Category: Nature

Posted on

Holding On, Letting Go

Approaching the woods, a gentle wind stirred the air. Snowballs, crystals, fairy dust, and wonder rose from the tree branches before falling to the ground lightly and playfully. The field was covered in a full, fresh layer of snow. It looked like winter but the temperature of the air and the depth of blue in the sky hinted towards spring. This snow was not destined to last long. It is late winter and the season is more fickle than ever.

The pines and maples surrounding the field at the edge of the forest held piles of heavy snow. Some of the trees held the fresh snow as if in a gentle hug, happy for the temporary companionship. Others seemed burdened by the uninvited guest, holding the unwelcome weight as a burden. The oak trees, which also still held many of their leaves from the previous fall, seemed especially laden. With each gust though, each tree released a little more snow. As the wind whispered through the branches, I heard an audible sigh of relief as the trees let go of the snow.

I sat for a while with the little oak at the top of the drainage. I felt some kinship with this tree and its long, reaching branches. It will hold onto the leaves of the last growing season until emerging buds push them off in the spring. This oak, nestled out of the wind, will also hold the day’s snow longer than most of its neighbors. There does not appear to be any burden in this holding. This little tree seems designed to hold on. Its trunk is straight and solid. The branches grow low and wide. The fibers of each branch are dense. It clings to last season, embraces the snow of this season, and prepares for the growth of spring and summer ahead. This little tree declares that it is possible to have and hold it all.

Like the oak, I too attempt to hold — or at least juggle — it all. There is joy in this rich fullness. It can also be stifling and inhibiting. Dwelling on the regrets, mistakes and successes of the past does not leave space for recognizing the gifts of today. Attending to the longing, anticipation or worry for the future does not allow for living into the potential of each moment. When I am holding too much or too tightly, the present passes without notice and intent.

Holding on can also be can be comforting, serving us well from time to time. I remember helping Dad pack up his condo when he was moving to Maine. I picked up a candy dish that I had never seen before and asked him if he wanted to take it with him. He looked at it for a long time while I watched him drift far into his thoughts. Finally, he returned and said, “Yes, let’s take that. It reminds me of my grandmother.” We packed it up and it stayed by his bedside for the next three years. Dad had lost so much to dementia and would lose so much more. Holding on to that dish and any memories that it carried was a small and tender grace.

Now when I see that dish in my house, it reminds me of Dad. Specifically, it reminds me of holding him close and offering care during the years of his decline. And it reminds me of the paradox that was so strong at his death. After days by his bedside, I finally felt myself letting go of his barely living body. As I did, I remembered that I had felt the power of his spirit releasing into the world several days before he died. Noticing that I had been clinging to physical life and being intentional about letting it go, allowed my awareness of his persistent and expanding essence to return.

I see similar expansion in my boys as they explore the world and create their space within it. As they have become teenagers, they are taking longer, more independent steps into the world. Much of it now happens out of my sight, but the growing strength and freedom feels very similar to those days when they were mastering the monkey bars. It was important to stay close at first but, as strength and confidence grew, it was important to step further and further away. They needed to know that they were capable and that I trusted in their power and ability. They also needed to know that I was nearby if they wanted or needed me. Letting go is not the same as walking away. Letting go is an opening of hugging arms. Letting go honors both past and potential.

By now, the little oak in the drainage was beginning to release her snow. As the sun rose higher, the snow melted away one slow drip at a time. As I walked away from the tree, I began to walk a spiral in the middle of the field. The lithe trees at the edge of the field and the stiff, stoic oak at the top of the drainage had both offered a rich teaching. There are times for holding on and times for letting go.

As I wrapped into the spiral, I felt how closely connected the two actions are. Sometimes we are walking into the center, contracting, focusing and holding. At other times, we are walking towards the edges, expanding, stretching, and letting go. Holding on and letting go are expressions of love on the same continuum. The dance between them becomes the way that we nurture ourselves, our relationships, and the way that we live our life.

