It reads:
"Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen."
I do that. A mountain brook flows right beside our house. It's a frisky piece of business, turbulent and smooth by turns. Sometimes a trickle. Sometimes a gush. Walk upstream a little bit to a bend in the brook where an ancient tree had been uprooted seasons ago.The great tree's trunk is breaking down - food and moss and nutrients for decades - ants and beetles and things that slither - a place to sit and listen. Listen for what? Nothing in particular. Just listen.
Trees have lately become a hot topic. Way back I wrote a children's book about a boy and his very own tree. For years I've planted them on birthdays and special occasions.The latest is a white oak I planted for my grandson, Dorian Alexander. It wintered well, and is growing beautifully, as is my grandson, I'd like to add. We know they migrate. Oaks have traveled down the mountain since we've lived here. Why? There's more water and better soil, and they know it. Their root systems communicate with each other and interact with multitudes of other woodland fauna and flora. They even medicate each other, nourish each other, feed and foster the no-see-ums - the moss, bacteria, organisms, and myriad insects, without which we would have no forests at all. Trees only appear to be still.The Druids worshiped trees, and I have always found comfort sitting on the ground, back against a sturdy trunk, legs out, at peace. When I worked in a rain forest the trees had above ground roots like the flukes of a whale. I'd just cuddle in, arms resting on the flukes like an arm chair. Think Frodo. Come winter, in the Catskills where I live, trees are stripped bare of leaves exposing their phenomenal twists and turns, all arms like that Indian goddess. Eternity is a winter wood that goes on and on and on and on. Bare trees against the snow. On and on and on and on. Nooks and crannies you never knew existed. So much you never knew existed!
Silence my soul
These trees are prayers.
I asked the tree
Is this prayer?
Can there be prayer without a God? I don't think I've ever thought of prayer out of a theological context. Religion;Prayer. Everything else is hope. Prayer, to me, was something transactional, a contract of sorts, albeit a sacred one, still a contract.
"Will You protect me?"
"Slaughter your best bullock and we'll see."
I try to think about nothing at all. Make my mind as empty as my check book. The Quakers sit in silence for an hour. Calm that chitch. You Buddhists know what I mean. Or Taoists. One of you folks out there. Try it some time. You know, that pesky thought, the one that keeps going round and round and round and round? Takes hydraulic brakes to stop it, right? T'ain't easy, Magee.
I listen - I try to listen - to what the moving water sounds like passing over the stream bed: rocks, smooth and ragged rocks, shallow flats, pools, downed trunks, deep drops, the deeper drops, cutbanks, sandbars...The differences are subtle. I can't always hear them, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. They are. They always have, and they always will.
I get those for whom prayer is a truly transcendent experience. If someone feels their private emotions connect them to something greater than themselves, a personal relationship with their God, maybe they are deluded, but maybe they also experience feelings that bring calm and peace and certainty - the very things most people I know are forever trying to find - calm and peace and certainty. Elusive little critters.
Daniel Pearl's last words before he was beheaded were, "I am a Jew". I am a Jew as well, strongly so, but not religious. Even so, I visit the synagogues in each country I've been in. I seek out the community. My daughter was actually named - Shoshana - Rose - in a synagogue in Medellin, Colombia. Still, the lift I look for is not from books but from acts of conscience. In general, I don't follow any religious creed. I said "in general" because I'm still at the seder table decades later wondering if the prophet Elijah will really come through the open door and take a sip of wine from his special silver goblet in the middle of the table on its own white, pristine cloth. I certainly don't think of myself as spiritual. No mystical insights. No endless nights of the soul. No Guide To The Perplexed on my bedside table. But calm and peace? You bet. Certainty? We may part ways on that one.
Daniel Pearl's last words before he was beheaded were, "I am a Jew". I am a Jew as well, strongly so, but not religious. Even so, I visit the synagogues in each country I've been in. I seek out the community. My daughter was actually named - Shoshana - Rose - in a synagogue in Medellin, Colombia. Still, the lift I look for is not from books but from acts of conscience. In general, I don't follow any religious creed. I said "in general" because I'm still at the seder table decades later wondering if the prophet Elijah will really come through the open door and take a sip of wine from his special silver goblet in the middle of the table on its own white, pristine cloth. I certainly don't think of myself as spiritual. No mystical insights. No endless nights of the soul. No Guide To The Perplexed on my bedside table. But calm and peace? You bet. Certainty? We may part ways on that one.
Just this instant I remembered something. No kidding. Not Fake News. Just this instant, writing about this.
When I was a student at Morgan in the early sixties, after a demonstration or some kind of political action, at the end of the day we all formed a circle with our arms around each others' shoulders, and sang, "We shall Overcome". Black and white. Bodies linked and hearts swelled with hope and love and determination. "Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day." Many as one. The feeling I had then is the feeling I want now. Nothing less will do.
Trees have lately become a hot topic. Way back I wrote a children's book about a boy and his very own tree. For years I've planted them on birthdays and special occasions.The latest is a white oak I planted for my grandson, Dorian Alexander. It wintered well, and is growing beautifully, as is my grandson, I'd like to add. We know they migrate. Oaks have traveled down the mountain since we've lived here. Why? There's more water and better soil, and they know it. Their root systems communicate with each other and interact with multitudes of other woodland fauna and flora. They even medicate each other, nourish each other, feed and foster the no-see-ums - the moss, bacteria, organisms, and myriad insects, without which we would have no forests at all. Trees only appear to be still.The Druids worshiped trees, and I have always found comfort sitting on the ground, back against a sturdy trunk, legs out, at peace. When I worked in a rain forest the trees had above ground roots like the flukes of a whale. I'd just cuddle in, arms resting on the flukes like an arm chair. Think Frodo. Come winter, in the Catskills where I live, trees are stripped bare of leaves exposing their phenomenal twists and turns, all arms like that Indian goddess. Eternity is a winter wood that goes on and on and on and on. Bare trees against the snow. On and on and on and on. Nooks and crannies you never knew existed. So much you never knew existed!
Jamie found this. I wish I had written it.
Silence my soul
These trees are prayers.
I asked the tree
"Tell me about God."
Then it blossomed
Then it blossomed
Rabindranath Tagore
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