As I walked around this evening, out again with the intent to purposefully notice my surroundings, I became acutely aware of the noise that surrounds me. The neighborhood hums with machinery, electricity’s high pitched whine, and the roar of generators. Even inside the room where I now sit, a machine drones away on the other side of the wall. Even at rest, the world here whirs.
What if this sound took on life in a different form and became color? Imagine what that world would look like, or any world where sound became color, as if synesthesia were possible for a day. What would different things we see become if they were sound? Would we respond to noise differently than we do now?
The way we view a place is, in part, the associations we have with the sound. I will always remember my months at Lincoln College, Oxford for the bells that rang through the city in the evening. I will remember Izmir, Turkey for the peddlers walking down the street calling out “Aygaz,” followed by a dinging bell, and Izmir, again, for the mosque calls ringing through the cannoned walls of apartments in the morning’s early hours like a thousand voices calling out all at once.
When I return to my home in Santa Cruz, I am always stunned by the purity of the silence at night, in the morning, and how it seems to flood over me like a blessing, my whole body giving itself to a quietness so beautiful, so rare and set aside from other experiences of places I know that it feels I enter into a kind holy space–my whole body sighing in a kind of inner relief.
But of course sound can be more than noise. It can also be beautiful–the voice of the ones we love is always a sound that resonates in our hearts with happiness, and what could be a better antidote to noise than that sound which is like music?
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered Franco Corelli’s voice as I was looking up “Torna a Surriento.” What a magnificent presence his voice has–rich with the intensity and depth of life that wells up from the longing in the soul that opera evokes so well, bringing the listener totally inside the moment of the sound rising from the singer’s body. Here is Corelli singing “O Pase d’ ‘o Sole.”
The noise of the world only makes sound and silence all the more precious.
What do you hear today? What are the sounds around you telling you?
Today my walk involved walking through Nehru Park to a grocery store in Yashwant place. The late afternoon light cast lovely shadows on the tree trunks. I love the twisted turns and organic lines of the trunks and the character they hold. No straight lines here, and that is a refreshing thing to behold. I love the freedom in twisting, turning forms. It’s as if the trees are dancing while holding still, rooted to the ground.
This is so different than the palms I passed on the way home who were all about straight lines and angles–as you can see below. It makes me think of the variety of personalities we have in the world, some of us are curved and turning lines, others of us straight angles. The diversity makes us richer.
I am including these observations so that those of you trying to do this or not sure where to go with your observations can see a couple of examples. The items you notice don’t have to be significant, just something you looked for, then gave particular attention to for a time.
The idea is to notice just one thing, but if you want to notice more, that’s fine. I am including these as examples. I’ll include one last one here so you can see a different type of observation possibility, the interesting things in the world around you, such as might be found at a grocery store. What I love about the grocery stores here in Delhi, and throughout India is how much can be fit into a small space, and how much color there is on the shelves. I wonder what other people are noticing today where you live.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing further research about Italian immigrants in San Francisco, San Francisco in the early 1900’s, reading some of Billy Collins’ poetry, editing a couple of articles to send out for possible publication, barbecuing pizzas with my husband and friends, listening in Spanish to some cultural programs about food in various regions of Spain, along with various other things important for me to keep abreast of things at my work, which this year, again, includes totally new systems and ways of approaching things.
Just One Thing—Simplify.
About three times a week I get to the swimming pool, the gym about twice, and I aim to go on walks, though recently these have been fairly short. While I’ve done a number of things I want to do, drawing, as I was doing during the summer months, has now diminished to less than one page of drawings a week in my sketchbook. Books I want to read wait on a table. The clarinet I finally got out of the carry case last year with the intention learning to play currently sits on the shelf. I want to feed the things I’m passionate about. The reality is that each of these things takes time. To sum it up, there are many more things I want to do than I have time to do. Whatever it is we want to do or be takes practice, and this includes reshaping our life to live in a way that enhances our own well-being and sense of wholeness. For decades, I have pondered Thoreau’s quote from Walden, “Simplify. Simplify.” This still isn’t easy to do.