Today, I am letting go. The struggles and sorrows of our human family and ailing planet often hang heavily on my heart and I hold them tenderly. But today, the snow and sun are calling for company and I will stay out to play.

What about you? How will you embrace or release your day?

Posted on

Winter Compost

I have always thought that we compost year-round at our house. We use 2 closed bins to avoid attracting critters to our backyard and chickens. The bins work on an annual rotation — we add our compost to one bin at a time, while the other “rests”.

This resting bin is really a fertile cavern of activity. The microbes, worms, and fungi in the resting compost bin change the apple cores, egg shells and other food waste into dark nutrient rich soil. By the end of the summer, our discards are ready to become the foundation for the next season’s garden. Every fall, we put one of our garden beds to bed with the fully cooked compost from the resting bin.

Once empty, the bin is ready for contributions. This winter, I am watching the empty bin fill as the compost pile inside grow taller and taller; I realize that we are freezing rather than composting. The last few times that I have brought out the compost, I have wondered how much more I will be able to fit into the bin. We have never run out of space before. I don’t ever recall having a frozen pile of banana peels, carrot tops and withered greens rising to meet me when I take off the lid. What have we done differently this year to create a food scrap stalagmite rather than a decaying pile of organic matter?

In previous years, maybe there was enough organic matter left in the bin to begin and maintain a modest rate of decomposition throughout the winter. Or maybe the deep freeze of early January killed or stunned the microscopic critters that are responsible for sustaining the transformation from scrap to soil. Or maybe we are eating a greater volume of fruits and vegetables that have skins, cores, seeds and stalks that are bound for the compost. Whatever the reason, we are freezing rather than composting this winter. The growing pile of perfectly intact food scraps is a little absurd, but I continue to take my food waste out to the growing pile.

Every bucket added to the pile feels like an act of affirmation that the cycle will continue. I have observed the interplay and cycling between decomposition, creation, and decomposition hundreds of times in the garden and forest. This year, in the frozen pile of food scraps, the cycle has slowed, perhaps even suspended for the winter season. The compost’s long pause is a good reminder to find time, space and safety to pause among the activities of our days and years.

In our journey from birth to death, we have thousands, maybe millions of opportunities to create, break down, cycle and recycle. Between each opportunity, there is also a potential for pause. In these pauses, we can take note of the process that brought us to this moment and in wonderment of the one that will follow. Sometimes glaringly obvious and sometimes barely perceptible, the pause is an integral part of the cycle too. It exists in the subtle time and space between inhale and exhale, between dawn and day, between speaking and silence. It exists in a time and space that is both hollow and full beyond measure. The pause is fleeting and slippery, but I know it when I have moved through it. In this year of All Time and No Time, the pause visits often and we are learning to harvest its gifts.

No matter how long or short, every pause eventually yields to motion. At the compost pile, spring will come. With the warmth and movement, the compost pile and garden will “spring to life” in a flurry of decay and decomposition, beauty and growth. I will be looking for the subtle pauses that co-exist within the cycles. They are there too.

While I tend the garden, I will also be settling more deeply into the pauses of my daily life by regularly practicing stillness and reflection. I will create longer pauses by stepping out of routines that restrict time and energy. I will value the solitary space and time that slows my pace and hones my intentions.  I will live deeply into the sacred pauses that pepper my days… And I will turn the compost and weed the carrots, taking my place in the cycles of dissolution and creation that will always surround the sacred pause.

Posted on

To John Muir, with Gratitude

John Muir (1838-1914) was a writer, naturalist and social activist. I discovered his writing in the months after my first trip into the wilderness. I was 16 and on a 6-week camping trip. That trip was my first close encounter with high peaks, deep wilderness and the essence that percolates beyond the realm of the physical.

Nothing in my life to that point had even hinted towards the ethereal. I had grown up regularly attending an Episcopal church and Sunday school and, at the time, was attending a Catholic high school. I had an appreciation for the formality and traditions of religion, but I had never felt anything that could be called spirituality. I’m not sure that I even recognized it was absent. I had heard the concept and even thought that I believed in its existence, but I had never experienced it.

In the mountains, I felt a Oneness that was surely the holiness that I had heard described in church. I turned the corner at the end of a long switchback and emerged above treeline. An immense valley opened below me, the wide sky stretched above me and I felt myself melt into the expanse. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it, I loved it and I was loved by it. I didn’t need to believe it or understand it, I knew it. I became devoted to honoring and protecting Mother Earth.

in the months after my trip, I began reading John Muir, and his words helped me to embrace and touch the sensation more fully. With a naturalist’s training and an artist’s heart, Muir describes the glory, wonder, ferocity and peace of moving amidst trees, storms, creeks and mountain peaks. His words resonated with my experience of the wilderness and, perhaps even more importantly, with the spirituality that my travels had awakened in me. He described the interconnection like this: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”

In sentence after sentence, John Muir validated my budding awareness that I was connected to a larger whole, connecting my fragile teenage humanity to the vast and mighty natural world, and acknowledging all of Nature as God. He wrote about forests, mountains and glaciers with such rich detail that reading his essays was like a walk through an old growth forest, dripping with sights, sounds and feelings. I took many armchair journeys as I read about his adventures. He was an accomplished alpinist and a risk taker, so rapt by experience that his own health and safety were quite secondary. He spent many months living simply and closely to the earth, spending long swaths of time alone or with just a few others in wild places. Through his words and sketches, you would believe that he was most happy with the trees and birds for neighbors, but he was also passionately committed to protecting wild spaces.

I relished his observations and the conclusion that there is more for us to glean from wilderness than an understanding of the sum of the parts. Wild spaces and humans are expressions of the same spirit. We need one another.

The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease…This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.

— The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West from Our National Parks, 1901

While Muir advocated that people should get out into wilderness whenever possible, he also argued that it was important for them to know that wild places existed if they couldn’t get there. His love of wild spaces both for their own sake and for their potential to heal humanity fueled his persistence; his writing and lobbying ultimately contributed to the development of the National Park Service. As I learned more about John Muir, his activism sparked mine.

In the decades since my first encounter with wilderness, my connection to Nature (capital N) has grounded, guided and supported me. Muir’s stories kept my passion for the wilderness alive while I was making my way through college, suburbs, and cities and I followed his advice, “Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” For a few years, I stepped off the beaten path quite fully, living off the grid and closely to the earth. In those years, the rhythms of my days closely followed the rhythms of the sun, moon, seasons and critters.

I didn’t see it at the time, but I now fully recognize that my forays into wilderness, inclination to keep my hands in the dirt, and connection to seasonal cycles has been my link to a Universal Spirit all this time. I named my affinity to Mother Earth, Muir named his to God’s Creation. We were talking about the same thing. Renamed and reclaimed, the thread of Nature that has been running through my life is already being woven into new patterns. What gifts!

To John Muir, with gratitude

The Divine speaks

In rustling leaves and

Babbling brooks.

In singing birds and

Howling wolves,

The Divine speaks.

 

The Divine glows

In oranges, pinks and purples

Of the rising and setting sun.

In the brilliant white reflection

Of the full moon,

The Divine glows.

 

The Divine lives

In wind and earthworm,

Mountain and valley.

In you and me,

Eagle and salmon.

The Divine lives.

I am participating in a 2-year interfaith ministry program with the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine (ChIME). During this exploration of heart, mind and spirit, the first year focuses on Contemplation while the second year is about Action. This piece originated out of preparation for a presentation to my class on a Planetary Chaplain who has been particularly impactful in my life. A Planetary Chaplain is an individual who, as Matthew Fox describes, is “doing good work – that is, work that is a blessing to the community, a midwife of grace.”