Prayers with Wings

Dove in Flight-public domain

Oaks and a few struggling pines snug down into this pocket valley, offering refuge from the mid-day heat. Above the aged line of treetops, a barren hillock lunges upward, step by jagged step. From where I sit, this shady dent in the earth is the palm of God’s great hand.

Beyond me lies “the world” and all its machinations, its splendors, its complexities, its uncounted woes

A simplistic scenario, of course. Woe and splendor are played out here as elsewhere. But for the moment, I can settle back beneath the branches of this gnarly old behemoth and pretend we are sequestered here together.

We see beyond us the long, tangled-scrub heights, a fairly formidable barrier, and beyond that the great unknown where “the rest of the world lives and dies.” It is, for now, beyond our seeing.

Now let's imagine sudden wings upon our backs. We are able to rise above these “formidable” heights and see beyond. The heights have shrunk beneath us, and now breadth is our barrier. So much of a muchness! Too much to take in, to compress into a soul-scape sized to our perceiving.

And once again we are instantly equipped for this great transposition. We have only to lock our eyes upon some small, distant point . . . and we are there. It lies before us, demystified.

Now we see with unaccustomed clarity, close up, what once was simply an unknown―or a vague perplexity, a perhaps dangerous complexity, with attributes that distance had distorted. Now we know what is, and our response is subject to our sudden fuller vision.

Back and forth we go, from one compelling spot or scene to another, taking in the new landscape, perceiving what is in the context of all that lies around it―all we never really knew before.

And then, back once again in our familiar “pocket,” we are changed; we are spoiled for the old margins and myopias that so long constricted us. We will go out beyond the barriers of height and breadth, on the wing of expanded thought…on the Wing of Prayer. We will see, or more aptly, perceive, and we will know. And we will listen for the Word that puts it all in focus.

Vision . . . the point of this small, homely metaphor. Vision creates the kind of prayer that leaps all barriers of land and mind and spirit. And of course, prayer creates the kind of Vision that knows no barriers. It is this sacred synergy that draws us to that God-filled dimension, “a little lower than the angels,” where the real work of the Kingdom is done.

A great leap of faith indeed.

Vision . . . that insight/hindsight/foresight Begotten within us when we aren't gnawing on the bones of earth. We often have wings when we least expect and most need them—and now we feel the push and rush of wind beneath our aspirations. This is an uncommon-common gift of God, this perception. It is meant to be ordinary—which is why it is extraordinary.

Humanity is, by nature, bred to think beyond our small world-set, but it is our own questing thoughts (and those of others) that guide us. When God moves upon us, He infiltrates; it is a beautiful Awakening. Our responses to ordinary become, if we choose, extraordinary. Seeing beyond sight. Knowing beyond our staid or heated opinion. Our conjectures and mental-emotional particularities are confirmed or amended or shredded—with sudden and often compelling clarity. For the smallest reasons, by our reckoning. It is, perhaps, the difference between begrudging and believing. The schism between pouting and praying. It is meant to become our ordinary, this Second Sight—for greater reasons than we can imagine, by the reckoning of God. And this is the ground laid for prayer.

When this wonderfully real Gift comes, it comes at the point of sacrifice—our willing escape from that prison-of-mind which long constrained us. When we are touched by this costly commonality—unity—this hidden treasure released in us and by us, we are free. We become real. More real than we ever pretended to before. And everything looks different.

In our stumble of living, there is refuge from our raw responses. We are, when we plead, held in the palm of God’s great hand, to learn and to tell back what we now see.

Our prayers will have wings.

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.

Weeping with the Elephants...

Photo by Heidi McKinley

As a conclusion to the four-part series "The Elephants in Our Living Room," I post this photo by Heidi McKinley. 

It is common knowledge that elephants weep...mourn for their slain herd-mates...over the destruction of their habitat.... 

Elephants are emotional "beings."

We are called to weep for them....

The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 4

African Elephants -- Public Domain (AnimalGalleries.org)

Part Four of a Four-Part Post

Awww, who are we to say "NO!"? And who would listen? Not the shadowy purveyors of shark fins or elephant tusks and rhino horns. Not the oil-soaked barons with their winsome promises and frankenfrack realities, or the tinkerers of witches' brews that foul our soils and bodies. Not legislators who feed at the trough of power.