This past week I viewed the program, “Killer Stress–A National Geographic Special with Robert Sapolsky.” Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist, biologist, and researcher at Stanford University, explores the effects of stress–how it ages us more quickly, reduces our health, and cuts into our well-being–and yet how multi-tasking and stress is actually valued and promoted in our culture. Stress is difficult to escape. We all live in a social system. How can we live as free people, rather than slaves to a system that positions competition, power and financial success as centrally important? Sopolsky’s research lead him to observe how a troop of baboons, animals that are known to be aggressive, combative and nonsocial, became peacefully cooperative and nonaggressive after the dominant males suddenly died off as a result of contracting tuberculosis. The encouraging news in this study is that even though aggressive and destructive habits had been the way the baboons had functioned for decades, when they entered a new social construct where the aggressive males died, the whole community was able to become peaceable, even when new baboons entered the community. (See more at “Warrior Baboons Give Peace a Chance.”) Maybe there is hope for us too.
In his essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Thoreau says, “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” In his essay, Thoreau admonishes readers to place their humanity before money, before laws– “policy is not morality,” suggesting that if we want to live humanely, we must place the way we relate to each other at the center. We must consider what it means to live wholly, what we mean when we say we want to live not as slaves to industry, but more fully.
What are we industrious about? What do we want to harvest?
So, how does this hopeful change where baboons learn how to live together peacefully apply to our own lives? Many of us continue to live in aggressive societies where community and connectedness are not held as central values, where diverse ways of seeing, being and unique contributions are not seen or held dear because the system is rolling down the track like a locomotive train, intent on getting on with whatever its own vision is. In her recent article on Brain Pickings,“The Shortness of life: Seneca on Busyness and The Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long,” writer Maria Popova quotes Roman philosopher, Seneca “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested…Life is long if you know how to use it.” This is a stunning, paradoxical thought. We have time! As Thoreau suggested, it’s not that we’re busy doing something–what is it we are busy about that eats the time that would allows to understand we are living fully? Are we nurturing our passions–the things that makes us feel connected to our heart’s deep need and fully alive? If life is long enough if we use the time we have to fully live, how do we reshape our lives to do that. If, like many of us, we find we need to be on the institution train for a period of time, how can we still make use of the station stops? How do we open the window and feel the breeze and make sure to look up and notice the dragon flies swarming above the nearby trees?
In the hopes of recovering more life and a sense of space inside myself, I’m aiming to practice the act of purposeful noticing–looking for one small thing each day to connect myself more to the heart of the days I’m living–to the physical world, and to the life of those around me. I want to release myself from the world of walls, at least briefly every day, and every day remind myself that I am alive in a physical world full of wonder. I reside in a body that is allowed to wander and walk here on this earth. Walking, Ferris Jabr tells us in his recent article in the , “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” not only improves our memory, attention, and staves off degenerating brain cells, it also, through its rhythmic quality, creates a mental state that nurtures creativity and innovative ideas. Now that’s wonderful news!
I’ve decided to take a small, probably slow walk each day, and will couple it with a practice Naomi Shihab Nye suggests people consider–the practice of writing down just a few lines a day, maybe three, for example, of things I notice and observe. A short walk and three lines are manageable. I plan to try this for 40 days, a length of time long enough to notice change but short enough to feel doable. My desire is to observe how this small act might shift my thinking, perceptions of time, and way of being and living to allow me more of a sense of freedom and connectedness to the physical world around me.
I began my first observation yesterday, with noticing the tree in the school yard that was suddenly cut down. The tree has been a focal point of observation I’ve returned to many a morning over the last seven years as I’ve watched birds gather in that tree–crows and kites mostly. Last year, the tree was struck by lightning and was in distress. Its center branches had dead. Then, yesterday morning, I heard the sudden crack from my apartment as the tree’s center trunk broke apart–the result of the school’s gardeners pulling it down. Only this past Tuesday I had been standing next to it, noticing the sap dripping down its sides at various points on its trunk, as if it were grieving over the recent difficulties it had experienced. All day, the gardeners were cutting up the trunk and branches. Now the tree is half its original size. Everything changes. What was once present, is suddenly gone.
