Blog Entries by lindsay

We recently held a retreat at Rolling Ridge, “Finding the Gold in the Darkness: The Way of Soul in Troubled Times,” led by Jim Hall and Cheryl Hellner.  In preparation for the retreat we were asked to read an essay by Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Learning to Navigate Amid Loss.”  The essay ended with an image about the necessity to find “a compass into the future.”  This got me thinking, and that, together with elements from the retreat that followed, led to the reflection below.

Last month I stood with a circle of sixty people or so on a rocky beach on Long Island Sound and sang up the moon. As the soft full circlet of the moon rose above the water, the coral sun sank in the west. We gazed in awed silence, chanted, recited poetry. The luminosity of the experience was heightened by the occasion: we were on a retreat led by Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Returning the Gift: What Does the Earth Ask of Us?"

Children gambol on the gentle hillside between our houses where forsythia blooms.  The fronds adorning the old willow stump are filling out, a green fountain. These are bright compositions of happiness and hope, the faithfulness of Earth greening once again.  Yet for me they are splashed with other thoughts and emotions.  Perhaps it is the times in which we live or, just as likely, my particular heartbreak, but there are moments when I crave a more mottled canvas.  In The Seasons Book Parker Palmer writes

 …there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck.  I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice.  But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.

Something inside of me has reached to the place where the world is breathing.
--Kabir

Days each week, I go walking in the woods with a story in my pocket.  It’s winter now, and the landscape is a mass of tawny leaves, twigs and branches.  I pass trunks sprouting delicate scallops of pale fungi and fallen logs green with moss.  My boots rustle through the brown leaves, crisp with cold, and thunk in the mud along the creek banks.  A flash of red and a harsh call announces the pileated hurtling through the gray trees.  The rest of the forest is quiet.

... Autumn is a variegated season, known for its mystery and ever-changing pallet. It's a season of vibrant golden and green beauty here on the Ridge, punctuated in scarlet; a season of sweet potatoes in the garden and crackling fires in our woodstoves. It is also the season of oncoming darkness and chilling temperatures. We are nestled in a span of days when the intricacy and poignancy of this season is marked by holidays in several spiritual traditions: days that invite us to reflect on rhythms and seasons, light weaving with dark, contentment with sorrow, harvest with letting go, abundance with loss. This is the cadence of the season, though lately the darkness is out-pacing everything else, in culture, nation, world as well as nature. Things feel off-balance.

In the human imagination, and as they have been throughout the ancient world, the cedars of Lebanon are sacred trees, planted by God.  They are long-growing, strong, the material of temples and voyages in sea-roaming ships.  

Recently I read a piece in The New York Times by Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard describing how the cedars of Lebanon could vanish by the end of the century.  The warming climate is stressing the trees, and political and cultural upheaval makes protecting them haphazard.  “Many thousands of square kilometers of forest once spread across most of Lebanon’s highlands.  Only 17 square kilometers of cedars remain, in scattered groves.”

At the Poor People’s Campaign in DC in June, the Rev. William Barber asked the assembled crowd,

"They say Aslan is on the move."  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis has enthralled me ever since I was 9 and read the Puffin book with its pen and ink illustrations by Pauline Baynes.  Many generations of children have loved the secret world filled with unconventional and magical creatures, and the young heroines and heroes who are neither patronized nor belittled.  I too loved Narnia, every thicket and lamppost, faun, centaur, and dryad. I loved how in the story subtle sounds and shifts in the air foretold the approach of the yet unseen Aslan and the breaking of the Witch's spell.  

It must be the season, or the year.  This snowless winter I was part of three retreats, one per month, about finding the grace in darkness even while leaning toward the light, about the essential rhythms of descent and renewal which keep our lives and our planet from ending, about the fertile dark as soil for the seeds of hope.  There seems to be a need in these shadowy times to seek the lantern of soul and to hold onto one another while we quest, hands clasped in sacred circles.  During these retreats, we danced in this way in fields in the late afternoon as the sun turned rose and coral and the moon appeared delicately in the lambent sky.

As is our annual practice, some of us gathered at the Meditation Shelter in the night of December 31 for a time of quiet, bringing whatever was in our hearts.  Once again we walked through a moon-bathed forest to the Shelter, aglow in candlelight and warmed by the wood stove.  The Shelter has wonderful acoustics, and I was eager to hear the sound of us singing in it.  I had brought a new song, a simple chant from West Africa, that I learned from Michael Meade's new cd A Song Is a Road.  It is called "Azima", and it is a song in praise of the Earth.  But before (and in between) our singing it, I had a few reflections to share.  Below is an adaptation of those thoughts: