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

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.

CATS

CATS

How do we know that cats are not in a state of constant contemplation, graceful, purring Buddhas, St. Francis with paws, always aware of the present moment, being all awareness itself aware? How do we know that every shimmy of grass, each turn of a leaf, every errant bird call doesn’t splash into their naked awareness like a stone into a unruffled pool, and that the ripples of sound and sight do not gurgle through them like laughing bubbles in a stream?

How do we know that when a cat lopes in lightness or meditatively meanders it doesn’t caress each tiny variation in the ground with tender soft paws, and listen to them, as a man should listen to wind with his skin, cherishing their touch with earth?

How do we know that when a cat stretches it doesn’t feel a slow rise of yoga-sweet pleasure as each muscle yields, elongates, swells open and breathes?

How do we know that when a cat purrs it doesn’t feel silver shivers of ecstasy humming through every red cell of its body, melting it into a life-renewing relaxation in the naked presence of Life —and isn’t it possible that it sometimes slips in a sweet euphoria of peace into God’s bliss heaven to play with the eternal in dreams?

How do we know that when a cat hunts it isn’t in a state of constant prayer, a keen and constant anticipation that at any moment the object of its longing may appear? And how do we know that when it crunches the skull of a mouse and tastes brain juice and blood it doesn’t feel the same thrills we feel when enchanted by the succulent creations of some three star chef?

How do we know that when a mother cat licks its baby’s ears it doesn’t feel love’s holy warmth flooding every cell of its maternal body; and how do we know that when a kitten licks itself clean it doesn’t feel the freedom of the sky moving in its naked skin?

How do we know that when kittens play they are not exultant as God’s pure whimsy and that every pounce, twist and twirl is not a divine form of cat laughter?

How do we who have hidden our most sensitive, dreaming hearts in shells of abstract knowledge and numbed our most awake awareness in fear of further pain know anything at all?