Observation: Lime tree with fruit and blossoms
The photo here shows today’s observation, our lime tree, one year old and putting out an abundance of leaves, blossoms and tiny fruit. It is a happy tree, ready for a larger pot. We hauled up several new plant containers four flights to place on our balcony with the hope of enhancing our garden there. The lime tree is thriving. We had orange groves the entire time I was growing up. When I smelled the one blossom that’s currently open, I was reminded of my mother who always sent me orange blossoms in the mail after leaving home. Citrus blossoms are always sweet.
I’ll post later the other things I observe in the coming week, and invite you to try this along with me and let me know what subtle things begin to shift in your own awareness over the course of time–what it is you discover through the practice? Do you feel an increased sense of health, awareness of nature, gratitude, wholeness, connectedness to life, your neighborhood, or the world? What is it that happens when we practice grounding ourselves in place, when we pay attention to the suchness of things? If forty days is too long for you, try 20 or four and see how that goes–whatever feels right for you in your desire to shift things in your life.
being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land…
Love is the voice under all silences.
—
I want to listen inside that silence and notice the miracle of love that holds me up day by day.
I’m starting another year in India. Again, as I travel the streets I see the need everywhere around me. The need has been there even though I wasn’t here to see it. There is so much need in our world today. Often, it has seemed overwhelming, so enormous that it has made it difficult to start when I consider what it is I could do to respond to it. I am learning that the enormity of the problem is not what to focus on. Instead, it’s better to focus on the small thing that I know I can begin with, and to begin there. That small thing, like a seed can grow, and the small thing can be a help to those who receive it. In our world, often what is big is valued. What is abundant is sought after. But in the world of the heart, the small thing can be enough.
Several years back, while teaching a unit on the five major world religions, I noticed how in Judaism the 10 commandments say to rest on the sabbath right alongside the command to not kill and steal. I began to wonder why so much significance was given to resting. I usually felt I didn’t have enough time to complete the work I was given or felt I needed to do. As a result, I rarely took the time to do the things that fed my soul like writing or going out in nature. I felt I was only living half of a life.
Earlier, I had read portions of Wayne Mueller’s Sabbath, Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest and Renewal. The book planted an important seed and was a voice that enabled me to see that the unrest I was feeling about the obligation to work almost without ceasing was actually something others were experiencing as well, and that such an approach to life actually causes a kind of violence–an inner disturbance which can then be transferred outwardly into our lives. In his book, Mueller quotes Thomas Merton who said, “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” Reading that for the first time stopped me short. There was a deep truth there that called out to me, and I know I needed to learn from it.
Most of us want to do something to help make the world a better place, and as Desmond Tutu, Jim Wallace, and others on this short video describe, it doesn’t have to be something big. Small things matter. We don’t have to feel guilty about what we’re not doing or if we are doing enough. What matters, I think is not how much we do, but what we do with an open heart. Relationship matters. I’m struck by what Wayne Mueller says in this short video about what is enough. We can only hold so many eggs he says, and at a certain point, we try and hold one more egg and something will get damaged. “We can only love well, kindly, thoroughly, a very few number of people in the course of a human life.” Mueller explains, and he goes on to suggest that what we do with our lives, instead, is to hold a crucible of something small and true, to offer not miracles, but ourselves. This a place we can give something that is real and valuable. In that giving, he implies, is something of meaning, something true.
I like the way Wendell Berry’s poem below, explores the idea of how we can be stirred, from time to time, to begin something new, to go elsewhere. How often has it seemed that doing something more or moving on could be an answer to the dilemmas of life we are facing. Sometimes that is the right thing to do. We see as the poem moves on, however, that the place the speaker of the poem ends up actually going to is in his mind–to a quiet place where he can think, or not have to think at all–and instead, he watches light filling the space between leaves. This is the sabbath time, space among leaves where wakefulness can occur.
