Climbing the Naked Tree

I climbed the Naked Tree today: my favorite tree in the world. The sun is warm, the breeze cool. The fields around the great tree are bright yellow mustard. The breeze makes the mustard flowers move in swirling waves of unanimity. The Great Tree is suffused with strength: about 50 to 60 feet tall and utterly massive: its great gray truck splaying out in 10 different directions about 25 feet above the ground, then stretching outward and up, licking up sunshine, drinking wind with eager leaves.

I pressed my body against the huge trunk and felt its silent strength in stark contrast to its lithe, trembling twigs and clattering leaves all around me. Suddenly it was so clear: this Great Tree and its lessons; the wind whistling its counsel of radical forgiveness and release; the sweet burble of birds in natural song; and the silent earth beneath, resting in its massive weight, alive with glory-making fecundity.

Life… the great mystery, the supreme teacher, the Living beauty, the spontaneous happening just beyond the sphere of ideas and words. Why have we required more than this? I sensed in a moment of innocent clarity that we really can return to Paradise here in this world… that the fiery sword is not that horriid a fate to face and pass through: that it only kills bondage, that it only melts duality, that it only slays fear.


To hear poem: The Ecstasy of Trees

RECREATING THE SACREDNESS OF THE NATURAL

There is a spiritual pathway that is just the opposite of our current economic/social patterns of ever increasing wealth generated by ever increasing consumption. It is a pathway into a profound simplicity of life for the sake of lightness and freedom; an increasing clarity of mind through realizations of the Real; an expanding Love of heart through a growing state of sensitivity to the beauty of all that is natural and good. This way opens to us through an astonishing discovery that we love what we love in life just because in some way it gives us a taste of the essence of what we all most truly are: through that song, or that gadget, or that place, or that person, we sense the freedom, beauty and joy that is the very pure nectar of Existence.

These times of collapse and uncertainty have thrust upon us the imperative of a massive change of perception much greater than politics or current religious paradigms can give. Let’s get with it now!

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A New Way of Thinking

Einstein wrote, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking. Thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

Can we hear Einstein with the sobriety and seriousness these words should evoke? A new way of thinking requires a recovery of the truths and values written inside us by the fingers of Nature, or Hand of God. We must let Life start thinking in us. What I mean is there is an inherent wisdom in all Creation. This wisdom does not think in human symbols — but it can! We can allow the Language of Life to harmonize our bodies and brains.

All Life is singing the glory of its existence and the wisdom of its delicate relationships. It is an unbroken field of interrelating energies. All, except for us. We must now clearly see ourselves as broken off from this web through 300 years of excessively left brained thinking and the paradigms of life we have developed that are inherently self-destructive.

It is the nature of the left brain to distinguish differences, to analyze, to break down into parts, to structure in new order. But without the inspired, insightful, creative, mystically related right brain the order it creates is too inclusive and limited. We create independent systems without regard for their relationship to the whole. We are now experiencing the catastrophic potential of such imbalanced and partial thinking. We must, must, must shift to new patterns based on universal values expressed in new ways.

Thomas Berry eloquently echoes this. "The New Prosperity requires a new language. This new language is primarily the language of the earth, a language of living relationships that extend throughout the universe."

New thinking demands a new usage of language. The two are inseparable. If I think differently I will express myself differently. If I am growing more attuned to the rhythms of the stars, the energetic shifts of seasons, the balances or imbalances of our food producing soils, the quality of water, the greater good of humanity and all wild creatures, I will speak of stars, weather, earth, fire, water, birds, deer and bear, the laughter of children.

We have journeyed away from nature for 300 years now and learned much. We are in a tremendous place where we can take the best of our insights, tools and technology and the ones that shall yet be invented in order to create a new world of harmony and peace, where people love nature in a way they never have before: seeing it as both motherly provider and source of inspiration, beauty maker, marvel and delight.

We are on the cusp of a new era. Those who cling to the dying age will resist the changes with all the strength born of their fear or greedy lust for power. Those who let go and embrace the challenges and changes are in for a very inspiring ride through the death of life based on consumption into life based on quality of relationships, simplicity, creative freedom, harmonizing with the whole, sanity and peace.

HEART DANCE

I listen to your eyes
with my whole body
until your eyes open
as my whole body sings
with the beauty of your eyes
seeing my beauty in wonder.

THE SECRET LIFE OF BIRDS

How do we know that birds aren’t singing with bubbling gurgles of joy warbling and trembling inside their bodies? How do we know that their little energetic systems aren’t alive and luminous with the ripples and cadence of song? How do we know that when they can’t contain it any more—because the ecstasy is so great—that they don’t dive and dip out of the trees or off of wires to soar?

How do we know they are not blithe and happy as they eat seeds by the road? How do we know that the robin isn’t perpetually cheerful because it savors the sensation of a worm wiggling down its throat into its belly? How do we know birds are not savoring the warmth of soft nests amongst twigs as snow falls on feathers? We who filter out Life with our bodies and left lob limited brains: how do we know anything?

How does a bird feel when it makes love: when feathers part and soft tissues touch? Is the ecstasy so filled with Light that their body feels like it flies with its wings folded? And does a bird know pain that drains its brain and flutters its body out to the edge of extinction as its orifice stretches thin, budging open to expel an egg?

And how do we know that birds do not grieve in song when they see their brothers or sisters in peril: when the cat pounces or shots ring? How do we know that when a bird friend falls and its eyes darken a black stone doesn’t weigh their hearts down so heavily that it strains their wing bones and feathers?

We who filter out oceans of brimming Life with our biological brains, we who dumb down and dampen our senses so we can darken and immure ourselves in abstract thought symbols, the supposed and seditious security of familiar emotions and endless chatter of words — how do we know anything real at all?