Graffiti and Roses

Today is the Summer Solstice, and what that immediately conjures in my mind is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and a vague longing for romance and the ocean.

But I am single, and nowhere near the ocean.  I was hoping to visit the west coast this summer, but chose instead to put money into a writer's conference that will be happening here in Taos.  (Have I mentioned that I'm writing a book about my relationship with the San Francisco de Asis church?)  My heart right now is very much with the Gulf Coast, and so at this Solstice time of great light and life, I am permeated with the awareness of darkness and death.  I feel it in my own body.

Today is also Honoring Sacred Sites day, and so I send my light and life to the Gulf Coast, the sacred ocean.  And I turn, as I do every day, toward the San Francisco de Asis church, the sacred site right outside my door.

Taos is a tourist town, and each summer a theme is chosen to center activities and events around.  Last year it was "The Summer of Love," and the focus was on Taos' strong and enduring hippie culture.  Dennis Hopper came for the opening of his art show.  This year the theme is "Return to Sacred Places."  In fact, the newspaper held an essay contest for Taos residents around this theme, and I got an honorable mention for my essay about the church.

Because of this theme, there has been a lot of focus on the St. Francis church, with talks given and three art shows around town.  I missed the talk that was given at the public library on June 5, but was lucky enough to catch it on the radio the other night.  The thing that most struck me in this talk, given by David Maes, who is a lifelong resident of Ranchos de Taos and member of the church, was in his introduction.  He spoke of how the church belongs to anyone who experiences its sacredness, and how even the air around the church feels holy and refreshing.

I did not participate in enjarre, the annual remudding, which is now over.  There is a variety of reasons for that, but one of the most unexpected ones was the sense of loss I've been experiencing over the cutting down of trees in the grove by the church.  It left a bad taste in my mouth and made me want to stay away from the church altogether.  It was several days after seeing all the stumps before I could go back, and when I did, the stumps had all been overturned so that the whole space resembles a twisted wasteland.

The next time I went, a few days after that, I discovered that the entrance to the grove between the gift shop and rectory was now defined with edging and filled with gravel.

I have to admit I'm having trouble with these changes.  A little bit of wildness has been tamed.  I don't think the birds are happy about it either.  The doves have been completely silent and the crows have sounded so angry lately.  They've been congregating and having screechfests in my yard.  I know I've mentioned the birdlife at the church before but I want to give you a clearer picture of this.  It's really only been in the past month or two that I've realized how central the church is to the bird communities of Ranchos de Taos.  There are more birds in this part of Taos than any other, and what I finally realized is that the church is their crossroads, their center.  They fly back and forth, in and out from that hub.  Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems like there's been less bird traffic since enjarre began.

And I can't help but wonder how St. Francis would feel about all this.  One of the things he was famous for was going around and restoring rundown churches, but I wonder how far he took that, balanced against his intense reverence for Mother Earth and her creatures.  Sigh.  Well, what's done is done, and there is nothing for me to do but accept and integrate these changes, and continue to simply observe them.  One thing I do like is the new sign that marks the entrance to the grove from the church side:

The grove is still in flux.  Orange fencing surrounds the area near the adobe ruins that borders the grove, and certain spaces are marked out in a way that suggest something is planned.  Perhaps I've never mentioned the ruins before.  It's hard to give you the scope of it with my simple camera, but here's a try:

It's not the Parthenon, but there is still something sacred in this to me, even or perhaps especially in the graffiti.  There is a sacredness in the way we leave our artful marks on things.  I love the way recent generations have come up with ways to do this even in urban landscapes.  Graffiti, skateboarding, and parkour are all ways to use and add to the mundane and manmade in elevated ways, turning the utilitarian into the artful, for the sheer joy of it.  (I must mention here that I love the concept of Tess' blog, Sacred Graffiti; I highly recommend you visit there.)

After some inquiry at the gift shop, I discovered that the activity around the ruins is because an archaeology group is doing excavation.  When the church was first built, it was surrounded by a fort, and the buildings later became private residences, many of which are still occupied.  Since those buildings hold a lot of history, it makes sense that an archaeology group would be interested in the ruins. 

On the other side of the ruins is the church lot, a deep contrast in its manicured beauty.  Now that things have calmed down a bit over there, I've been able to settle in and enjoy it again. Today, a man was revarnishing the benches in the courtyard.

I love to see the seasonal changes over there.  The flowers that the hawkmoths come to aren't blooming yet, but the rose bushes are in full bloom, something I missed last year because I didn't start walking to the church until after the blossoms had faded.

Clare, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and their roses.  Notice the ruins in the background.