The Thought of Something Else Wendell Berry
1.
A spring wind blowing
the smell of the ground
through the intersections of traffic,
the mind turns, seeks a new
nativity—another place,
simpler, less weighted
by what has already been.
Another place! it’s enough to grieve me— that old dream of going, of becoming a better man just by getting up and going to a better place.
2.
The mystery. The old
unaccountable unfolding.
The iron trees in the park
suddenly remember forests.
It becomes possible to think of going
3.
—a place where thought
can take its shape
as quietly in the mind
as water in a pitcher,
or a man can be
safely without thought
—see the day begin
and lean back,
a simple wakefulness filling
perfectly
the spaces among the leaves.
While visiting southern California recently I got to wander out into the hills outside of Wildomar and experience again a landscape similar to the one I wandered in as a child. At first glance the landscape seems semi-barren. Though there are few, if any trees, low chaparral grows in abundance, especially the beautiful red California buckwheat. The ants especially loved this plant, and numerous flower petals spread in a mandala around the ant holes. The flowers have a sweet smell, and the seeds are edible. At sunset, the light made each thing on the earth’s floor stand out distinctly. So much texture in the bark of broken shrubs, scattered rock. The hillside were alive with their blossom’s red rust blush. Truth, beauty, and goodness abound when we set out to notice them. Standing in the presence of beauty is too much for one person to hold. Overwhelming beauty is humbling and helps us to see our place in the vastness of all that is. It enables us to understand that the world is not ours, it is shared.
Wildomar sunset
In the Harvard Gazette, Howard Gardner advocates revisiting the values of truth, beauty and goodness “suggests keeping lifelong portfolios of beauty, either in our brains or a physical catalog that chronicles the experiences, music, art, and more that we find beautiful over time.” I’m thinking of hummingbirds, how they feed frequently, coming back to the flower repeatedly in order to maintain substance. As we do this, what is beautiful, good and true expands in us.
With its wide valleys and minimal vegetation, southern California has a wonderful sense of openness, and the sunsets this summer carried me away into the ecstasy of their expansiveness, and the sense of freedom they invoke. The skies filled me with awe in the vastness they evoked. I wondered why everyone in the neighborhood had not thrown open the doors, and walked out into the arms of the world waiting for them to see the boundless beauty above and around them. The world is a wonder if we open our eyes to see it.
Wildomar countryside
So many people today are wondering how to live well, how to find their center. Returning to Gardner, he states that what we need to do now is to learn how to behave not just for “numero uno, or for your neighbors, but for a wider public.” One start, I think, would be to consciously look for beauty in the world. Notice it, delight in it and share it, and thereby help others to lift their hearts into a deeper understanding of their own connection to life and to each other.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” –Gandhi
“It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”
–Albert Einstein
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” –T.H. White, Once and Future King
Frequently this summer I’ve been looking at clouds, the way they grow and contract before my eyes, sometimes so imperceptibly I wonder if it’s happening, other times so rapidly I wonder how they can do it. Gazing at the sky may seem like a mundane thing to do, but I recall many a time as a child lying back on the chairs outside my house and watching them glide by for hours, morphing forms as they paraded by as if on a slow moving carousel.
There was something soothing about those quiet afternoons. They carried me into a place, that looking back on it now, I can describe as a place of communion. Like staring at a campfire, the experience enabled me to enter a state where the world dropped away and I was absorbed into the moment, fully present in the simplicity of being. I call it a state of communion because even now, years later, while cloud gazing I find myself entering the same place in the mind and body, connecting with the environment where words aren’t needed, nevertheless communication is happening. I see the images, color, shapes–they are all showing themselves to me and something in myself is responding with more than a mere physical reaction. I hold and behold the forms, and in doing so, I am learning about the changing nature of the world and how I participate in beauty.
