Cairn-Space. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland
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They were watchful and alert.
I had the good pleasure to encounter their watching and waiting. Slowly focusing on the meal, almost hypnotizing it before the strike, they would become careful, and lose their place in time to a slowed attention. It was the “Power of the Slowing” that Gerald May wrote about in “The Wisdom of the Wilderness” (HarperCollins Books, NY, 2006). Their slowing to capture food made me pause, pay attention, and enter into the slowing myself. It taught me about what it takes to discriminate and discern the quality and nature of things in my life. Although all things can move us toward union with God, some things pose potential dangers and threats of entanglement that are just not worth risking. It requires watchfulness and alertness to become nourished—to grow.
Slowing helps us to focus and become aware. Nature has a tendency to help us enter the slowing, if we watch her examples in other sentient beings. Could my praying become the same? Could I still myself enough to become observant and watch what would arise from my heart as I watered it? Could I become still enough to see the many options for nourishment all around me: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, self-control, community, forgiveness?
For many years prior to this experience of the mantises rising, we had hatched mantis pods as a family. We would buy an egg casing from the local garden store and leave it out in the backyard in a covered aquarium. As the weeks wore on, we would almost forget it was there, until one day someone would notice hundreds of mantises on the walls of glass. It was hard to believe that so many mantises could be in one casing. They were a shifting mass of life and limb covering the aquarium walls. We would take off the lid and watch them scurry throughout the yard.
There was another time we had watched the mantises. Glinda and I had just begun dating. We hiked the woods and collected scraps of nature to weave into a wreath. We started with grapevine. We wrapped it into a circle. We tucked dried garlic-mustard fronds into the hoop. We tucked in some mullein leaves and sassafras roots. We also wove in a mantis pod. We had no idea what it was.
One night, when we returned to her room, the walls were covered in moving spots. At first we thought our eyes were deceiving us. We thought we saw shifting movement. As we stepped closer, we were assured that we did. Hundreds of young mantises covered the wall. This was an accidental hatching. The hatchings in the aquarium were not.
I am glad that we took the time to hatch them. They gave me pause in their hatching, and a renewed sense of stillness in watching them rise while watering the gardens. For years, we had more praying mantises in our gardens than anyone around. For years, I had a new way of seeing prayer.
Their presence has been a cycle of routine. I have seen their daily morphs and the slow changes that happen to them over time. I have seen how their colors change as summer lengthens and draws to a close. From green to brown they fade. Their numbers decrease throughout the browning, until they leave the yard altogether. Gone.
I could only notice this in the repetition of a daily routine. The routine of watering the garden daily brought me to the mantises everyday. Routine reveals so much about how life is going; how it is moving ahead and how it is standing still. The things we place into our lives on a routine basis have so much power to affect who we become; particularly when we pay close and steady attention to them—over time.
Stepping toward the hose at watering time almost felt as if I was entering a holy place; a place where I would uncover some immense glory. The air that surrounded me during the watering time was palpable. I could feel myself entering into sacred space as one hand reached for the hose and the other hand for the spigot knob. I was becoming an act that would transform all space and time. I became a holy event for a moment. That is the best I can do to describe it. A stillness reigned in the act itself. A sacrament was born. Words about phenomena, union, and the sacred are meaningless. The NOW became Divine Milieu.
As I am crafting the description of these moments—with my words—I remember other moments that time slowed down and stood still long enough for me to become transformed. The birthing of our sons. The death of my father. The boarding of our plane home from Greece.
They all had this numinous quality that not only made me feel alive, but also aware. Stillness prevailed. It was not as if they made me feel aware of any one thing in particular. It was that they made me feel aware of everything, all at once. I owned space and time in these events. I was at one with everything. Life itself became a sacrament; living became a cairn. I realized that whether we slow down or the events of life slow us down, slowing is vital for deepening.
Every time I approached the hose I could almost begin where I left off the last time I had watered. The routine itself had some part in my discoveries. Doing the routine over and over built up some sort of energy within the act itself—an energy of seeing. Layer after layer of meaning is added to the pieces of our lives that we repeat again and again. After a while, I began to slow down as I simply began to approach the routine task. As I thought about watering, I would shift into stillness. Could this be the same with my prayer life?
This intrusion of awareness on a single moment is often revealed in routine events. It may also come as we enter into the fruition of some long awaited moment. It can be a result of a process or an event. The mantises were able to open in me this sacred space because of the routine and regular nature of my watering encounters with them. The birth of my sons opened me to eternity because of the culmination of long hours of anticipation and hope. Both can spawn awakening.
***
Coming into the Presence of the Holy One is the same. We may enter into the Presence through a routine event like daily prayer and contemplation. We may enter into the Presence through a long awaited event like a sacrament or rite of passage—even a crisis. Philosophically we would say that entering the Presence can be facilitated by either a process or an event.
Either way it is the same. We must make space for the encounter and notice the encounter if we are to unravel the meaning of the encounter. We must provide time for the wrestling. Without space and time for the encounter of and union with the Divine Milieu, there can be no reality of the Divine Milieu in our lives.
Like the daily watering that produced an encounter with the mantises, we first strike out to find a place—a garden to water. Once we have come to that place to do the work of “watering” we must learn patience, repetition, and watchfulness. We must look for the markers that will call us into encounter and wrestling. It is the same with our prayer life. We can build up a routine that will begin to settle us, even when we simply think about enacting the routine.
We can begin a habit of prayer that will open our awareness with a simple routine. Finding a daily time and place to sit and remember God is how we begin the “watering of the garden.” Set aside a time and a place and then we are ready to begin. We must build a cairn—a place of remembering (space). We must visit that holy place often—again and again (time).
Some people choose a rocking chair. Others a straight back chair. It may be in front of an icon, or window, or in an out of the way corner. It may be on a porch, or deck, or shed out back. There may be a “Holy Book” and a candle, or a simple stick of incense. The senses must join the prayer in being able to make this time and this space a shelter from life’s usual. But, there must be a place. There must be a place where we can go, sit, and enter into an encounter with Divine union. There must be a place for wrestling with our observing awareness.
When we come to the holy place we have chosen we can begin by offering a simple spiritual practice—a simple prayer. This may be an invocation of the Presence, it may be a sacred salutation, it may be a favorite prayer, it may be a prayer service (like Morning Prayer, or Vespers), or it may be a Psalm.
Once the words are offered, it is as if we have drawn a line around our place, we have marked it. “This is sacred space, this is sacred time” our prayer tells us. We have added another stone to the cairn. Eventually we will learn to sit and inhabit the stillness of that time and space itself, but at the outset, we must have a spiritual practice of prayer that we can begin and return to in our sacred place. We must have a “watering act.”
It is important to find a space that you can return to with little or no distraction. You are going to return here daily—perhaps