Nobody Argues About the Trees

I woke up at 4:45; it was still dark, but I wanted to hear the birds wake up. So, I hopped out of bed, grabbed my jacket, yoga blanket, coffee, and headlamp, and headed out to see the light of the morning. Before I even got to the top of the hill, I received a treat. I came upon a sleeping deer under some trees. I startled her and she got up but froze in the glare of my headlamp. A literal deer frozen in the headlights! She couldn’t move, and I didn’t move. She was probably five yards in front of me. We stayed that way for minutes. I finally lowered my headlamp and thought she’d scurry away, but she remained. I could now only see her in the light of the moon. Eventually, I moved just enough that it broke the spell and she dashed off.

I made my way up to my hilltop perch and sat on the bench listening to the cricket violins slowly give the midnight duties over to the dayspring piccolos of the birds. The vast sky around and above me time-lapsed watercolors from the deepest midnight navy into the dustiest steel blue, fading into a foggy azure and finally dissolving into a morning cerulean. I never saw the sun rise. The cloud cover obscured the circle and diffused the light into one gigantic, all-pervasive dawn.

Yesterday, I was reading Richard Rohr’s commentary on Luke. He wrote about John the Baptist probably being heavily influenced by the Essenes in the Qumran community of the desert. They did not worship the sun but it was their primary symbol for the anticipated coming of the Messiah. Father Rohr encouraged us to make a point to watch as many sunrises as we could because there was richness in the messages God was telling us every morning through this one expression of creation.

I did not make anything of it at the time. It was a pretty sky and I was glad to be awake for it.

I was feeling a bit melancholy this morning. Probably, because I was tired. Often, my sadness and weariness run on parallel tracks. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. (I hear the irony in that considering I’m on a silent retreat and have been spending the majority of my days not doing much of anything. But, I didn’t feel like even doing “not doing” much of anything.)

So, I went back to bed and just puttered around in my room until lunchtime. After lunch, I headed outside to get some fresh air and as I walked my pace got slower and slower until if I had gone any slower I would have been going backwards. I not only didn’t feel like doing anything, I must not have felt like going anywhere, either. Finally, I just stopped and laid down on a bench under a tree and looked up into the branches. I never realized there was so very much activity going on over my head all the time. And, I’m not talking about the commotion in the trees of squirrels running along the street branches and birds coming in for fuel stops before zooming on their way again.

I mean in the air. With the shade of the tree and the backlight of the sun, it opened up a whole realm of sight that is usually beyond my vision. So many white things flying around! What are they all? They don’t all look the same, either. I’m guessing they are a variety of: bugs, moths, pollens, leaves, seeds, webs, dust, all kinds of particles! It certainly made me curious about what else is going on all around me that my human eyes can’t see, that are nonetheless, real.

And that was the question I carried into the rest of the day, though I would not have put it that way yet. What is real and going on all around me that I cannot see. What is actually there.

Yesterday I had spent the day with a twelve-year-old in the Temple who asked questions for three days and got treated like a marvel for it. So I gave myself permission.

I wanted the freedom to start from scratch. So I handed every unquestioned answer back to the authority I had gotten it from. But what did I believe? And, if I were scarily honest, what did I not believe? What did I believe just because I’d heard it all my life? Or because it was written in the Bible and interpreted in a “Baptist” or “Pentecostal” way? What about other sacred texts? What about the “truths” Japanese children grew up believing? Or Native American kids? Or Indian girls? Or Iraqi boys?

I wanted the freedom to question and discover the truth. The Bible says, “The truth will set you free.” Well, maybe it could also work the other way around, freedom could set free the truth.

If I wanted beginner’s mind, I had to start at the beginning: creation as the first sacred word of God. I knew that I believed in God and I believed that He/She/They/It spoke the world into being. I had no problem with people who didn’t believe in God, but I was going to start with where I was and what I believed. I didn’t think God looked like Gandalf on a jewel-encrusted throne of gold. I was fine with believing God was energy; that didn’t take anything away from His “Godness” to me. I was fine with believing He created Earth (and all its unknown galaxies) billions of years ago; that didn’t take anything away from His “Godness” to me, either. I was also fine with believing he may not be energy or that scientists could tell my great-great grandchildren some completely new and even opposing theory about our beginnings, somewhere down the line. I was just fine not knowing and still believing in what I choose to call the indefinable, ineffable, unexplainable, unfathomable whatever, “God.”

So, what did I know that I knew that I knew about creation? Well, seasons seemed to be a stable pattern to build some kind of truth upon. Life and death were fairly predictable. Sex was key, especially at the beginning. The cosmos appeared to have a timetable it stuck to from minute to minute, day to day, month to month, year to year, for as far back as, I’m assuming, the beginning. What else? Oh yeah, there was the whole Circle of Life thing. I kinda wish that weren’t part of nature. Couldn’t we all have been vegetarian? Then again, the plants would probably take issue with that. Hmmm, what did I forget? Water. Sun. Oxygen. Sleep. I would think of more later, but this was a good beginning.

Looking back over my preliminary list, I noticed patterns and themes. Beginnings and endings, life and death. But, upon closer inspection, the deeper pattern was circles. Circles/cycles appeared to be the beginning and the end of everything in nature, yet there was no real beginning or end, only an endless loop. Plant life. Food. Humans. Weather. Water. Animals. At any point one was living, they were also slowly on the way to dying. At any point one was dying, it could be closer to the beginning of living. Maybe it was impossible to separate the whole without destroying the parts.

If you took water out of the picture, nothing survived. Same with sun, air, sleep, sex. Same with the organs of a body: blood, heart, intestines, brain. We cannot divide and separate and still survive, not individually and not together. If one link in the chain is broken, nothing holds.

Why in the world were we not all working toward oneness? Why was there still so much division, from the macrocosm to the microcosm? Separatism is everywhere, and everywhere it is, it is disintegrating. Un-ONE-ing.

And yet, looking at nature, oneness clearly does not mean a lack of variety or uniqueness. Distinction is not the same as division. Why do we confuse the two?

There are all kinds of trees, wildly different from one another, each with its own shape and its own use. But we don’t argue about whether they are all trees. Some of us prefer apples to pears, or pine furniture to oak, or a good climbing tree to a tall redwood. Nobody claims that one is a true tree and the other is missing the mark. Nobody says one is a pure tree and the other is less than. Nobody suggests we cut down and burn the Dragonblood trees because they only grow in one part of the world, and we didn’t grow up around them, and we don’t know much about them, so they must be wrong, or God would have planted them everywhere. Or at least in the United States.

Why do we treat human beings, with all our mystery and uniqueness and variety, with less respect and less grace than we give to trees? And flowers. And animals.

And I thought about the dawn I had watched that morning. One light, no visible source, and everything underneath it lit anyway. Nothing under it arguing about whose light it was.

I did not settle a single thing that day. I had set out to find what I actually believed and I ended the afternoon with a longer list of questions than I had started with, and not one of them answered.

What surprised me was how it felt. For most of my life I had the answers ready, and God was a subject I was well informed about, and I would have told you that was closeness. It was not. Lying on that bench with nothing but questions, I felt nearer to God than I had been in years.

Next week, I am at a wedding where the wine runs out and a mother asks her son for a favor. Then I am on a mountain where the light goes wrong.

What is something you believe mostly because you have always heard it? I would love to know what it is, and whether you have ever let yourself look straight at it.

And whatever else came up while you were reading, the comments are yours. I read every one, and Thursday is where I pull up a chair and really answer.