Though I gazed at clouds more often as a child, still today when I look up at the sky after waking up or as I walk home from work, something in me longs for the the open sky I experienced as a child, the vast, spacious world the mind can wander in. A hazy, flat sky flattens the mind. On days when the haze lifts, my heart feels freer, more content and at home. It’s refreshing to be reminded that shapes can also have forms with soft edges that float.
Our connections to the environment we grow up with influence who we become and leave an indelible mark. The house my father built and that I lived in as a child in San Diego county was perched high on a hill looking over a wide valley. We lived in a rural area with hills rimming the distant horizon, a geographical location that shaped my soul, so to speak: Living there nurtured a value of open space and encouraged in me the qualities of observation, reflection, and of taking the long view of things, values fundamental to my understanding of the world.
Earlier this summer I was recovering from a knee injury. Because moving around was slow and uncomfortable, all walking became a focused effort, each step a meditation. Immediately the world felt smaller and more challenging as a result. There seemed to be so much I couldn’t do, and I was surprised by how vulnerable and limited the injury made me feel. During that time, I was visiting my brother. I rested on his deck one morning, looking up into the enormous billowy clouds. Once again the world grew into itself, the largeness of it stretching out with the length of sky like an enormous blue sheet hung out across the universe, shifting in the solar breeze. Little had actually changed except my perception. I couldn’t move any faster than before, but staring at the passing clouds reminded me of the larger reality I was a part of, and brought me back to that place of wonder I participated in as a child. Just as clouds change forms, so does my life, and any suffering I might experience. Any suffering I might know, however small or big, is just a part of the larger suffering of the world. In the world there is pain, but there is also great beauty. Both coexist, and reality is a state of flow between them in different measures.
Not all of us live continuously in a world with natural beauty. I know I don’t. Countless others are like me–those who live in smog choked cities, those without access to green space and parks or who spend most their time in rooms without windows working under fluorescent light. Though we may not have access to it, the world’s immense beauty continues on. When I am in a place with natural beauty, I want to really notice it, pausing to take it in, to be thankful, and to consider all the processes of nature it took to create what I am experiencing. I want to remember often how open skies and time spent beholding them can restore.
When I am in a place that lacks beauty, when I find myself living there, I can also look up at the sky and know that beauty’s absence I that place will help me to recognize how precious beauty is when and wherever it is found. I can let this awareness fill me with gratitude that I have seen beauty, have beheld it, and hopefully do so again in the future.
I am reminded of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath’s 1999 poem, and how it values the small, quiet moments, emphasizing the importance of noticing and learning to rest in them, moments like looking at clouds.
VII
by Wendell Berry
Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.
Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.
The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.
What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.
This is a poem about transition, and reorientation of life around a compass that is directed by an interior understanding of ourselves, an understanding that arises out of time spent in nature that allows us to re-see and revise who we are in connection to that understanding. I was especially drawn to the lines that say, “and old things will fall down,/we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like/burnt paper.”
Today I am rereading the piece again, and exploring the words that imply that our egos–the desire to become someone, or somebody–to be important or powerful, is a trap. In our culture and society we are encouraged to rise, compete, gain importance and control of whatever it is we are learning or doing. Lawrence is suggesting, however, it is something very different that makes us feel alive.
He names the forest as a place to rediscover ourselves. A walk in a forest places us in a much bigger life system, a system outside of the orderly and familiar–a place of awe if you will. This forest doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal forest, but any place that gets us out of our self-containers where we allow position, power, and control of knowledge to define us. Lawrence is suggesting that we let go of these so that in that the definitions of ourselves open to redefinition. This allows us to step into a place where things are likely to be unpredictable and not particularly comfortable or hospitable. In taking this step, we will then be able to encounter another self–one that doesn’t make up stories, one that opens to what it really is that makes life meaningful. All the fake versions of who we are, Lawrence suggests, will fall apart in the face of this knowing. We will see the flimsy nature of that self for what it is and laugh at it. Institutions may prop up something of who we are, but our true selves aren’t really found there, according to Lawrence. Our true self is something more complex.
