

One of the original renditions of this hymn can be found here: http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/p03.html

I bind unto myself today, the beauty of this gentle dawn, the fire of the turning trees, and the quiet of the leaf-fall.