And, of course, not because of a few cranky voices; no NO is loud enough in itself to be heard and reckoned. "They" have smirked a thousand times at NO.

But "NO!" is the only force, the single word we have. The MLK "NO!". The Gandhi "NO!". The NO that is fixed and immutable. Ground-swell NO. Finger-pointing NO. NO that stalks with constant footage and solid rhythm and irrefutable evidence. That notes  the sullied by their bloodied hands.

If. If we care enough to do this kind of "NO!", to do this "STOP!"

Most of us, as I said, are consumed by life's demands. But many of us are also blinded by our toys―and yes, our ploys. Oblivious to or paralyzed by the dying of a natural world once rich and ripe―teeming with irreplaceable, unimaginable, breathtaking diversity: immune to the magic of all things winged and finned and limbed―and the incredible variety of flora that sustains them.

In this world grown pinched and crowded, every tiger leaves his perfect pelt stretched upon each wall. Every doodad carved of ivory gathers dust upon our shelves―totems of the devil's delight for our triviamania. Every lithe sea creature slicked and sickened by oil, or dragged from the waves for senseless slaughter, ends up in our boat . . . . All  this will rebound upon us all.

For this is the final seduction: The shameless buying and selling and reshaping of the human soul. The trinketing of earth that feeds our vanities.

Enough is not enough for us. Never. Not in the board rooms, nor the sullied halls of congress. Not across the sweep of our society, no―not when bigger-smaller, newer-sleeker-better is parked across the street. Or in our pocket. Or wedged into our living room, where it fits so nicely and defines us so well, and matches the carpeting . . .

Or did, until the elephants came, in single file, a dreg of rumpled ghosts.

We must make room for them, these iconic creatures. Here in my home, and yours. We must weep for them, with them; cry out, call out, trumpet in their singular voice, tell the dawdling world of their distress, their demise . . . and make sacred space for them, safe in their own milieu. Before the last of them lies butchered on the bloodied soil.

Or it won't be long now.

Will we ride into history on the back of our beloved "mastodon," the gentle beast-nonpareil-progenitor on this Ark that is earth? Will we even know what we have forfeited? Noah is not waiting with a gangplank and an open door. The boat is pulling away emptied.

Open your door. 

List of Information and Statistics relevant to above:

*According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, 96 African elephants are killed per day for their ivory tusks. This is called poaching and is one of the primary reasons for their population decrease. The other major component to their population decline is the loss of their habitat due to human encroachment and deforestation. Nin Ninety-six elephants are killed every day in

Statistic: "More than 100,00 elephants were poached in Africa between 2010-2012. (National Geographic Society)

Although it's technically illegal to buy and sell ivory from freshly killed elephants, the sale of older ivory is still perfectly legal in much of the U.S. -- including California.

And since it's so difficult to distinguish between new and old ivory, the state's ivory market, the second largest in the U.S., has continued to skyrocket. In fact, the proportion of ivory offered for sale in California that is likely illegal has doubled in the last eight years. (NRDC)

---------------------------------------------

"Tiger numbers in the wild are thought to have plunged from 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century to between 1,500 and 3,500 today." (http://bigcatrescue.org/tiger-facts/)

-----------------------

Bees are a 'keystone species', and honey bees especially, are regarded as ‘canaries in the mine’ – an indicator of wider environmental damage and problems – a warning that action needs to be taken to rectify a dire situation, one that potentially affects not only honey bees but also other insects and creatures up the food chain.

Honeybees are dying at astronomical rates in the United States, Canada, and Europe, a phenomenon which could potentially have dire effects on the world economy and agricultural ecosystem.

http://www.bees-and-beekeeping.com/honey-bee-deaths.html

The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 3

Elephant Odyssey at the San Diego Zoo

Part Three of a Four-Part Post

A world without bees and butterflies, dancing flower to flower? It's happening.

Big Chem brews the dark magic that kills the weeds that kill the soil that kills the blooms that feed these tiny grace-notes. This is the house that Chem built.

Chemicals and escalating diseases and pests―and God knows what else―are the death of them.

There is no compensation for the demise of the honeybee. Or the Monarch, our king of butterflies, whose milkweed staple has been largely eradicated. Or, indeed, the great striped cat, pattern-perfect in its timeless life-rhythm. Or . . . in a lovely-strange, impossible sense, the elegant "caprice" that is a dolphin―so peculiarly akin to the lumbering grace of its brother, elephant. Immutable diversity, not a bone alike. But ah, such amazing tenderness; such wisdom . . . such humanness.

