Cultivate the Wisdom Within the Wild: Biomimicry as a Spiritual Practice

Boehman, Jessica. Bedtime Stories. 2013.

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” -Joseph Campbell

We are approaching the threshold of Winter, and these days that come before that elemental edge are known as Advent, a sacred time of the year when rituals attune ourselves to the growing darkness and when hope is kindled by the coming of light.

But before the light is the darkness—a darkness that is the deep color of sunless earth. All life is being drawn into the depths of soil, a migration of descent that is both a lull and a longing. Life is slowing down, quieting, and entering caves and underground caverns wherein sleepy darkness will be the only thing that will satiate this elemental pull.

And yet isn’t it ironic that the farther the Western mind moves from celebrating this season and the upcoming solstice for its earthen guidance and wisdom, the brighter the holiday lights become; the louder the market cries for over-consumption; the more frenetic the pace and demand of over-worked holiday cheer? This is a way that is contrary to the descent the more-than-human world engages as they wait for the light.

Every Advent I see new methods, books, and calendars that aim to connect ourselves to the meaning of this season. These seem to exist at the margins, hardly able to compete with the trumpeting chaos of holiday calendars and over-played carols. And while I admittedly do attempt to engage these new titles or traditions as a way to center and slow down the pace, I find that rarely do the intentions last as there is little grounding and rooting into the reality of what my body longs to do—this longing to go inwards and follow the others with fur and four-feet, to find the kind and nourishing dark within my inner-self.

Truly, the light that breaks with promise on the heels of the Winter Solstice only has power because of the darkness through which we have just come. But how can we truly know the Light if we’ve been kept from going into the Dark?

This Advent I want to do something different, or more aptly, something deeper. I want to look to what Nature is doing, how the wild is behaving, how Earth is quieting and model something of a spiritual practice of it. Instead of buying another book to guide my Advent season, I want those with rhizomes and heartwood, those whose voices rise to moon-howl, those who curl confidently within their fur to counsel my quest for holy days that leave me with a renewed sense of faith, hope, and love. I want Nature to be my scout this season towards an ancient nativity, showing me how to rest like roots; when to withdraw like wolves; and when need for warmth demands a festive fire with family and friends.

These days before the brink of Winter will be ones where I lean into and look deeper into the principles of biomimicry, an idea that by imitating models, systems and elements of nature we might discover ways to solve complex human problems. Frankly, there is no way anyone can engage the news and social media and not see the human and ecological grief and suffering that is happening all over this world. And I believe that Albert Einstein was absolutely correct when he said:

We can't solve problems by using the same thinking we used to create them.

Our anthropocentric attempts to solve our human-engineered problems need to be reoriented—rewilded to the rest of the whole from which biotic life is bound. If the Winter Dark is the time when the natural world renews itself for the regenerative life-burst of Spring, how do we expect to do the same if our Winter looks no different than the frenetic force that pressures the Western world to be lit year round?

We know we are intimately connected to earth-systems. Our bodies get sick when our planet is sick. Our ability to flourish is fastened to the potential for all life to thrive. We have awoken to this reality in the eleventh hour of climate chaos. Janine M. Benyus, author of the profound and popular book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997) says this, “We are awake now, and the question is how do we stay awake to the living world?” I would say, it will take practice—disciplined regular and repeated rhythms or patterns of behavior that bring about this awoken state of perception. Following are the nine basic principles of biomimicry that come from Janine M. Benyus’ work:

Nature runs on sunlight

Nature uses only the energy it needs

Nature fits form to function

Nature recycles everything

Nature rewards cooperation

Nature banks on diversity

Nature demands local expertise

Nature curbs excesses from within

Nature taps the power of limits

How different are these than the common consumptive energy of this season? And how different would the holidays be if we engaged them from a spiritual practice of biomimicry? My sense is that we would be incredibly awake to the sacred and wild world in ways that would transform how we experience these threshold days of this season. We would come to find that we have enough. We are enough. And from this place, we will be able to open up and sink deep into this beautiful dark and rooted place.

