Bridges, Paths, and Waters; Dirt, Sky, and Mountains. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland
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power afoot here. When we become small; then we are large. When we are weak; then we are strong. When we disappear; then HE appears. “All is perishing—except His Face” (the Koran 28:88).
What follows are words and poems that reveal stillness and motion, movement from and toward, passage through space and time. They are descriptions of awe, beauty, wonder, glory, and radical amazement. These can only give a hint at or point toward the actual experience of these things. Once we realize what they are hinting at or pointing to, then we are undone. Once we are onto the scent, or uncover the trail we are no good for this world. We are set loose in an encounter with the Living God of all creation; an encounter in which we lose ourselves to our Beloved.
Capturing the illusory nature of life and its images is as fleeting as grasping at mist, and yet in the activity of trying to make out what is before us and all around us we do find a few laconic and lapidary images that will make themselves into agents of rapture and amazement. We all find a few pearls of wisdom to help carry us through our days on this earth place. We are awakened a few times to the infinite glory by the stuff all around us.
These things, these things that we try to figure out and these things that we invest with meaning; it is these things that we can only hope to discover. If we find any of them in this one lifetime, we are home. We will have arrived. The arduous task of living has these words to offer: “Do not ever lose your ability to be moved by a sunrise. Do not ever stop crying when you see the ocean. Feel the wind blow through you. Be opened up by everything you experience.” We must be always interacting with the stuff of life. We must walk away from these encounters deeper people. These encounters are what nature call us into.
If we find out what it means to be a bridge, or a path, or water, to be dirt, and sky, and mountain, then we find out a piece of our own “selves”. For, surely, we are not only “apart from” the things around us, but we are “a part of” the things around us. All about us are things that inform us about how life is and who we are.
One of the powers of poetry is that it evokes immense and varied images. It evokes ideas and feelings that are vast and seemingly unrelated or conflictual. As we look at these images and discuss them, it is important to recognize that we may come up against things that seem to be broken or in opposition to something else inside of us. We may be left feeling we have not resolved something. Poems may unearth some deep mystery within us. Poems set us on the path of mystery and connection.
Our work with nature and awe should teach us that we are standing in the face of something we cannot wrap our intellect around fully. We feel tiny and unimpressive next to this great scene, vista, or moment, and yet at peace and one.
Contemplating nature can be disturbing. When we unearth unsettling impressions from within ourselves, we are just finding something new that we have not been able to wrap our mind around. We are standing in the presence of a mystery. Some mysteries become revealed. Other mysteries stay mysterious. We are able to express some things that we encounter, other things we can only sense.
There are moments in our lives that we see this same beauty in other people. We sense the depth and the stillness that they exude. We are in awe of someone else. We ourselves may become objects of awe to other people. We see a hungry man offer a cold man his coat. A mother awakens repeatedly to feed her son. A woman holds the hand of her dying sister—and sings. As in nature, we often come upon great vistas in the lives of our brothers and sisters. They are as vast as the dirt, the sky, and the mountains. Rivers are not the only sisters of creation that lull us into union with God.
There is a wonderful quote from Shantideva’s “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” (Shambala Press, Boston, MA, 2006) that reads: “May I be a protector for those without one, a guide for all travelers on the way; may I be a bridge, a boat, and a ship for all who wish to cross the water.”
This quote sets out a way in which we may be the still motion for others. We may be an object that helps move folks from one place to the next. We may be a vessel for those who need transport. We may help our own selves move from one place to another on the spiritual journey called life, called faith.
The Father of all may call us to move others along the way. We must allow ourselves the grace of being a depth and stillness that others aspire toward as well. Just as we have already ascribed to the natural world of creation, we ourselves maybe a part of the process of union that others go through.
These terrains we cross, they are always changing. At one place in life, we may ford the rivers of pride; at another we may cross on the bridge of desire. Some days we cross the desert of apathy, others we search for the path of kindness that climbs through the hills. Others journey the same as we do. They encounter the same terrain. They look to us for meaning and understanding. We ourselves may be the object of the echolocation of being for another.
We ourselves—as Shantideva proclaims for us—can be vehicles to support others through their journey. As caring people who lend aid to other travelers throughout life we must remain flexible, available, and open. If we do not we may not be of service. We must be pliable enough to hearken unto the voice of the Spirit and compassionate enough to be the exact vehicle needed—these are tricky balances to maintain.
Can there be anything more useless and more “in your face” than the wrong vehicle in the wrong place. If a person needs a path across a hot desert, being a boat will be of no use. If a log bridge is needed to cross a stream, being a path will be useless. What sense does it make to see a rowboat in the middle of the desert? What good is the path if you are trying to get across the stream to the other bank?
Being compassionate requires suppleness and discernment. We must ferret out the need and be able to adapt our “selves” to the task at hand. This can only be done with the Spirit; and the terrain of the Spirit, the vehicle of the Spirit is the same: THE HEART. If you are all about living in the Spirit of God, and you are living outside of the HEART, than you probably are not where you think you are. Or, at the very least, you are using the wrong vehicle to get there. The life of the Spirit is the life of the HEART. If you do not know what that means, then the journey has just begun.
Nature becomes our partner not only in the deepening of our own individual selves, but in the process of helping others to deepen as well. We are a all a part of creation. Therefore, the connection to our world is deeper than just self worth. It is about wholeness—the wholeness of all that is.
As we embark on this great journey of faith, focusing in this retreat on the depth and motion of creation in our lives, let us never forget our place in it. We are a part of all that has been brought forth by God. It is not only the ocean that is deep, but our brother is deep as well. It is not only the river that comes toward us from an unseen place, but our feelings as well. It is not only the earth that shifts and slides as an escarpment is being born, but our hearts as well. We are, as John Donne proclaimed, pieces of the whole.
May the poems and the exercises that follow lead you to a place of wonder, and awe, and radical amazement—a place that lulls you into union with our Imaginative Father and all that He has summoned from His WORD.
1
Poem
“River Bending”
We are not here
long enough
to watch the river
change her shape.
But she does.
I have felt it.
We can see her swell
and dry, but we do
not get to see her
curl and cut and
grow old. She is an
old thing. She goes
back a thousand,
thousand years.
We cannot see all the
changes, but we can
feel them. They are
in there.
Discussion