Dear Friend,
I fell asleep on Tuesday reading John Muir's Spiritual Writings. It was unnerving and glorious. I recognized many of my own words in his. Like the exact same words. A dear friend suggests intimate friendship is the coming together of two people whose first response is:
Wait. You too?
John Muir: Friend.
Muir, I think, saw the things that perhaps we are seeing, or maybe longing to see: That rocks and trees and birds and we are all words of God. Not God, but God’s words. Each an equal and essential syllable or line or stanza of the same great poem.
Isaiah 55:12-13 - The Message
“So you’ll go out in joy, you’ll be led into a whole and complete life. The mountains and hills will lead the parade, bursting with song. All the trees of the forest will join the procession, exuberant with applause. No more thistles, but giant sequoias, no more thornbushes, but stately pines— Monuments to me, to God, living and lasting evidence of God.”
After falling asleep to Muir, I dreamt of rewilding - a word I stole from Barbara Taylor Brown months ago, and still haven’t returned. (And yes…I do recommend you click on the link, but only when you have some time to listen.) Rewilding is a word that I have been hanging with most days, and the word that slept beside me that night. Rewilding. Brown said this about it:
I’ve started wondering about what … a subsistence spirituality might look like. It’ll never sell. It sounds way too meager. But wouldn’t it be interesting to cultivate a way of being with God and one another, that is lean enough to live in the wilderness for as long as necessary?
I think of rewilding as walking right out of the cages we have built for ourselves and leaving them behind. Walking into the wilderness (in community) and listening for God's voice in all creatures. Recognizing that creation is filled with creatures. Recognizing that there are only creatures in God's great handiwork. Recognizing that each creature - each star, each mountain, each tree, each rabbit sings to God’s glory. In my dream, I recognized, somehow, and I embraced the holy scripture of creation, and had a sense of the Holy Spirit moving through it.
(I am staking no claim to any special seeing or hearing. This was a dream. No more.)
Another dear friend, Dr. MC McDonald writes (and I have lightly paraphrased):
The word ‘truth’ comes from the Proto-Germanic “having good faith,” and the Proto-Indo-European for “tree.” I laughed when I saw that because I know you’ll love it. But also because it helped me to understand truth in a way that I never have. The truth is as steadfast as an oak. It is something you can lean on. Truth, like a tree, slowly pulls together these disparate components from the earth - water, sunlight, minerals, air - and integrates them into one whole steadfast something that you can have faith in.
That’s a beautiful idea, but we don’t always put our faith in the truth, do we? Sometimes, and for a variety of reasons, we put our faith almost anywhere other than in the truth. Mostly, I think, we rest our faith in our fear.
What does this look like? It looks like handing the most precious part of ourselves to a person we barely know who we hope might shield us from the scary noises we hear in the dark night. It looks like trading our freedom for the security of an institution whose interests have absolutely nothing to do with our own - but which seems strong and trustworthy and steady in the face of so much uncertainty. Or most tragically, it looks like giving our hearts away, not to God, but to people who purport to hear directly (and exclusively) from God, and who claim to speak on God’s behalf. The ones who almost always insist that God has told them to tell you that “you’d better get your act together, or else…”)
This resonates deeply in me. And I would add that putting our trust in wealth and status and health and intellect and getting it right and the number of followers on Substack all betray a deep fear. I wonder if putting our trust in anything other than the truth is rooted in fear. Maybe this is one of those exceedingly rare instances where the choice truly is binary: Love or Fear.
Could it be that simple?
I woke from my dream imagining I was back on the trail. Waking in my REI Quarter Dome tent near McAfee Knob. Imagining that the sound of the ceiling fan over our bed was the sound of the wind through the leaves in the forest. In my waking, I imagined I could smell the rain that had fallen on the pines overnight and could not only hear, but understand the joy of the birds who announced to their lovers that they had made it through the cold night, and were delighting in the promise of a new day.
