In Anticipation of Shoots from Stumps

It has been a challenging few weeks.  Death has been too much on my mind -- deaths of both mentors and memories; deaths relational, institutional, and even intellectual.  That it all coincided with my birthday made the passings all the more poignant. 

I confess that I haven't handled it well.  Yes, I know that people die.  My affection affords no prophylactic barrier against mortality.  And yes, institutions have their own life cycle.  Sometimes they, too, pass away; more commonly they simply morph into some other, hopefully more relevant, permutation.  My head understands these things.

My head, however, is not the problem.

It's my stomach that feels the ache.  For days now - weeks, really - I have lived with a stone in my stomach that has weighted and sickened the inside of me while clouding, shrouding even, the outside.  You needn't bother to ask Lori; you can infer that I haven't been a joy to be around.  Tears have been my pastime.  Lament has been my song.  Thundercloud blue has been my color.

I have carried on the obligatory argument with myself, noting to my inner griever how blessed I have been to know these people - to have been touched by them, formed and enlarged by them.  Death doesn't change the fact that they have lived, and lived for good.  Their "wild and wonderful life," as the poet Mary Oliver describes it, has been food for countless hungry souls who, like me, are forever grateful that our lives intersected in such nourishing ways. 

For the institutions that are moving beyond my recognition I truthfully and humbly give thanks for the privilege of living and loving and serving among them for the time that was ours to share.  Through childhood and adulthood, respectively, those walls and the people who gathered within them have alternately cradled and framed me; challenged and beckoned me; anchored and animated me.  And the ideas they taught me - the beliefs and understandings, the principles and convictions, the clarities and even the ambiguities - have formed my skeletal structure.  That this acquired structure has come to feel more like an exoskeleton that is cracking so as to allow a different kind of growth and flight doesn't alter the truth of my gratitude for all the stability that it has afforded me throughout these enlivening years.  I find myself elsewhere now, and differently shaped, but that inherited structure has been both ladder and bridge.

I "get" all that.  I "know" it to be true.  My head puts forward a persuasive argument.  My gut, however, still seeks some spiritual, emotional emetic that would disgorge this aching stone.

A couple of years ago we had to cut down an oak tree behind the house.  It was a beautiful adolescent tree that the prior stewards of this farmstead had planted.  We had enjoyed its changing colors and its stately growth.  It was neither diseased nor damaged; its only offense was standing too near the solar array that we had installed a few years prior.  The oak was casting too large of a shadow.  We delayed, we turned our heads, but ultimately, with the help of a friend, we pulled the chainsaw rope and made way for the sunshine.  Then, too, our stomachs ached with the loss.  A short time later, an assessing arborist called our attention to a wounded catalpa tree in front of the house.  The giant tree with the giant leaves and seed pods was dangerously hollowed.  We followed the expert's advice and  grievingly turned away while the chainsaws once again did their work. 

Two stumps remained - one behind and one in front; amputations relentlessly reminding us of where life had once been.

And then something happened.  In true biblical fashion, shoots emerged from the stumps.  Life, it turns out, had not disappeared from those roots but merely been forced to find fresh expression.  And they have flourished.  We now have an oak "bush" out back and a catalpa explosion in front.  They look nothing like they did before, except for the leaves - extremities still gathering sunlight and embodying their inner selves.  A mother hen and her hatchling, escaping the confines of the chicken fence for afternoon strolls, nestle beneath the oak bush for comforting shade.  In more ways than one, it along with its parallel tree out front, are locations of life rather than death. 


Tenacious life. 

Morphing life.

Life unafraid and undeterred. 

And my soul has started toying with an emerging curiosity about what might grow out of these truncations so stark in my own story.  Picking up a stone that had made its errant way into the flower bed, I place it reverently beneath the oak branches - a nascent altar.  A token of possibility.

It isn't quite a purging -- an aching, after all, still remains --  but at least a symbolic act of hope.

And the commencement of a new spiritual practice:  waiting with that hope, and watching for emerging stems.

This Earth That Even Heaven Envies

Dew drops slung off the tips of my shoes in every direction as I made my early morning way to the chicken yard and back.  It hasn’t rained for days, but even the rain chains hanging from the roof gutters glisten with the dew of this cool and ample morning.  It’s too soon to call it “autumn”, but daylight is slower to open its eyes these mornings; earlier to close them in the evenings.  The chickens help me to notice these seasonal undulations that once transpired invisibly in the ether, well beyond my awareness.

Tomatoes are ripening by the crates full these days, and we struggle to keep up with the stewardship of them.  Peppers, too, in greater and greater diversity.  Dehydrators have been running almost non-stop.  Our personal salsa and marinara factory churns out jars and freezer bags, but still the countertop is covered.  It’s a prodigal time of year when I reach to recall what I must have been thinking when I planted all those seeds.  But it’s a smiling reach, because I relish in the abundance.

Yesterday, in anticipation of some friends who were joining us for brunch, I went out and dug a few potatoes, pulled an onion, plucked some peppers and a squash and united them with the prior evening’s eggs.  To be able to accomplish such a thing is surreal gratification. The prairie grasses, mature and stately by this point in the season, sweep with the breeze – a three-acre bristling sea with its own instinctual tidal flow.  Branches of the plum tree, apples and pears, sag low from the fruited weight.  We haven’t yet considered the options for tending to that sweeter harvest.  It is a wondrously inspiring time of year.

A well-known Christian “leader” of a particular persuasion recently blamed the epidemic of mass shootings on the teaching of evolution in our schools.  “We’ve taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised that they treat their fellow Americans like dirt,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.  It’s a clever turn of phrase, but the logic is flawed.  Setting aside for the moment the considerable and substantive issues involved with confusing the public educational mission with that of the faith community, that something subtler, more complicated and sinister likelier accounts for our violence towards each other is evidenced by the fact that a greater awareness of our kinship with the earth and the breadth of the natural world hasn’t engendered any more care of it than the other humans with whom we share it.  More poignantly, that “primordial slime” is used as a slur – a pejorative – is ample enough evidence of how scornfully we view the creation that is simultaneously ancestor, sibling and spouse.  A local politician recently penned a partisan screed in the weekly newspaper mocking the environmental concerns of the opposing party, lampooning all the handwringing about “supposed” climate change as "alarmist scare-tactics."

Never mind the scientific consensus.

Never mind the visceral experience of increasingly troublesome weather.

And never mind that it simply doesn’t matter.

As I watch the grasses sway, the mother hen tend to her hatchling; as I shade my eyes from the blinding color of the blossoms on the stem and marvel at the heaviness of the fruit and the profligacy of the garden; as I wipe the dew from the deck chairs to enjoy yet another breakfast sprung from the land in the coolness of the morning, I think about that image voiced by John in his climactic biblical vision of that time when God finally gets God's way:  “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

Out of heaven, in order to come down here.  Looking around me I think, “who wouldn’t?”

And I wonder what deters us from doing everything we can to reverence and partner lovingly and protectively with this glorious home that even heaven aches to join – whether there is a crisis or not?