It was hot, a rainless time. The stick weed and wine berries wilted among the straw grasses. The creek beds were scatterings of tumbled stones. In the garden, Kate watered, and watered again. The hard soil seemed to repel the moisture. Several times a day the forest reverberated with the sound of a tree branch cracking and falling. Everything was brittle.
Grief in a Time of Not Knowing. The podcast’s title had me at hello. It turned out to be an interview with Zen Buddhist teacher and author Joan Halifax. The discussion opened by considering whether living in these times means to be engulfed in a collective initiation. Roshi Joan noted that a classic initiatory experience begins with separation and moves through a threshold phase before reaching the time of return. She pointed to the separations of our time: the quarantine and social distance caused by the alien coronavirus as well as the hurtful chasms we have carved for ourselves through hundreds of years of history.
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On the Schoolhouse Trail I passed an old tree with a craggy opening near the forest floor, an intriguing portal to the Underworld. Meanwhile, the serviceberries are out, their delicate creamy blossoms like fallen stars in the woods. Serviceberries are so named because they bloom at the time when the ground softens after the winter freeze thus readying the earth for burials and making services of parting and remembrance possible. Gray fog is wrapping itself around the high, still bare branches, shrouding the tree tops. So much is about fog and loss and descent. Collectively we have fallen out of a world we thought—even worried—was immutable. Mystery cloaks what comes next, what the eyes of the future see. What do we do now?
The vernal equinox is a handful of days away, announcing the astronomical beginning of spring. On a morning last week, as dawn chased the darkness from the forest's edge, the moon was a glowing, golden plate resting on the western horizon. Tiny purple crocuses peeked up through pale brown grasses. Bright daffodils nodded on slender stems. Lacy green fronds adorned the old willow stump. On the edge of winter and spring, the moon, stars, and sun grandly and reliably spun a new day. The land offered delicate, deliberate promise of renewal and returning life.
But we know that around and just beyond this idyll, a maelstrom whirls at speed, carrying all manner of things ill and fearful. The virus raging through global humanity is a visceral, microbial emblem of a planet and a world profoundly undone.
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht
Even the splotches of rusty orange and russet punctuating the lacework of bare branches have turned now to brown leaf-carpet. They were what remained of one of the more brilliant autumns we have seen on this mountain, a season resplendent in scarlet and gold, back-dropped in azure blue skies and graced with crisp, invigorating air. I wandered gratefully in the splendor, but images and news from other places intruded and captured me: a wounded and unquiet Earth, a world of injustice, people and creatures in peril; global reports of climate catastrophe; testimony to abuse of power and high betrayal. These are the dark times, the dark edge we walk.
We recently held a retreat at Rolling Ridge, “Finding the Gold in the Darkness: The Way of Soul in Troubled Times,” led by Jim Hall and Cheryl Hellner. In preparation for the retreat we were asked to read an essay by Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Learning to Navigate Amid Loss.” The essay ended with an image about the necessity to find “a compass into the future.” This got me thinking, and that, together with elements from the retreat that followed, led to the reflection below.
"Every day has something in it whose name is forever."
(Everything That Was Broken, Mary Oliver)
Recently that "something in it" was the sight of my granddaughter and two friends plucking wine berries from the bushes by the dirt path and popping them in their mouths. The path they were on led to a large fallen oak. The girls hoisted themselves onto the trunk, which rested majestically in loam and leaves on the forest floor. They proceeded to walk fearlessly along the broad rounded beam, which ran crooked, though true, into the branches that once had danced in the sky. They were utterly at home, skipping effortlessly through imaginary worlds and back again to the present of tree, branches, leaves, balance, height; perfect play in the woods.
Last month I stood with a circle of sixty people or so on a rocky beach on Long Island Sound and sang up the moon. As the soft full circlet of the moon rose above the water, the coral sun sank in the west. We gazed in awed silence, chanted, recited poetry. The luminosity of the experience was heightened by the occasion: we were on a retreat led by Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Returning the Gift: What Does the Earth Ask of Us?"
Still Point Mountain Retreat is a sister community to Rolling Ridge Study Retreat. Located nearby, adjacent to the Rolling Ridge Foundation lands, Still Point exists for the same reasons and does the same work of wilderness preservation and hospitality for those seeking deeper connection with nature and soul. On a recent Saturday the Still Point partners gathered for a workday and meeting, at which I offered a version of the reflection below.