How does this land with you? It’s from John Muir’s Journal.Context is key. A young John Muir was walking from Wisconsin to Florida, and ultimately, he hoped to South America.
Kentucky, September 1, 1867 (also lightly paraphrased as noted)
“Few bodies are inhabited by so satisfied a soul as to allow exceptions from extraordinary exertion through a whole life. The sea, the sky, the rivers have their ebbs and floods, and the earth itself throbs and pulses from calms to earthquakes. So also there are tides and floods in the affairs of men, which in some are slight and may be kept within bounds. But in others it is constant and cumulative in action until its power is sufficient to overmaster all impediments, and to accomplish the full measure of its demand. For years I have been impelled toward
the Lord’stropic gardens in the Souththe Lord’s glory, revealed by the trees and His grand creation . Many influences have intended to blunt or bury this constant longing, but it has outlived and overpowered them all. This longing overmasters everything.”
I will embrace imagining if I must. But I long for so much more than that. For more than faint hints and dim suggestions, or at least clearer hints and brighter suggestions. I wonder if you might, as well. I do believe that God is both here and now, no matter where and when. But aren’t there places where the veil is thinner than others? Moments when eternity takes your hand and gently leads you to a rocky ledge on the border of her boundless kingdom? Places and times where the clutter and noise lie down enough that the ears and eyes of your heart are more discerning of the glory of the creator?
You might counter that God’s glory is in even the noise and clutter. No doubt. But my ears and eyes are not yet mature or sensitive enough to perceive it there. Someday, perhaps. I long for that, too.
Lost
by David Wagoner
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.
The morning I woke from my dream, the Wordle was "FERAL." I woke with the word rewilding lying next to me, reached for my phone, and found the word feral. I don't know if this means anything. It's just a thing that happened. I did not, until that morning, understand that a feral animal, by definition, had once been domesticated, but had escaped captivity. Had left domestication behind. "I want to be feral," I told a friend. "Not in the contrived hypermasculine way that some parts of society seem to be promoting these days." Not feral in a fearful way that puts me into conflict with creation. But feral in a way that is not defined for me by anyone other than God. I wonder if feral, in this sense is to return to harmony with His creation. Not to be in competition. Not to be in an unrelenting fight for dominance. But to accept creation as it is, and to dance with it.
My friend asked, “What is the nature of your captivity?”
(Ouch.)
I responded with something heady about dualistic thinking. But I don’t think that true or even honest. It is definitely not feral. Today, I would respond differently. With this maybe:
We may call the cells in which we have imprisoned ourselves “dualistic thinking” or “ego” or “pride” or “sin” or any manner of names, but I think that no matter what we call the prison, the bars are made not of steel, but of fear. And the door is locked from the inside, if it’s locked at all. And all we have to do to take one step, and then another into the terrifying uncertainty of true freedom, where we will find an oak tree, a word of God, that has been there all along, to whom we can whisper “yes” and upon which we can lean.
I long to stop resting my trust in fear. On people and institutions and false prophets. On a healthy body(!), my intellect, or the size of my bank account. I long to surrender my fear to a “Love that far exceeds my wildest dreams.” I long to embrace the never-ending joy-task to accept that Love and to let it overflow out of me, more and more fully each day. That though I may never grasp how broad, how long, how wide, how high and how deep is that Love, I long to accept the marvelous hints, and to trust that Love fully. And to let Love swallow up fear. That is the oak on which I long to lean.
And my earnest prayer is for the courage to go out with joy, to the very limits of our longings. Courage for each of us, dear friend. For both of us. For all of us.
Oremus,
C
Personal notes: No new health updates. Nothing seems to be changing, or if it is, it’s too slow for me to notice. Put this in the box labeled “good.”
Next scan is August 14. Now accepting playlist recommendations for the procedure. Recommendations with Nick Cave and/or Radiohead receive top consideration.
Here.