So unbelievably akin to us. Our shadow selves.

A frenzy of bees gone insane? A shark drowning in its own life-home-waters, fins hacked off for a few bowls of soup? The horns of a rhino ground for a useless tonic? This is a real insanity, a malignancy that metastasizes daily. The list goes on and on, swells and feeds and breeds. Different rationales, varying methods, one over-arcing mindset: Gain. Prospering. At any cost to environment and ultimately, life on earth.

Most of us, in our once-blessed LaLaLand, are not directly guilty. But by neglect we harbor the unconscionable among us―say, ivory dealers who, with virtual impunity (through native poachers) are steadily slaughtering earth's timeless herds―nearly a hundred a day, official estimate!* And what of those within our nation's boundaries who willfully trade with or provide transport for certain foreign fishing industries―despite their well-known brutality. Supporting the agonizing deaths of great fish―to stoke frivolous appetites far beyond our shores! Where is the anger at such desecration?

A forfeiture that too often comes with nothing more than a "Tsk!" or a woeful shake of head. The world is dying of Tsk!.

All this, and more―infinitely more―is transacted daily from our shores with our implied "consent." With our consent―us, enlightened America? The land of the free and the brave?

Where are the brave hiding out? God bless the burgeoning movements, the NGO's and enviro-activists, and others who carry their placards and call out our spineless ways. But they are too few, spread thin among the battlefields of this age's travesties.

We in the background of this legacy of death-based greed go on with our undeniably busy lives with little thought for such atrocities . . . offering little-to-no demand for reproach and restriction. It simply doesn't fit into the needs, the mindsets of our already complicated state of being. But by this unawareness, or passivity, or disengagement, we allow evil to triumph. And yes, our earth's historic die-off is largely that. A historic betrayal indeed.

Why the disconnect? Because we do not care enough to see enough to do enough? To say "STOP!"?         

To find a way to do "STOP!"?

to be continued...

The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 2

Photo in the Public Domain from The Dodo.com

Part Two of a Four-Part Post

A couple of years back, late summer, Southern California in unending drought:

The bees searched my shriveling yard day after day for fresh blossoms. Not speaking bee, I couldn't explain this dearth to them. Finally, one-overheated morning, and with an undeniably overheated heart, I fed them―from shallow pans laid out across the patio. Each container was dribbled with thin tides of sweet-water brew, dotted and criss-crossed with small rocks and gnarly twigs for landing.

They came, these sleekly shaggy little refugees. A few, and more. And more. Day after day they met me at the back door, waiting. Learning me, knowing. They circled me in a halo, walked my skin, tangled in my hair, sometimes nibbled me―a slight tickle, perhaps to see if I were made of sugar. They never "bit the hand that fed them." And around the rims of each pan they clustered and waited. Waited for life.

For more than a few days, it was like this―calm enough, and almost routine. Something of a fairy tale, a small and intimate cross-species undertaking-understanding. One bee hovered on the tip of my finger, and I whispered to it, consoled it, watched its tiny  mandibles twitch, as if wringing its hands in telling of its hunger.

Somehow, strangely, I was mama, and these, my diminutive family. And a shared grief.

But then the newbie's suddenly showed up. The word had spread. Wave after wave of bees, several varieties. It was bedlam. Oh, what was wrong with them? They fought, climbed savagely over each other, drowned in the sparse quarter-inch of brew, a tide of floating bodies―or jerked through the air and dropped to the pavement in a witless frenzy  . . .spinning, twitching until their lifeless little selves were spent.

They came to me in extremis. Beyond feeding. As suddenly as it began, it ended. It had to. I gathered up my pans and my pain.

Strangely, a year later, bees returned―as if their clan had been told the story. A few, at first, scoping the scene, I guess. Never many, and not for long, but they greeted me once more beyond the door, circled me . . . with hope and hunger. I stood in silence. And left, and left them hungry. A day or two of dwindling and it was over.

The ache in my guts and soul have never dimmed. I had become, in my well-meant ignorance, a part of their death-dance. Their plaint still echoes through me like a buzz-saw in an emptied room, describing absence.

And so I have a hive―oh, a wealth of flourishing hives!―back here behind my eyes, anchored in field after field of clover.

to be continued....