I'm thinking about the pruning metaphor again in terms of manmade changes versus "natural" ones.  I once had a student who wrote an astonishing paper using Emerson's ideas about nature to back up the claim that everything humans do is natural.  Is the grove-clearing and throwing down of gravel as natural and beautiful as any seasonal change of the flora?  My instinctive resistance to this idea is based on the fear that if we believe that, it gives us license to do all kinds of real damage, just the way that verses from Genesis about mankind having "dominion" over Creation have been used to justify all sort of horrible nonsense.  And yet, partially thanks to that student's paper, and also Byron Katie's teachings, I can't help but wonder:  If we consciously saw things in this way would it not ultimately give us a greater, not a lesser, awareness and sense of responsibility in our interactions with the natural world?  In fact, we would no longer see ourselves as being separate enough to have "interactions with" the natural world, but would know ourselves to be part of the organic whole.

I don't know.  If I've learned anything in my four decades here on Earth, it's that it's a long road from ideology to integration.  But on this Solstice day of honoring sacred sites, it feels like an appropriate rumination.  Graffiti and roses, skateboarding and birdflight, excavation and pollination, pruning, enjarre, restoration, decomposition - my former student would say these things are equal to each other, equally natural.  What has always appealed most to me about the St. Francis church, which is the most sacred place in the world to me, is the dance among nature, culture, spirituality, religion, art, tradition.  And the paradoxes in all of it, the paradox in my relationship to it as an intimate outsider.

What better way to honor the seasonal changes of nature and sacred sites both "natural" and manmade than to perceive ourselves as fully integrated with and responsible for them the way we are responsible for our own selves?  This is also National Prayer Day, and the only prayer I have is for this, and then to rest in the holy paradoxes, the mysteries to be integrated within and beyond our ideologies.   

Easter Bells, A Blessing of Crows

How mysterious that the Lent in which I did not attend church or immerse myself in Christian reading, ritual, or prayer was my most powerful one ever. I didn't read about Jesus, or even think about him much, but I have been going through a death/rebirth process that I think is what he was trying to teach about in the first place. Actually, it's not so much an ongoing "process" as it is a momentary, repeating occurrence: I find myself upset about something, and instead of trying to fight myself, I surrender, let the feeling die, and am reborn back into myself. It may happen many times a day.

I didn't know what I would do on Easter, and I deliberately made no plans. Since I had already been experiencing these rebirth-moments, Easter didn't strike me as terribly significant. When I arose Easter morning, I considered going to church, but found myself uninspired to do so.

I felt a certain sense of loss, of regret, that I was missing out. It was just a little nagging thing in the background of my attention, but it was enough to keep me feeling slightly off-center. I was sitting in my backyard feeling this offness when the church bells at San Francisco de Asis began to ring out. At first, hearing them intensified that uneasy feeling, but then the bells became church for me. They only rang for a minute or so, but as I surrendered my full attention to them, to enjoying them, I entered into those moments fully, and the Easter bells put me in the resurrection mood, brought me back to myself. Out of the tomb and into the day.

And I thought, as I often have, of a quote that Barbara at barefoot toward the Light posted a while back:

Just as the gong in a center for meditation reminds us from time to time to return to ourselves in the here and now, we all may become "bells of attentiveness."  ~Dorothee Soelle in The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance.

I love this analogy, the poetic beauty of it and the immediate effect it has on me. Just by thinking bell of attentiveness, just by entertaining the image in my imagination, it becomes my experience, now. It's a little icon.

This rumination also led me to remember other "being a bell" quotes from two of my favorite writers:

“The day's blow rang out, metallic -- or it was I, a bell awakened, and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can” ~Denise Levertov

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." ~Annie Dillard

The thing that occurs to me is that in the sound that rings out, bell and what strikes it are one. Which leads me to another quote I discovered recently:

Take time to stop and smell the flowers," says an old homily. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD and lived to age 102, had a different approach. "Take the time to stop and be the flowers," he said.

That's my advice to you. Don't just set aside a few stolen moments to sniff the snapdragons, taste the rain, chase the wind, watch the hummingbirds, and listen to a friend. Use your imagination to actually be the snapdragons and rain and wind and hummingbirds and friend. Don't just behold the Other; become the Other.   ~Rob Brezsny, Freewill Astrology

Easter afternoon, I walked over to the church, something I've not done much recently. It was sunny, warm, and breezy, and no one was around. I lay on a wooden bench in the courtyard for quite a while, gazing up through the branches of a pine tree.

On my way back home through the grove, I noticed a lovely little patch of green green grass, something we don't have a lot of here in dry New Mexico, especially in early spring. I sat down in its softness, letting the play of light and tree branch shadows dance over me. I became very still, and watched two large crows fly back and forth among the trees, until they both came to perch in the one nearest me. Out of intense stillness and silence, their occasional lazy caws resonated through me, and the three of us just rested together. As I gazed at one of them, he or she looked back at me with tilted head. I felt an unmistakable connection, a message, the warm thrill of a caress. To be noticed by such a glorious creature! I was lifted and struck.

I may have missed church, but I didn't miss communion.

New Year of the Trees

I have a wonderful fat little book called Earth Prayers, which contains earth-centered prayers from many different traditions. There's an index of special days throughout the year, connected with different prayers in the book.  This is how I came to learn about Tu Bishvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees, which takes place on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat.  Which happens to have been last weekend.

I found many detailed resources for this celebration online.  I think the thing I love about Judaism the most is its emphasis on elaborate, meaningful, home-based ritual.  I also love the fact that Jews celebrate four different New Years, in different seasons.  This makes so much sense to me - the year is a circle, which begins and ends anywhere and nowhere.  It's not a line from Point A to Point B.

I printed out a rather long booklet of the haggadah for the seder meal to be performed on the eve of this holiday.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get it together in time to actually go through the seder, but I did read through it, in the manner of Lectio Divina.  The symbolic gestures (even when only performed in the imagination) and Hebrew prayers are quite beautiful and affective.

This holiday has had an interesting evolution (which you can read about extensively if you explore the link for Tu Bishvat above) but one of its primary associations is with the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life.  In Kabbalistic wisdom, there are considered to be four worlds, corresponding to different levels of reality, from the physical to the purely spiritual.  The Tu Bishvat seder symbolically takes you through those four worlds (up the Tree) with the eating of different kinds of fruit and the drinking of wine.  Reading through the haggadah, I realized one would probably end up slightly drunk by the end of the meal, with the ritualistic drinking of four glasses of wine.  But I suppose the tradition is to make the meal a long, relaxed affair that could take hours.

All of this got me thinking about trees, and I started  looking through my library for anything interesting to read about them.  I pulled out a book I bought for homeschooling purposes called Keepers of the Earth.  It's an amazing resource for anyone teaching children (Dan, Jennifer - I sincerely hope you have this book).  Using traditional stories from various Native tribes, it teaches children about ecology and other sciences, as well as Native American culture and history.

I read the story in the section on trees, called "Manabozho and the Maple Trees."  This story is from the Anishinabe, in the Great Lakes region, which is also where I grew up.  The gist of it is that maple syrup used to come straight from the trees year-round, but people got lazy and started lying under the trees all the time with their mouths open.

So our hero, Manabozho, went up to the top of the trees and poured water into them, making the syrup thin and barely sweet, and the Great Spirit made it so that the sap only comes at the end of winter and the people have to work hard to turn it into syrup.

This story made me think back to my childhood in Toronto, when we would take school field trips to the maple farm in February, and watch the sap drip ever-so-slowly into metal buckets, and then go inside to see how they filled huge vats with sap and boiled it for ever so long to turn it into syrup.

And I realized that it's just perfect to have a New Year for trees just when the sap is beginning to flow.  And I also began to think about slowness.

Dan Gurney recently posted an article he and his wife wrote for their local newspaper, a plea for the people of his town to slow down when they're driving.  This post really humbled me because I'm almost always in a rush when I'm driving, and frequently get irritated with people on the road who drive under the speed limit.

And then, Lucy posted about slowing down enough to take good care of ourselves.  One of the things I want to develop this year is the ability to truly relax, not just every now and then, but as a more constant state of being.  Dan's and Lucy's posts, combined with contemplation of the slowness of the maple syrup-making process, made me realize that if I want to be more relaxed, I've got to learn to slow down.  Be patient.  That relaxation and patience are in fact two aspects of just slowing down.  And that paradoxically, this will lead to a quickening of body and spirit, increased energy, a less rushed sense of time.

The story of Manabozho has reminded me that being relaxed and slowing down doesn't mean lazing beneath a tree with syrup dripping into my mouth, but is a manner of working and spirited living, being an active participant in turning work into a sweet gift.

And when I begin to slip into my familiar sense of rush and tension, I need to call to mind the maple with its slow gift of sap, or the luxurious live oak with its lazy swaying moss, or my favorite - the slowest and most spirited of trees, the patient redwood.  I would marry a redwood if I could.

Ah, trees.  My favorite teachers.  Thank you for reminding me. 
Happy New Year, dear trees.

How surely gravity’s law
strong as an ocean current
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place
Only we, in our arrogance
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrender
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us
to fall
patiently to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

~Rilke

(Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)