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Advent Practice

Instead of spiritual practices that that lead us away from the dark, demanding a journey towards the light as if it wasn’t already within us, let’s re-engage rituals that place us here, that designate the dark earth as holy ground, sacred soil within which we rediscover the life that has always been within and with-out all things. Over the course of Advent, engage each of the nine elements as an invitation into a personal and spiritual practice.

• Take 2-3 days to reflect and respond to each principle and imagine ways in which you can bring that principle into practice. Begin by simply reframing each principle with the personal pronoun, “I.” For example, “I run on sunlight.” “I use only the energy I need,” etc.

• How does this statement feel to you? Is it true? Does it invite a response of longing or desire for a different way of being? How does this challenge you in this season? It becomes very interesting to think of these principles through the lens of holiday gift-giving, and even holiday activities and festivities; these foundational aspects of the natural world don’t work within a world of capitalistic consumerism, over-consumption, and narrow religious views.

• Let’s take this reframing into our inner-world, our soulscape. Are you able to restate the basic principles of biomimicry as a spiritual or soulful practice? Does your spiritual tradition or practice reward cooperation? Does it demand local expertise? If yes, how? If not, how are you being invited to a biomimetic lens of your faith?

• What rituals can be created to honor the sacred rhythms within the principles of biomimicry? Perhaps you bring in a cup full of dark humus earth into your home and create an Advent altar with it, pairing it with a candle. Do you already have an Advent wreath for your family table? Place the cup of earth at the center! This creates an earthen awareness for darkness and connects to the question: “What do I need to stay grounded through this season?” In our family we gradually begin turning off electric lamps or lights in our house and replace them with candlelight so that our eyes can begin to re-sensitize to the dark; by the time we are at the Winter Solstice we have only candle light within our home and boy can you feel the dark! This is a dark that is hard to come by in the city as light shines year round in the night from street lights, cars, businesses, exterior house and condo lights, etc. I also like this move towards the candle light as I find that we move more slowly in the house when only candles are lit. This honors what our bodies want to do naturally in this season, instead of the push to rush towards the coming light.

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“Seeds grow in the dark—so do we.
Let’s stop making such a virtue out of the light.
Let's turn toward what’s in the shadows and breathe it in,
breathe it here, meeting it face-to-face until we realize
with more than mind that what we are seeing
is none other than us in endarkened disguise.
Seeds grow in the dark—so do we. 
Let’s not be blinded by light
Let’s unwrap the night 
Building a faith too deep to be spoken 
A recognition too central to be broken 
Until even the darkest of days can light our way.” 
― Robert Augustus Masters

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Waiting in the Whispering Dark by Sarah Steinke

To be awake in the dark is to be alert in a wholly other way. We’ve just passed through the darkest night of the year and anticipate but do not yet know the growing light. This season of night is one of deep vulnerability, where the mind of daily tasks and to-do lists eventually gives way to something more lunar, less solar; here, we find a hush that blankets our daytime sensibilities with something like the acoustics of snow and allows what’s quiet during the day to become loud. This is the only time I hear my husband’s breathing. And I’m reminded that in the dark, we hear what has been with us all along.

Night is also anxious making, fear provoking—we’ve all known nightmares—and what if the ache that's slowed us down and brought us here is bottomless? What if we hear the monsters that since childhood have lurked under the beds, who whisper, "Look at what you’ve done, and there is no forgiveness," or "It's all too broken, and there's no fixing it.”

We’ve all heard these whispers. They come when we’re most vulnerable. But these aren’t the only whispers. There’s something even more true here in the dark.

The Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, in paraphrasing Nietzsche, said people do not like to be alone as they are afraid that something will be whispered in their ears; by contrast, artists wait with fierce attentiveness for that whisper. The truth is, we all are artists, we all are makers. And we all have reasons to doubt this. Partly because we’ve been told in our waking lives by too many people that what we make doesn’t really matter.

