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Archive for Nature – Page 11

Trees

Trees

I’ve been appreciating trees – our ‘ent’ brethren – a lot lately. Perhaps it’s because of my recent time on the north shore of Lake Superior, where I met quite a few of them, or their part in the seasonal tableau of pagan beauty, but I’m very aware of their presence right now. Their grace and solidity; their sober vitality – I’m comforted by them.

Maybe that’s why I am so jarred when I see the abandoned Christmas trees start to show up on the side of the road & in empty lots. I shouldn’t be surprised – it’s the time of the year & no doubt there’ll be more of them. But I can’t help but see them as carelessly discarded bodies, homeless corpses ignobly thrown on the heap. I’d rather they were given a proper burial in the recycling chippie and sent back to the soil with a little dignity… if only in gratitude for their having blessed our homes with the smell of the wild.

Restoring Wholeness in Lake Superior

Sunrise

This week I’m in a ceremonial retreat in a cottage on the shores of Lake Superior with some dear friends and colleagues. We are engaged in an emergent endeavor that has brought us together several times over the last year to contemplate the sacred task of restoring wholeness in the world.

The first part of this task is of course to restore wholeness in
ourselves, and spending these days and nights cradled in the rhythm of
nature feels like a crucial step in that process for me. I’m reminded that waking each
morning to the sunrise is an amazing restorative, completely free and
available to all…

Each of us have work and lives that take us to the heart of restoring wholeness
in our own part of the world, and yet we realize that none of us can make the
difference we want to see alone.  We feel that the crucial call of
our time is to come to consciousness about our relationship to each
other and to the earth. To recognize that we are individual parts of one
living organism, one body, and that all our actions, even our thoughts, effect
the other parts of this shimmering web. As a species we’ve wandered off that
path of knowing and our subsequent actions have effected the very air
we breathe and water we drink. It is imperative that we find our way back to consciousness, and to the love that is the very core of life, the motivation and reward and purpose of all. To the wholeness that is our true nature.

So we meet, and strengthen our bonds, and develop the microcosm of wholeness within and between ourselves and take the next step in doing what’s ours to do in manifesting wholeness in the macrocosm … I take an enormous amount of heart in knowing that we are not unique (and of course we ARE unique). All over the world there are others, too – gathering, restoring wholeness, repairing their part of the great web of life. I know many of you, and hear of more every day. One of my passions is shining a bright light on each of us so we can find each other and make common cause, because our time together here is precious and all too short, and there is much to do.

Preparing the Soil

Michael Jones‘ new book on Awakening the Commons of the Imagination has a chapter on beauty, where he talks about Robert Frost’s relationship with soil  …

Jones shares Frost’s explorations of the connection between a farmer cultivating his fields slowly, over time, to produce the best
possible crop from them, and an artist giving their own creative soil time to
develop, to become enriched by the seasons of life, ‘plowing under’ our
thoughts and ideas until such time as they have ripened and refined into their own perfect form.

This makes sense to me. I’ve often thought about my life so far as the gestation period for my art. To some it may seem that I’ve wasted a lot of time not doing much of anything, :-), but from another point of view perhaps I’ve been slowly honing the rough carbon of my life’s experience on the whetstone of contemplation and imagination, until the day it emerges in its full brilliance as pure diamond.

I must admit I like this idea quite a bit. 🙂

Space Awe

 

Hubble Awe

These Hubble photos blow my little mind! This one was taken by the Spitzer space telescope…