I am reading the poem again, and wondering about how to live in such a way that I am not afraid to go into the forest Lawrence writes of. Some people have come to a new kind of understanding of themselves in relationship to the world through such ventures, and it has reorient them to open to a new way of viewing both themselves and the world. After this, though, remains the difficult work of how to live within that understanding while still being a part of the world’s social-economic structure. This is the scary part because it’s difficult to do.
Gandhi said, “I do not know any religion apart from human activity. It provides a moral basis to all other activities which they would otherwise lack…” There are people who would like to participate more fully in helping others in their communities, who want to do work that doesn’t contribute to environmental problems, to work on a small organic farm, for example, or people who want to write, do art, or help address issues of injustice–these are the interests and skills they want to offer to the world. The economic structure we live in doesn’t make it easy to make a living wage while doing this work, however. Other work must be taken up in order to make one’s way in the world. Bill Moyers cites The Economist in 2008 on his website, ‘“After you adjust for inflation, the wages of the typical American worker—the one at the very middle of the income distribution—have risen less than 1% since 2000. In the previous five years, they rose over 6%.”’ You might want to do the work your heart told you was the right work for you went to the forest, so to speak, but you would have a very difficult time getting by in the world.
In deed, it is difficult for the majority of people to make a decent living in America these days. Why is that, and how can that be changed? Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stilglitz in his recent New York Times article, “Inequality is not Inevitable,” explains, “The true test of an economy is not how much wealth its princes can accumulate in tax havens, but how well off the typical citizen is — even more so in America where our self-image is rooted in our claim to be the great middle-class society. But median incomes are lower than they were a quarter-century ago. Growth has gone to the very, very top, whose share has almost quadrupled since 1980…If we spent more on education, health and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” Change is not the result of a single action within ourselves or in society. It is the result of practice over time, the values we come back to over and over. In our culture, we believe our safety net is whatever it is we can create ourselves through our work and activism. These are certainly needed. We are part of each other, and as Stilglitz indicates, spending more on education, health and infrastructure have a larger strengthening effect on the economy, and I would add, the morale of people as a whole.
So, what does this mean for those of us who have walked out into the forest, felt the cold, and watched institutions curl up like burnt paper? We participate in making the reality we live in. This leaves us with the need to both work on our own self-awareness, and development of wholeness and a peaceful life for those around us. Out of that place of individual practice and understanding regarding what it takes to develop that inner balance we can ask ourselves how it might lead us to act to help create those conditions for others as well.
Stilglitz described in his article the economic reality of how the greed of wealthy few has a negative on society as a whole, and how spending more on educating people can strengthen the economy as a whole. Similarly, there is a spiritual economy. When we strengthen that base of self-awareness and humility through regular practice, we can develop better relationships with ourselves and with those around us. The two are connected. Lawrence has titled his poem “Escape.” Is this how it works–the walk into the forest is a way to escape a false reality, but couldn’t it also be a way to put us in touch with reality so that we can hear the voice that calls us to be and do what we are put on earth for?
I sit looking out over my yard while I write, the sun neither too warm nor too weak– a perfect gentleness for a summer afternoon. I see the stone steps under the grape arbor, and the thyme that fits between the cracks, and think of how those cracks are like the summer holiday, the space in my life that I am hungry for. The quiet. I sit here satisfied simply to absorb the green and the random dove or falcon call. At unexpected moments the scent of redwood or pine wafts through. Restaurants and movies can be good. Shopping for supplies is necessary. But many of us also need to walk in the woods, go down to the river or ocean, sit by flowers or a slab of granite, or get our hands in the dirt to find ourselves again. I am one of those. This morning I decided to read Rilke again, and pulled from my shelf the volume of Selected Poems From Rainer Maria Rilke with translation from Robert Bly. In his A Book for the Hours of Prayer, Rilke writes,
1.
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
—
As a traveler, I’ve circled around the globe exploring and discovering, but there is another kind of travel, that of the inner pilgrim, traveling within trying to understand what it means to live and how to live meaningfully so that we can learn who we are and why we are here on earth–what it means when we meet and greet each other, what it means to be in relationship to others, to the earth, to this place in time. Like Rilke, I don’t know if I will ever achieve this, but this is my attempt.
