Restoring The Waters

The early 14^th century Sufi poet Hafiz writes:

Listen to the music.
I am the concert that flows from the mouth of every creature,
singing with the myriad chords.

The story from The Daily Good to which this verse was attached was titled Singing to Tomatoes, and it caught my fancy. I am enthralled with the science which at last offers substance to the capacity of cognitive communication and vibration – human and non-human – taking place all the time, among all that make up the earth community.

I am thinking now about the trees and the granite boulders on the land I walk with our dogs. There are three trails on this land, trails that stretch through the woods from our home to Tannery Pond. I vary the walks – three or four each and every day, the first one attempted in the first light of the morning when my joints are not yet oiled. Sometimes the dogs and I negotiate which trail we’ll take. Other times, the dogs get their way, because they are ahead of me, and so I follow. From time to time I insist on my own way. Three trails: the Outer Loop, the Ridge, and the Highway. The Highway goes straight from house to pond. My daily goals have to do with time and distance: at least two hours and at least three miles. I combine the trails; any two of them make a mile. If we stay at the pond for ten minutes or so, each walk takes forty minutes.

The trails are not the only ones with names. I name trees: white pine, birch, maple, oak, poplar, and beech mostly. From time to time, names just come to me and I know the power of them: Beauty and the Birch. Other times I wait until I can hear the communication – tree to me. Not infrequently, I name them out of my own projection, and find that they have a different idea. If a tree is reluctant to introduce itself, I simply greet noname – no-na-me, three syllables. Is it too fanciful to think that trees like introducing themselves?

Rocks have names, too.

I can shut my eyes and name the trees and rocks of the Outer Loop:

The Sentinel
Turning Point
Slippery Rock
Spike Lee (one of several young pines by the same name – quite the family)
 The Twin Peaks (granite boulders)
Upper Slingshot
Grandfather Fallenbe

Grandfather Fallenbe is a tree which has fallen. At his foot stands a white pine who, for a long time, did not share her name. After weeks of greeting her daily, I heard the name: Elephant Tears. Two knots are reminiscent of sad elephant eyes, and from them the bark flows down, rivulet to rivulet.

Then:

Great Uncle Bones
Lil Brother Lean on Me
Auntie
Papa Bentwood
Grandfather Bolt and Little Sister

And then I greet the pine known (formally) as Lower Slingshot. People who know her well call her Granny Sling. I call her Grandmother Dear Tree. Across from her is Standing Rock –  it’s why we’re known as the Granite State – twelve or fourteen feet high. Then comes:

Bob Wire (barbed wire over the years has grown into this tree). Bob is a trans. He used to be Barb Wire, but he transitioned.)
Mama Bentwood and quite a few young Bents
Buckhorn (an antler rub)
Beauty and the Birch
Whale Maiden (granite)
Old Paint (Poplar with moss)
Softly Dying
RT (RT was my recliner. I could lay back on her and gaze through the branches of several trees into the clouds. RT split in two one day, and I could no longer recline. Because her bottom half has been rotting, I named her R2 and then R-squared, but she prefers RT.
Then Papas Bill and Bob, fraternal twins, one a pine, the other a birch, twins named after friends from elementary school.Uncle Willie and Uncle Charlie – these are my great grand uncles, both fallen.
Uncle Willie and Uncle Charlie were my grandmother’s uncles, and they were brothers. One fought for the Union, the other for the Confederacy. Both died. Not in the same battle, so I’ve been told.

As I come up over the rise, the beeches sing. I love the beeches in winter. They keep their light brown leaves, and when there is wind, they rattle. I have a friend whose name is Beecher, and so I have named these Beecher Woods. They seem to like it – they rattle a lot.

Tre (pronounced tray) is a stump of a birch which Jim had to cut, because he was ready to fall.

At last the dogs and I arrive at Tannery Pond. I have two friends (so far) at the Pond. One is an altar of stone, in honor of Jim’s brother John. On the stone live two hippopotamus(es?) because John loved hippos. He died in 2016, and asked that the family scatter some of his ashes in Tannery Pond. The stone altar with hippos is his gravestone, Hippocampus.

Great Grandfather lives on the bank of Tannery Pond. He is old.

Before the dogs and I go on any walk, I fill a pocket with kibble. As we walk, I offer kibble to the trees, seeking (and finding) crevices in the bark or woodpecker holes to leave them, a great game for the dogs who love to sniff them out.

Walking through this community of tree and rock gives me a profound sense of belonging. It’s hard to be lost when you know the names of the denizens of the woods. I like to think they know my name. I wonder.

I once thought that my husband Jim and I had bought and therefore owned this beautiful land parcel in Central New Hampshire. But over the years we’ve lived here, the idea that we actually own the land we walk – or any other land, for that matter – has become increasingly untenable. We do not own the land we walk, but we do walk it. I no longer look east to Jerusalem for the Holy Land. The Holy Land lies under my every footfall.

The first years we were here, our walks consisted of traveling the ready-made path from our house to the waters of Tannery Pond and back. Sometimes with dogs, sometimes without. Sometimes with hearts in our throats as the pond ice began its melt, and the resident bear started to wake up, other times with the confidence that our black neighbor had moved further into the mountains for her summer foraging.