This is a lie. And partly because it’s frankly easier to consume rather than create. Because the act of creating calls us to confront our own dread, and our own dreaded hope. But woven into the cloth of our very being is this—we are made to create, no doubt about it.

You are a maker. And you have what it takes—whether you make poetry or paper snowflakes, clear clutter or ivy, sing the most haunting music or longing howl, maybe you draw or dance or color or entrain with the ocean, maybe you dig with your hands in the earth, or work at teaching your children that we all are neighbors, even the trees. Whatever draws you nearer to life, do it. It matters.

This is poiesis, making something that is not yet. Every time we live out our poiesis, we grow our capacity to listen, to see, to know that wholeness includes and incorporates the dark.

Emmanuel. God is with us. Maybe even especially in the dark. Crozier says that every work of art begins and ends with silence. Can we bare the silence? Can we lean into the dark? For it’s here that we see how even the smallest light pierces. Shine.

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Wonder resides in places of quickening, those moments where new life is first felt, and where words often fall short. And wonder, for Sarah, is what compels her to stay and listen. And then to enter more fully, senses alert. As a yoga instructor and poet, she finds these are both practices of quickening. She believes the longer we tolerate this place beyond words, the more deft we become to movement—allowing what needs to drop to the ground to drop, and allowing shape to what needs to take shape. Sarah’s yoga and writing practices reflect her commitment to the poetry of the ordinary, and she invites others to awareness and connection, the places of quickening in their own lives.

Sarah’s teaching has had the benefit of much practice—over twenty years of writing and editing experience, and ten years of yoga practice. She is a RYT 200 certified yoga instructor who received her MFA in poetry from UW. She currently teaches yoga classes in a local studio in Silverdale and corporate sessions in Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Laurel Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Creek Review, the Other Journal, the Southern California Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Words Could Not Make It More True, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Find out more about Sarah at her website. 

Sarah will be guiding daily yoga sessions on the North Beach of Iona, Scotland for the 2018 Waymarkers Iona Pilgrimage. If you would like to engage your personal poiesis and with a guide who will assist you in listening to your own quickening,        register for the Iona Pilgrimage today!  

The Silence Breakers: Mother Earth Says #METOO

Cosmic Birth by Mary Southard

Humans ignore the deep inherent value of the natural world and our interconnectedness to it.  We exploit the planet for her resources without acknowledgment of the deep and lasting cost.  The payment for this extensive damage to ecosystems shows up in human lives to the extent that a peaceful enjoyment of life has been threatened and/or injury to life will be caused.  Author and theologian Shelly Rambo calls this trauma: “Trauma is described as an encounter with death…a radical event[s] that shatter all that one knows about the world and all the familiar ways of operating within it.”  Trauma to the earth moreover, vis-à-vis ecocide and environmental injustice, manifests through the bodies of women; more specifically, through the suffering exploitation of marginalized women with long-term impacts on their health and wellness. To defy systems of eco-violence is to hope for a future that recognizes the sacredness of the earth through the inclusion of women within this sacred sphere.  

She has been groped, penetrated, maimed, and raped millions of times; reduced to nothing more than a vacuous object that will provide fleeting pleasure, and meet the relentless, gaping demand for greed.  She is left sick with fouled veins; cut off appendages; diseased cultures; and empty cavities—only to be leered at again, and ceaselessly violated.  

She is Gaia.  She is God. 

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To turn humanity towards a new global outcome, we need new stories and myths of imagining God.

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Scientists like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have brought our attention to the fact that the earth is a living organism, a concept that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as noosphere or, the thinking earth.  Teilhard de Chardin’s thought would mesh well with the Gaia hypothesis.  First articulated by the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis, simply put, suggests that the earth is a self-regulating, self-sustaining entity, which continually adjusts its environment to support life.  Though a scientific theory, the Gaia hypothesis has captured the minds of philosophers and theologians demanding developing reflection and challenging long-held religious beliefs.  The personification of earth as a female has enabled us to see her in her strength and softness.  The Gaia thesis, in likening the earth to a self-regulating mammal, supports the idea that she may have organs that are especially important, such as the rain forest and wetlands, which are more vital to the global environment than are other parts of the system.  This fertile embodiment of the earth invites us to reorient our common perspectives of ecological disaster as physical trauma to Gaia; molesting, cutting, mutiliating, and oppressing her for the resources she is demanded to give. 

For Christian ecological thinkers, the biblical God and Gaia are not at odds; rightly understood, they are on terms of friendliness, if not commixing.  Eco-feminist and theologian Sallie McFague provides a critical model of God, an imaginative perspective that embodies God as Planet Earth.  While an admitted metaphor, McFague wonders how our behaviors toward the earth changes if it is imagined as self-expressive of God, if it is a “sacrament”—the outward and visible presence of body—of God, the very expression of God’s being? 

Is it possible for the human population to see the world as a body that must be carefully tended, that must be nurtured, protected, guided, loved, and befriended as valuable in itself?  For like us, it is an expression of God—and as necessary to the continuation of a vibrant and flourishing life. 

McFague strongly believes that were this metaphor for God to enter deep into our collective consciousness as thoroughly as the dominating, triumphalist has entered, it would result in a profoundly different way of being in the world.  There would be no way of seeing the earth as devoid of God, and God vacant from the earth. 

Eco-theologian Mark Wallace states, “Insofar as the Earth Spirit lives with us in and through the created world, then God as Spirit suffers loss and pain whenever the biotic order is despoiled through human arrogance.”  The human becomes both the manifesting symptom of the suffering of the earth, as well as the perpetrator.  The evil in the world occurs in and to God’s body: the pain that those parts of creation affected by evil feel God also feels and feels bodily.  All pain to all creatures (and I would include trees, mountains, streams and oceans to this category as well) is felt immediately and bodily by God. 

God experiences at God’s deepest core the toll, torment and trauma of a body under attack.  Nor is Gaia silent in her suffering but uses a different language to speak the unsayable; her deep pain manifests in the bodies of those most akin to her. 

McFague maintains that viewing the world as the body of God means seeing all bodies as the body of God; however, she calls us to look at the bodies that are neglected in our society, to look at the bodies that we render invisible; a particular body that is either objectified or intentionally made invisible: the black woman’s body.  When we look to the bodies made invisible by systematic oppression, we see a demonstration of what has been done to the planet.  

There is a broad recognition that human well-being is dependent on the well-being of the land, that the destruction of a healthy environment will necessarily affect human dignity.  There is also the realization that the problems the poor experience on a daily basis are essentially environmental problems.  Women often bear the brunt of coping with these environmental problems.  As soil deteriorates, women have to work longer hours in backbreaking toil to harvest food from barren soil.  In deforested rural communities, girls and women expend increasing energy and time to collect firewood.  Women are often forced to work in environmentally hazardous conditions for low wages.  Kwok Pui-lan, an eco-womanist theologian, breaks down these problems as a result of imperialist greed and competition; corporations monopolize basic resources such as water, which disproportionately affects women and their families. 

Indian physicist and ecologist Vandana Shiva claims that Western development is essentially maldevelopment in that it reproduces and perpetuates capitalistic patriarchy on a global scale, which relies on the structures of exploitation and degradation of nature, the exclusion and exploitation of women, and the erosion of their cultures.  She further documents women’s significant roles in the food chain and their critical contributions as slyviculturalists, agriculturists, and traditional natural scientists.  She writes: “The new insight provided by rural women in the Third World is that women and nature are associated, not in passivity but in creativity and in the maintenance of life.”  This insight requires us to move beyond  generalized notions of women, nature and culture.  While this connection is a critical start to imperative conversations within the ecofeminist movement—

There is a requisite need to evolve the understanding towards an exchange that addresses the actual bodies of women who have experienced conquest, colonization and corruption in the global market. 

Kwok Pui-lan talks about how the colored female body has been consigned to signify nature in demeaning and ambiguous ways.  She writes, “If we theorize about women and nature from the broken bodies of women of color, we can see the relationship between women and nature is much more complex, ambiguous, and multidimensional than is often assumed.”

The demand to look closely and carefully at the lives of women of color and ethics has created a theological inquiry called “womanist.”  Coined by Alice Walker, womanist theology calls forth the moral imperative to honor African and African American women’s connection with the earth (and invites specific attention to all women of color as well); specifically, Walker has investigated the similarities between structural systems of oppression that dehumanize women and dominate the planet.  “Earth itself,” admonishes Walker, “has become the nigger of the world.”  But the Earth, she goes on to say, will assuredly undo us if we don’t learn to care for it, revere it, even worship it.  Walker warns: “While the Earth is poisoned, everything it supports is poisoned.  While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free….While it is ‘treated like dirt,’ so are we.” 

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The connections between the earth-body and human-body continuum draws critical attention to the illnesses made manifest both in women’s bodies and the earth’s body.

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Narratives the world over confirm this connection.  

Katsi Cook, a Mohawk and midwife, argues that attacks on nature are also attacks on Native women’s bodies, and by extension, attacks on the bodies of Native children.  Toxins, which are released into the earth through industrial waste, pesticides, pollution, and weapons for war, are generally taken into the female body and stored in fat, and during pregnancy and lactation, women’s fat is metabolized, exposing fetuses and newborns, at their most vulnerable stages of development, to these chemicals.  Radiation poisoning, another environmental toxic byproduct of nuclear development, may be linked to the astronomical rates of lupus, an immune system disorder, among Nez Perce women living near the Columbia River in Washington State.  Wastes from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor, which began production of weapons-grade plutonium in 1943, were improperly disposed of in the river, from which the large amount of fish consumed by this community were taken.  Female tribal members have reported suffering from lupus, miscarriages, broken bones, endometriosis and life-threatening infections.  Termed “downwinders,” residents have reflected on the devastating impacts of  non-consensual radiation contamination as another form of sexual violence. 

Painful, dangerous events have created open wounds in females from the Two-Thirds-World.  Here is where Shelly Rambo’s definition of the wound as trauma is helpful.  She writes,

“For those who survive trauma, the experience of trauma can be likened to death.  But the reality is that death has not ended; instead, it persists. The experience of survival is one in which life, as it once was, cannot be retrieved.” 

This “middle” place is horrifically played out by the indigenous women of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.  After World War II, the U.S. exploded a bomb that was 1,300 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; this test was the first of 66 nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands.  The people from the island of Rongelap were directly in the radioactive fallout, which covered their beaches, homes, gardens, and skin with burning, white powder for weeks.  The women of Rongelap’s cervical cancer mortality is 60 times greater than in the mainland U.S., breast cancer rates are five times greater, miscarriage rates are tremendously high, and babies born are often without skeletal structure;  the current life-span of a Marshallese women is age 50.  “Death is not concluded,” states Rambo, “instead, it continues on in forms of life that may not be recognized as such.  Life is reconfigured as the excess of death, as what remains.”  The experience of traumatic suffering is intensified by the invisibility and unspeakable nature of violence.  The Marshallese women did not have words for the kind of reproductive abnormalities that were a result of the fallout; their trauma was silenced by a lack of ancestral understanding and cultural shame.  The violence done to the earth through wanton and deliberate warfare development was, and continues to this day, manifested in the bodies of these women with profound, devastating consequences.

As long as women’s bodies are showing trauma related to violent ecocide and anthropocentric colonization, the raping Gaia of her resources continues.  As Bessel van der Kolk has stated in his seminal work by the same title, “The body keeps score at the deepest level of the organism.”  The psychical trauma inflicted on Gaia-or more precisely the memory of trauma-acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that still at its work.  Like a splinter that causes an infection, it is the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem more than the object itself. 

The effects of ecocide on the women’s body is likened to that of the initial trauma being done to the earth, and the memory of that trauma shows up in the lives of women for generations.  To ignore and silence this critical connection between Mother Earth and the human mothers on this planet will continue to have dire effects. 

States van der Kolk, “Denial of the consequences of trauma can wear havoc with the social fabric of society….Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress.”  Our planet is showing the denial of these consequences through a myriad of ways: climate change, Fast Fashion, agri-business, and species loss to name just a few.  Rambo would see these consumptive cultural patterns as a statement of trauma.  She states, “Trauma is an encounter with death and with life. At the intersection of death and life, a cry emerges.”  There exists a global cry demanding witness to uncontainable suffering.  To see the ecocidal actions that humanity has taken against the world during the Industrial Age as trauma, and the life of humanity continuing in the face of this social and economic organization, then the body of the woman becomes the deep and desperate cry of the earth. 

Where does hope lie for a planetary population that both perpetrates and bears the trauma done to Earth?  How do we transform the shared material substances of our interrelated bodies from mutual toxicity to the brilliance of stars?  Rosemary Radford Ruether maintains that we need new psalms and meditations to make our collective kinship vivid in our communal and personal devotions.  These modern expressions need not be original however; a recognition and recovery of indigenous practices that honors the feminine may offer a way in to this much needed mutuality. 

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Women carry the wound of Gaia in their bodies, and it is from this wound that a voice demands witness: “witness death and witness the possibility of life arising from it.” 

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Many Third World and indigenous women believe that their own traditions give this voice, where the natural is not separated from the cultural and spiritual, can offer enormous contributions to saving ourselves and our planet.  The value lies not only in the long-practiced traditions of creation-honoring cultures, but in the actual ecological location  Humans are a uniquely positioned agent in the earth’s ecological matrix. 

Our particular places, our womanist lenses, allow us to see the personal saving presence of God in relationship to biotic communities, and provides a starting place for how we can contribute to reversing the global ecocrisis of Gaia, the Body of God, our Home Planet. 

The preamble to the Earth Charter echoes with hopeful possibility if we so choose to see the world as a truly holy place.  May we stand at this critical place—this place of such weighty wounds—and respond to the voice from the wound with a profound turning towards a future that honors Earth as God’s Body. 

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“We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, 
a time when humanity must choose its future…. 

To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth Community with a common destiny.”

— Earth Charter

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Bibilography

Conrade, Ernst Charity Majiza, Jim Cochrane, Welile T. Sigabi, Victor Molobi, and David Field.     “Seeing Eco-Justice in the South African Context.” In Earth Habitat: Eco-Injustice and the Church’s Response. Edited by Dieter Hessel and Larry Rasmussen, 135-157. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2001.

Grey, Mary. “Cosmic Communion: A Contemporary Reflection on the Eucharistic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin.” Ecotheology 10, no. 2 (August 2005): 165-180.

Harris, Melanie L. “Alice Walker and the Emergence of Ecowomanist Spirituality.” In Spirit and     Nature: The Study of Christian Spirituality in a Time of Ecological Urgency. Edited by Timothy Hessel-Robinson and Ray Maria McNamara, 220-236. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

McFague, Sallie . The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993.  

- - -, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987.  

Pui-lan, Kwok. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. 

Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Fransisco, CA: HarperCollinsPublishers: 1992.  

Scharper, Stephen B. “The Gaia Hypothesis: Implications for a Christian Political Theology of the Environment.” Cross Currents 44, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 207-221.

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books, 1989.  

Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Spencer, Daniel T. “The Liberation of Gaia.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 47, no. 1-2 (1993): 91-102.

United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. Earth Charter. UNESCO headquarters in Paris: March 2000.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Walker, Alice. Living by the Word. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 1988. 