Herb Bed at Gratitude Gardens
Here on my land while watering the garden, pulling weeds, or planting, I realize how deeply satisfied I am, how little it takes to make me feel content. I feel settled inside, whole. All the years of travel and exploration, these have been good. But the continuous striving that the workplace emphasizes seems irrelevant here in a garden that holds to an organic pace of being. Things grow according to the pace they were meant to grow at. The gardener nurtures them along by making sure there is adequate soil and light, plants the plants with others they are compatible with, tomatoes with basil for example, or strawberries with borage–but the true becoming is there in the mystery of biology and the seed. All the years of working and the practice of my work, reading, writing, and then I come home to the garden and sense I have found my true self, or it is at least a place I want to find myself in.
A metaphor for life, the garden has much it can help us understand about ourselves: that there are seasons and cycles for everything, the value of weeding to protect the life you are nurturing, that plants have personalities so to speak–some need more sun, others shade, which plants help them grow better, make them taste sweeter, and which protect. Gardens take work. If you want something to grow, you have to put in the effort by digging, planting, tending, and harvesting. Gardening can be a contemplative act. When you get your hands in the soil, you start to understand the connections to your own life. These are the connections I want to explore and know through our experiment in living here at Gratitude Gardens, a garden we are slowly building over the years here on our land.
At Gratitude Gardens we will raise our food and use the garden as a place to connect to the creative process in a variety of forms, for writing and art. We have planted herbs, flowers, grapes and fruit trees, and this summer are expanding the raised beds to make way for future food. Most anything we practice intentionally with our hearts can be a spiritual path that will teach us more of how to live if we are willing to view it in that way. For me, building a garden is an important part of that practice, and I want to believe there are others like me who feel hungry for the quiet, want to connect or reconnect to the earth and learn how to listen to what it has to tell us about life.
Gratitude Garden in its Beginning Stage
Adam and Eve left the garden. Everyone leaves. It’s the path of learning, knowing, of growing up. But we can come back too. We can make a garden. Yes, it’s made by the sweat of the brow, but that is an important part of learning what the gift of a garden is, and learning how to find yourself in one.
Maybe you, too, “have been circling for a thousand years,” or feel you have, and like Rilke, “still don’t know you “are a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.” Why not go on inner pilgrimage? Discover and claim your path so you can find through that work how it is you can come back to the garden.
I love the character of this particular tree that I have drawn. It is inspired from a photo (p. 150) in Giorgio Locatelli’s cookbook about Sicilian cooking, Made in Sicily. The ancient olive trees in Sicily, Locatelli says, are called Saracens. This tree reminds me of of the ancient olive I saw at Delphi, Greece, about eight years ago. Its trunk was so large it may possibly have been a thousand years old–or at least that’s what it seemed like when I saw it.
Ancient olives have such character in their forms. I wonder, if the trees could talk, what might they say? In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, olive trees are a symbol of life because traditionally they were the source of fuel used for light also for cooking, as well as in ceremonies.
Olives are one of my favorite foods, and their oils can be quite distinctive. Recently, a friend brought my husband and I a bottle of olive oil from his area in Alvito, Italy, a few hours south of Rome. The oil was golden in color, light in flavor, and had a wonderfully surprising floral after taste. Olive oils vary according to climate, soils, and the way they are produced.
Olive trees with their silvery leaves, great trunks, and ability to survive through periods of serious changes in weather or lack of water, are trees that truly age beautifully. Take care of them, and they will continue to produce fruit for perhaps millennia. That’s down right amazing.
I hope I can become as beautiful as such a tree when I become ancient.
When I return to my home in Santa Cruz, I am always stunned by the purity of the silence at night, in the morning, and how it seems to flood over me like a blessing, my whole body giving itself to a quietness so beautiful, so rare and set aside from other experiences of places I know that it feels I enter into a kind holy space–my whole body sighing in a kind of inner relief.
Anna Citrino---Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage 