Returning Home
When I was a child, Nature was in many ways my best friend, my greatest teacher and also a wise, loving mother. I loved to be in forest and field with the flowers, birds, insects, animals and waters. I didn’t just love them, I could feel that they loved me, too. I remember the smell of the sun-soaked fields which hid wild strawberries below. I remember the awe and delight of finding a box turtle with mottled yellow and brown mosaic shell. Every creature had a personhood, a sacredness, a meaning and message that landed in the heart, not the mind. I once watched yellow jackets flying in an out of their home, which they made next to ours. I knew it as sacred, though I couldn’t explain why. I was confused when my mother told me to stop. In retrospect, she was of course worried I might get stung.
Every place had spirit as well. The alcove beneath the yews, the natural seat up in the maple, the place where the stream slowed into a wide pool and bluegills darted below the surface. It was like being among friends, being among caring and protective family.
As a child, I witnessed Nature with eyes that as an adult grew dim. With time, and involvement in the business of school and later performing as a responsible adult, I spent less time in Nature, heard less of her intelligence, and noticed less of her spirit; but I never lost my affection for her, nor reverence.
In my middle years, I returned to Nature. Though having searched high and low, my thirst for truth was yet unslaked. Something was missing amongst all the philosophy and scriptures of all the major religions and schools of thought which I had read. Maybe it was with the trees, in the mountains, flowers and seas. I returned to the forests and listened, as best I could. What was the wisdom I once heard? What did the ancients and indigenous people know?
The insanity of human greed and violence against her enraged me, and under the rage, broke my heart. Nature is not voiceless, but her language is no longer understood. She has no self-defense against those who would destroy and exploit her—at least not against the immediate attacks. In the long run, because we are of her, our destruction will come back to do great harm against us. We already see that happening. Filled with grief and anger, hands and knees in the loamy soil of the east Pennsylvanian forest, I pledged to her, “I will be your hands and your voice. I submit my mind, heart and work to protect and bless you. I invite you to work through me.”
She heard me. She answered. This is her story, her voice—the voice of my mother, and your mother, my brothers and sisters, and your brothers and sisters.
Basking
The first lesson Great Blue Heron taught me was to bask, to do nothing at all other than absorb the warm rays of a deeper sun on a cold winter day of the soul.
* * *
For about a year preceding, I had intentionally been pursuing personal experience of the form of consciousness enjoyed by those of ancient animistic cultures. It was clear to me that the ancestors of this ancient, nature-oriented wisdom were not merely thinking about different things, they were thinking about things differently. The animistic mind, I believe, is organized in a way so radically different, that it is knowable neither to the physicalist nor monotheistic mindsets prevalent in the West, the paradigms which held tight control over my own perceptions and thoughts. From the prevailing worldviews of the West, the ancient beliefs and thought patterns are considered either nonsense or, at best, quaint and antiquated. However, having explored multiple ancient cultures, I wanted to enter into and know from within that other state of consciousness.
Perception of the living Spirit within each thing in Nature, the divine majesty hiding in the mundane was the water and food for which I thirsted and hungered. Throughout my life, I have insatiably devoured all I could find in search of a metaphysical paradigm that would answer to the spiritual emptiness that drove me to seek, knock, and ask. Buddhism, Hinduism, existentialism, esoteric and mystical Christianity, liberation theology, Judaism, Islam, Taoism—I learned about them all, and dove deep into several. I gained a great deal of wisdom from every source, but still I hungered. I was also was driven to reunited with Nature by a zealous love for life. I stand stunned by her astonishing life, beauty, abundance, strangeness and diversity.
So I began venturing into the woods as often as work and family allowed. I began by employing a language of symbol described by 18th Century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. He writes about how all things of the created universe are symbols of spiritual and psychological realities. All things reveal the nature of the Divine. Reading his works, I had a sort of glossary or dictionary of symbol in my head which I employed. It was a starting point from which I extrapolated a more detailed and comprehensive system for perceiving the secret language of Nature.
However, this method of knowing Nature employed the same sort of thinking that I was working hard to leave behind. It required analysis of form, internal processes, relationships with the surrounding environment, service to other entities and the whole, growth patterns and cycles, and so on. It was valuable in training the mind to mimic what I was looking for, and so move closer to it, but it could not deliver me into actual perception. A monkey can wear a vest and cap, and be trained to behave in human-like ways, but it remains a monkey. The lower mind can simulate spiritual awakening, can lumber about awkwardly to create a semblance of higher consciousness, but it can never actually enter or know it so long as it is immersed in linear logic, language, egoic focus, and earthly longing.
I increasingly perceived meaning and messages from the various forms and entities of Nature. Sometimes the messages were personal, speaking to active issues in my life; sometimes they offered universal spiritual truths; and sometimes the experience was more like meeting with a friend, a sort of communion. Almost always there was a very warm, affectional quality to the interactions. Underlying all the more cognitive information was an unerring communication of love and goodwill for me and for all life. We are all profoundly loved by Nature, and also the Great and Holy Spirit.
The communications do not arrive as words but as perception. When seeing, the form itself is the language. When hearing, I sense the spiritual personhood of the entity and I perceive a message as an intentional communication that I may not be able to readily tie to any particular feature or aspect of the other being.
To communicate them to others, I have to translate the meaning into English. The words you read in the Teachings and Songs below are crafted by me in an attempt to reflect the affectional flavor, the poetic beauty, the volitional vibrancy, and the intellectual content of the messages. It is like I am painting a picture of dream, or trying to convey an emotion in music. I didn’t create the dream or the emotion, but I choose the colors and the notes.
When in the most receptive states, I sensed spiritual presence, the personhood and spirit of forms, and not just symbolic meaning. I felt as if I was reuniting with a long lost family. I was finally home. My hunger was finally fulfilled.
I constantly doubted myself and for months wondered if what felt like perception of a deeper layer of reality was really just delusional imagination. How could I not? These experiences were in abject opposition to the reality had been trained up in since birth and which shaped all prior experiences. However, whenever those doubts grew loud, some event would occur to quiet them. For example, I was in a soggy part of the woods and a swarm of hungry mosquitoes surrounded me and began to bite. I asked Nature, which I had come to appreciate as Mother, if she could cause the mosquitos to leave me alone. Within a few minutes, the insects dispersed.
There were many similar little affirmations that Nature is sentient, intelligent, and interactive to the extent we are willing and able to know her as such. I have come to appreciate that these mini-miracles or signs are foremost for my benefit, and mostly not for sharing. However, one among them is, I believe, as much for public witness as for my own benefit. I will share more about this in detail deeper into the book where context provides it a proper home.
* * *
Back to Great Blue Heron. With increasing but sporadic ability to hear Nature’s songs, one wintry afternoon I wondered: Do I have a spiritual animal guide?
Though several people in my life spoke about their spirit animals at a drum circle I occasionally attended (mostly before the concept of cultural appropriation entered general public consciousness), through the years, I never felt such a connection. Now that Nature was beginning to communicate with me, or rather, I was beginning to listen to Nature’s songs, on that wintry afternoon, the question popped into my head: I wonder if I have a spiritual animal guide?
Immediately, the path turned and opened up to view a creek, and there, straight in front of me, was the Great Blue Heron. I had to laugh, so immediate and obvious was the answer, and so joyful the thought of gaining an animal spirit guide. Also, I loved great blue herons! I gazed at it for some time. The only message I heard was: come back.
So I came back the next day. There he was, on the sandy shore of the far side of the creek. With eyes closed, neck curled in an S-shape, and one leg pulled up, he stood in utter stillness doing nothing but absorbing the warmth of the sun on that cold winter day.
The Teaching:
There is a need that precedes all needs
It is subtle and often forgotten
It cannot be found in the flow of daily life
It cannot be chased and captured,
Consumed or devoured,
No effort avails it or amplifies it,
It cannot be heard,
It has no object or objective evidence to locate, to see or grasp.
It can only be felt and received.
Active and effortful, it goes unnoticed.
Passive and receptive, withdrawn from the world and from thoughts,
It becomes everything, bathing the whole mind and being
It is the warmth of divine love,
Ambition and achievement cannot long warm,
Without the warmth, ambition misses
Bathe in the immediate presence of the One above who loves with perfect love.
Bask and know your infinite worth
____________________
Since then, every morning, I enter the shrine of my communion, close the door to all else, and soul-bask.
What a wonderful and needed first lesson from my teacher. Without Heron’s teaching, were I to write a spiritual guide, I’d not have thought of this lesson, and yet it has had a profoundly positive impact on my life. To soak in the vital heat of Divine Love is to be empowered to survive the spiritual cold of modern society. So many of us walk through our days feeling isolated from one another, estranged from God, cold, alone, and questioning our worth. But the Great and Holy Spirit, our true Father, has no constraints and requires no payment for his infinite love.
You may wish to try: Every morning (standing in the warmth of the physical sun if available), close your eyes and repeat: I am infinitely loved by my True Father; or simply: I am infinitely loved; I am infinitely loved.
When Great Blue Heron basked, his long neck was curled, his eyes were closed and he stood on one leg in complete and still contentment. He withdrew from all stimuli, high and low, and was wholly absorbed in the moment of warmth.What is the warmth of the spirit but love? And what the light but clarity and truth? The soul has its landscapes, skies and living things, too. The spirit moves among these things, finding its way. The land of the soul also has its sun, the source of love and love’s own truth. Some call it Source, some God, some the Sun of Heaven, and some the Great and Holy Spirit. He is our Father. Regardless of what some religions say, our Father has nothing but pure love for all life and each life.
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