Wallace, Mark I. “The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide.” Cross Currents 50, no. 3 (Fall 2000: 310-331.

The Pilgrim's Path: Surprise in the Familiar

Pilgrim's Path-flowering tree

I've been walking in our neighborhood's woods for years now.  What started out as hopeful curiosity in a forest behind our house, led me down a path towards becoming a Forest Steward- trained in local flora and fauna, urban forest restoration and community activism. I wanted a trail upon which to walk my dog; I found homeless encampments.  I wanted a place in which to refresh and recreate; I found prostitution base camps.  I wanted a place in which to be quiet and still; I found needles and sex toys.  The sacred place I wanted didn't even seem like a possibile hope; the English Ivy and Himalayan Blackberry covered the promise of this land with its dark invasiveness.

In 2007 we commenced our commitment to hosting monthly volunteer work parties for our neighborhood.  We believed that the fear, filth and felonious behaviors could be combatted to reveal the great gift Earth is always offering us: LIFE!  In the context of these first-Saturday-of-the-month gatherings, we began the slow, inglorious effort of hand removing the ivy and blackberry.  We became master garbage collectors and bore witness to the very real social tensions of encampments being told [repeatedly] to vacate.  We became versed in our City's shelter programs and at which pier personal affects can be collected.  We canvassed the neighborhood looking for support and interest in changing something that was into something unimaginably better.  We were committed to the long-term work of restoration and transformation.  We wanted to transform this urban soil into a sanctuary.

Pilgrim's Path-fern alter

The work of bringing down heaven to earth is no easy task.  And it always takes time...and a lot of it.  This is the epic work of pilgrimages and journeys, deserts and dreams.  There is always such fanfare and exhilaration when one picks up the walking stick and marks, and crosses into, the beginning of the journey.  The vision of the destination is so clear, so lucid--it seems you could just reach across a short breadth of time and realize every desired detail.  But soon you find your arm is tired from being extended for so long...for so very long.  Your hand clutches that walking stick with a deepened sense of understanding that this stick is with you to uphold and offer stability when the road gets longer, instead of shorter.  For sacred destinations always require time and long processes; the meaningful meanderings are necessary to bring you to that place where you are able to see and hear with a clarity that simply doesn't exist at the beginning.

We have hosted over 75 work parties in our 10 acre parcel of urban forest in the last six years.  We have painstakingly picked up invasive plants and planted more than 1500 trees and shrubs.  We have written for and received grants to fund an urban forest trail system to connect neighbors and neighborhoods.  I have sat in Council members chambers in City Hall sharing our story of forest transformation and restoration.  The heaven that I thought was just one-shovel full away has taking me years to begin to see.  I have leaned on that shovel-and on the arms and hearts of committed neighbors and friends-in fatigue and frustration, wanting so badly to be done and to realize the destination for which I had set out for...so very long ago.

I long for free social weekends and open evenings not requiring correspondance with local organizations. ...And then I have to make the choice--the choice we all have to make on our journeys.  When we have been on the road for a bit of time, the enchantments and sparkles of roadside attractions become great.  They call for us to stop, rest and even consider them a favored substitute over the sacred destination.  We can choose this...or we can look to the "imaginative, active encounter with the place" (P. Cousineau).  At this point in the journey, we must look all the harder and request for a renewed power of vision.

I went up into the woods this week and came across a beautiful, seemingly-spontaneously-built, road side alter of rock, wood and fern at the trail head into the woods.  I was startled and stunned by its presence.  Everything about its quiet appearance shouted reminders to me of what these woods once held.  For at one time-at this very spot, I had uncovered over 200 hypodermic needles...and now there was just this free, intentional, beauty.  This organic gathering was a blessed statement of how far along the journey we had come to seeing this forest as a place of community refreshment, a place of collective comfort.  We certainly aren't there yet--the destination is still a long way off.  But the meaning that is being collected along the whole long way is going to make this little piece of heaven one helluva place!