What Nature Teaches: On Suffering and Steadiness

My "neck o' the woods" -- photo by Judith Deem Dupree

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine blog on May 8, 2015

You may view the original blog post HERE.

I live in the southwest, or, more particularly, the far southwest corner of this great, rugged-ragged hunk of earth―where it ends in an endless seascape. It―San Diego County―is an unordinary panorama, with its potpourri of terrains and neighborhoods and breathtaking shorelines.

Further inland, beyond the continuous clots of habitation, a long, slow rise unfolds―undulating hills and creviced valleys peppered with flocks of live oak and manzanita, strewn with sage, the “heather” of our terrain. And yes, this nearly-uni-season haven―daydream of many an east coast “survivor,” is also an ongoing, four-season lesson in durability and fragility…endurance and defenselessness.

Some days ago the wind lashed at us again: It comes as a thief, a wild beast racing free, pouncing, devouring, sucking the lifeblood from all things green, sucking the soul from life. Conjuror of fiery death. Santa Ana, they call it. Or devil wind, appropriately, breeder of fire. Oh, they are not frequent, but once a lifetime is many times too often.

We who live in the sprinkling of small villages that cling to the backcountry hills―savoring their timeless simplicity/eccentricity―have learned to live with our ears tuned for this telltale roar. The howling voice of nature gone insane.

In one of these fires, a friend lost everything but her life, and nearly that. She has written a book that takes us through the fear, the horror that she experienced―and deaths too grisly to describe, too near and known to forget. Ultimately she has come into abundant life. The transformation from victim to “victor” was not, of course, quick and easy. But today she celebrates the new radiance of living, and we feed upon the richness of her testimony! (You may check out her book, The Fire Outside My Window, at her website: sandramillersyounger.com.)

Twice through our years here I have been paralyzed with such fear, watching the great trees beside (and fringing) our house groan and teeter with their incessant whipping, felt the crescendo of crashing limbs upon our shattered deck, inches from our windows. I have seen the dark bloom of smoke on the near horizon, the way it flares to crimson and consumes the sky. I have coughed incessantly in the acrid air. (And yes, we have fled, wisely, when the wind turned its dark face toward us.)

And so I have become, gradually, both “tenacious and tentative.” I have forged something akin to strength, to endurance―qualities I never claimed, never fully understood.

Nature teaches us such stern lessons: Seek its beauty, solace, incomparable inspiration. Memorize and celebrate its great and small particularities―treasures beyond description, beyond the artist’s brush or camera lens . . . and carry them lightly. Holy sustenance. Let them “feed the stream” that feeds us, that balances us when all the smallness and dailyness, the shriveledness of life closes us in. That gives us breath when we are sour with despair.

That teaches us, over and over, to inhale and release. Love and let go.

Now each sunrise and sunset that my friend experiences upon that once fiery mountain is a radiance of a new sort. The gift of endurance and its wordless wonder is born from the ashes of utter defenselessness.

I have seen, and known, this life-taught gift again and again.

There are many heartbreaks, a slight or brutal chain of them draped upon us all. To live is to come to terms with suffering, to come to birth in a new landscape. Whether or when we are brutalized by the weather of nature or the nature of mankind, or the distorted nature of our own cells, we may search out a way to see beyond the rubble.

All losses are not finally, ultimately, losses. A house and its heritage, our history, is not our life. We cannot understand the heights of wholeness, the miracle of eternal Now, until we know this.

Daily we face the endless unraveling of life across this haunted earth, and across the street, and in our sometimes haunted homes, and our throats choke up. We have to mourn; it is a gift and a tithe and a demand that God lays upon us―and yet, soon or later, we turn/are turned once again to the delicacy and clumsiness of that dailyness we live in. Of course! It must be so; we are not meant to mourn our way through the days.

No, Christ mourned merely for a moment before the tomb of His friend Lazarus―wept with his grieving sisters. And then . . . He turned back to the tomb and called out: “Come forth.”

Another dear sister discovers that a fire is raging through her body. It is not benign. Her new Landscape is both uncertain and quite certain. I am mourning for one long moment with/for her. Her eyes crinkle with uncontained love for all the varied dear ones sharing time and bread and written-down words and pungent herbs. There is a Table spread before her. She is living to the uttermost, readying for the eternal Now.

The call to us each, I believe, is to come forth. To fully live―in but not for the things and ways and means that have necessarily engaged us, and yes, entombed us. We forbid them to define, to engulf, to drive us to fear the frenzies that drive the world. The gift is to learn to dwell with steadiness upon the desert of smallness, wade steadily through the swamp of misery. Without becoming small. Without allowing pain, loss, to devour the holiness of this-day-given.

We can live broken-mended on the raw edge of life―without edginess, knowing cell-deep that all,all of life, is both durable and endurable. Fraught with peril, seasoned with grief, and raucous with joy. Timeless . . . and so very fragile.

We are created to embrace and release, over and over. To find a way to face the roar of wind without collapsing. To rise from a fearful crouch. To stoke our wounded soul on sudden sunrise.

Finding Our Way in a Complex World: Blue upon Blue

Blue Sky photo in the public domain

A reprint from the Ruminate Magazine blog

See Original Post from January 27, 2015, HERE.

The day is brilliant―a wash of purity across the often-muddy sky, an opulent blue so intense it defies the concept of endless space. Surely it is a fascia that cups and covers the earth and floods our dowdy souls with its unnameable azure-cerulean-cobalt. 

In this moment’s proclaiming, even the word “blue” defies definition. It begs language we do not have for color we do not see with eyes alone. 

Once in a while, by our earth-heavy standards, we can see beyond vision. One blink, and suddenly our corneas are washed in that same purity, and world and sky and space shunt aside for a flicker of a moment. Long enough to know a hint―a tint―of Heaven, if we crave it so. We need it so―twice in a while. Once to convince us, once to remind us to imprint the unnameable upon our dull blue-seeing.

Of such is the Kingdom we sense just beyond the next rise. We need to head there, transplanted out of the blue that we know beneath a sudden altar above.

Yes, because earthbound we are!―tiptoeing or galumphing into a new year, dragging our baggage and bearing our gifts. Still trying to find a fit in this second millennium Anno Domini, here on this small outpost. Shaving everything down to a size we can handle, can tuck into the cerebellum―or perhaps, dump in the back bedroom where our unknowns and leftovers and last year’s wannabes often end up.

We are reluctant or we are determined . . . even hopeful: We are yearning for life as normal―a continuity, a grounding beyond our wanderlust.

Perhaps it is Wonderlust that will save us.

It becomes harder today, rowing into tomorrow. The “knowns” that we once lived by―or thought we did, paid heed to, woke up to every morning―are shifting rather suddenly, perhaps inexorably. Only a cosmic blink ago, we were huddled in caves and crannies at the brink of flickering campfires.

Today we homosapiens are sown across the face of earth, but oh, so precariously. Too often now we see, or become, victims of ravage―man’s worst nature or nature’s harsh rebellion. The “unknowns” have swept upon us, swept us off our souls’ narrow peninsulas like flotsam and jetsam. We are, we oh-so-modern pilgrms, drifting off on dinghies that have lost their mooring.

Physically, or not, we are adrift.

We circle the globe on silver wings beneath an endless sky, and see little more than the smog that blocks the busyness below. An apt metaphor for the way our civilization has evolved. We “see” what we have trained our eyes to witness. So it has always been, but never with so much of a muchness to flail and filter through.

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase. – Daniel 12:4      

The Word of God says it, and noted writer Alvin Toffler saw it coming:

Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of ‘too much change in too short a period of time.’ Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a ‘super-industrial society’. This change overwhelms people, he believed, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving people disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation’—future shocked. –Wikipedia    

Adrift beneath that sudden bluebeyondblue. Rowing through a sky full of our debris. Chasing something less than rainbows.

It was ever thus, both this propensity toward rushing forward and the heart’s innate resistance. We simply have tools in our hands and behind our brows that have taken us further, faster, from familiar shores.

We are “loster” than our grampas―intricately wrapped, engulfed in our strange new circuitries, mastering the invisible forces and illogical logics of an unseen universe. Twittering through the rocks and rills, through mountains, past ancient borders drawn by man to guard what now we know is never really, fully ours. Wanderlust.

“Hier stehe Ich! Ich kann nicht anders.” Martin Luther said it―said it well.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

There is a way to stand guard over what must not be lost, and finding it is a life-theme: Learning to grasp it when it suddenly takes shape “within.” Gripping what we discover cell-deep when we are tempted to equivocate or hunker. It is a bulwark―a hedge against the harshness or great moral laxity around us. When we “stand,” we row back against the tidal wave of all the atrocities and apostacies. It often comes to us, this new perception, when we are most down and dependent . . . lost in that sea of angst that has no shores.

Suddenly we have oars. And direction.

Today, the world stood still―right here before me―for an instant. For a lifetime. I offer you this gift of blue upon blue within blue beyond our ken . . . beyond our broken hearts, beyond our fixing. Look up. It is well; all is well with your soul.