One year we carved a second trail, up an over the ridge, where we can look down upon the vernal pools that are home to the spring frogs whose throaty crackling shouts of awakening sometimes sound like someone or something is being tortured. Not the case, of course. I like to think of it as the joy of awakening.

This winter has been an odd one, with very little snow, but enough rain and sleet to create solid paths of ice, treacherous even to me in my crampons, which I keep on my boots from December to April. So the dogs and I have had to find new ways. As we meander off path, I sing this song composed by my friend Alaan Classen, whose lyrics, in part, read:

Degaje . . . degaje

Somehow we will find a way

Where there’s no way, there’s a way.

By wandering where the ice is not, we have begun to form relationship with various trees, rocks, and vernal pools. As I sing, I give them names:

Upper Slingshot

Lower Slingshot (pictured)

Green Lagoon

Rock Watcher (above)

The Gates (below)

I love to do this, as it connects me deeply – and so much more deeply than in years past – with every part of the land we walk. I like to think the trees, pools, and rocks tolerate with curiosity my need to name them.

“What’s in a name?” they ask one another. “Why does she feel the need to name us?”

I do know that I am always glad to see them, denizens of the woods who’ve been there far longer than I, especially the granite. The trees were clear-cut a century ago, and I suspect, or at least hope, that my naming them honors their resilience and insistence to rise again.

Does naming matter? I don’t really know, other than the naming brings me closer in, helps me into a state of greater mindfulness. Perhaps – although none of them has yet to admit it – they really enjoy my erstwhile efforts to make connection.

*degaje is the name given to a ballet movement, when one leg disengages with another

To Re-establish Kinship

As pastor of a California congregation whose commitment was to the development of a paradigm for multi-generational worship, the challenge for me was to honor the traditional practices of the church while at the same time redesigning the elements of the ritual in such a way that any one, of any age – of any faith or no faith for that matter – could participate with integrity.

We had good story tellers, actors, and artists in the congregation, of all ages, and so the dramatization of the scriptural stories along with the liturgical art to accompany them unfolded with relative ease. More difficult was the worship piece called the Confession of Sin. How it appears in the Book of Common Prayer is as a long, very long, string of words, with no silences for thinking about the many things “done and left undone”.

An idea slithered its way into an afternoon alpha state – I was lying on the floor of my office; it had to do with partnering river stones with running water. Of the many scriptural stories of rocks and water, I chose three: the discovery by the Israelites in the desert that if they were to strike the rock at Meribah, water would flow; the rocks placed across the Jordan River by the twelve tribes which became the path into the Promised Land; and the convert Paul referring to the risen Christ as Rock.

At the appropriate time, each member of the congregation was invited to choose a stone from the basket, weaving its way down the aisle by the efforts of a couple of the youngest. I asked the people to hold onto their rock; think about the things they had done that they wished they hadn’t; the things they hadn’t done that they wished they had; and to lift those regrets from their hearts and place them on the rocks. The same children then gathered the rocks, brought them forward, and with words of compassion and forgiveness, I poured water over the rocks and into the baptismal font. Regrets named, promises made, regrets released, and washed away, a new heart given. Although I imagine I did mention God from time to time, I didn’t have to. Rock and water were enough.

During a Reiki session one evening, I described the ritual to the body worker as she stood over me, and her reaction both surprised and disturbed me. “You lay your sins and regrets on the rocks and expect them to carry your burdens? Did you ask them? Don’t you think that’s a little unfair?”

I had no answer at the time, and although I thought about it in a guilty kind of way for quite some time, I finally relinquished the concern and thus yielded to the power of the ritual. Rock and water.

Frederique Apffel-Marglin reminds us that before the beginnings of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, we lived in diverse communities of other-than-humans, with a lively host of spirits – of trees, of waters, of creatures – spirits who teased us, played with us, chastised us, educated us, communicated with us, all as they accompanied us on our earthly journeys.

In Subversive Spiritualities she writes, “The beings of this world taught us . . . they had reasons for existing, their own requirements, and their own agency. We needed to ask permission, to share, to give back, and to give thanks.” (p 3-4)

I find now that I am revisiting the angry words of my Reiki master. I still don’t appreciate the aggressive manner in which she asked her questions, yet there was fodder enough in her thinking to accompany me for more than twenty years.

Thomas Berry arrived in my life during those twenty years, in the form of books, recordings, and interviews. In a conversation with Caroline Webb, Berry insists, “Every being has rights. Every being, to exist . . . has three rights: the right to be; the right to habitat; and the right to fulfill its role in the great community of existence.”

So, what is the role of a rock? Maybe I should ask the question differently. Does a rock have a spiritual role? Likewise, what might be the spiritual role of water?

Because the refrain “the waters of grief” keeps looping in my heart, and I am thinking about eco-justice and rocks and yearning and grief and water and release and rebirth. This is a new day for new ritual, and, as Robin Kimmerer and Frederique Apffel-Marglin and Jeanette Armstrong and so many others remind us, it’s a time for permission, for sharing, for reciprocity, for mindfulness, and for gratitude. God or no God, it doesn’t matter; it is time, way past time, to know that the Holy Land lies under our very feet. How are we going to learn to honor and celebrate that?

That is kinship. It lies deep in our human memory and in the memory of everything that has life.