The Song of the Brook
I honor you. I am grateful for you.
What is your song?
(There was silence for some time as I continued to thank her and listen. Eventually, she spoke.)
You worry about direction, and about arriving, and time.
You see that I flow steadily onward, in freedom.
And yet there are banks on both sides that show me the way.
Beneath is the slope that tells me the speed.
They guide me to my destination,
What is there to worry about?
So is your life guided and brought forward to your purpose,
At the right pace, at the right time.
What is there to worry about?
You see the sun sparkle on my surface as I move over rocks.
Your moving forward through life,
Growing, serving, reflects the Divine.
Absence is Presence
In addition to the lesson of patience, the absence of my teacher included a second, perhaps even deeper spiritual truth: that absence is presence and that the absence of a lesson is a lesson. When Heron was absent physically, she was still teaching (unbeknownst to me), and in that teaching, present. Alongside wu-wei, the value of emptiness and absence is also a core principle of Taoism. Chapter Eleven of the Tao Te Ching reads as follows:
Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there. (Translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)
In fact, wu-wei is the natural result of the value of emptiness. Only when empty can the sage be filled with the motion of the Tao and so participate in wu-wei. Only when we remove our ego can Spirit fill, guide, and animate us.
The vital importance of absence, and absence as a form of presence was a focus of several other concomitant incidents and lessons which I received from Father and Mother during this period of heightened communion in, with, and through Nature. Unlike other lessons which I felt before being quickly translated by my mind into verbal expression, the most important lesson about absence arrived as an opaque, enveloping inner fog, the meaning of which didn’t fully descend into verbal understanding until days later.
I was sitting in a section of the woods I did not often visit, just opening myself to hear, perceive and receive as best I could. A feeling of potent presence came over me, and with it, mild dread—it was a kind of awe that made me realize my insignificance and impotency before something I was not fully aware of before. It was Mother herself. I had been hearing the songs of various forms of the natural world, but this time, I knew, I was being overshadowed by the spirit of Mother Earth herself. She did not have ill-will, but she was also, in this moment, no-nonsense, and not here to simply comfort or uplift. I felt mentally stunned such that I wasn’t having any thoughts, just held in a sense of being in deeper than I could handle, and closer than I probably should be.
Her teaching was on the importance of apparent absence—absence of both Father and Mother as sentient, powerful and real beings. Were you to, as you seek, keenly know and feel our presence, Father above you, and Mother below you, you would be annihilated. Imagine if you were able to experience the truth of being held from above and below by forces of perfect order, love and power? You would no longer feel free because the good and right choice in every situation would be so obvious. You would therefore resent us for robbing you of freedom. You would no longer have any sense of autonomy or power or life. You would no longer have any sense of purpose or meaning. You would have no self or even sense of self. Therefore, we hide ourselves, cloak ourselves.
When I feel lost, alone, distant from Spirit, I now know why—for my own good. In a sense, the disconnection is grounded in the unconscious choice of my soul so that it can remain alive. The absence of Father is the evidence of Father. The lack of perception of Nature as an intelligent, responsive, loving Mother is evidence of her intelligent, responsive love. This lesson has profoundly changed my experience of life and is closely tied to the prior lesson of patience and wading. Feelings of isolation do not mean something is wrong with my life, or that I am lost, it just means that this is the place I need to be experiencing at this time to preserve my life. I am not being punished, Spirit is fulfilling the tacit request of my soul to know that it exists and is valuable. It isn’t my favorite way of knowing the presence of Spirit, but absence truly is presence, and lack of lesson is truly a lesson.
Calmness in trial, patience with lack, stability on an invisible higher ground when the mind and events are turbulent are interconnected values of this lesson. This lesson also weakens the tendency to question the veracity and love of Father when he seems absent. These in turn allow us to be stronger for other people, wiser in our communications, and more clear-headed when others are in confusion, more healing when others are in pain.
In most mystic traditions, the self is an illusion, and the goal is to see through that illusion until Oneness is all that is left. What I have been taught is different from that. What I have been taught is that the goal is to, after seeing through the illusion of autonomy and separation, to return and embrace the illusion of separation and individuality because it is absolutely essential to life and meaning. Love is only real when there are separate entities to give, receive and share love. Father is Divine Love Itself; Mother is Divine Love actualized and reified by means of the sense of separation and autonomy that arises from time and space experience. In one sense, it is illusion, there is only Oneness, but because love reified in specific forms between the appearance of individualized entities, that realized love between them causes the appearance of entities to become actual.
To the extent we participate in loving interactions, to that extent we become actual beings, made real by the unique forms of love that have arisen through and as us. Mother, and all her children are therefore real, and just as vital as Father, just as worthy of our honor and adoration as Father. The fourth commandment (or fifth depending on how you count) says: Honor thy Father and they Mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God is giving you. The land is spiritual real estate of peace and happiness. If we do not know that land, then our disturbed and desperate minds create chaos in the external world and our days on the physical earth are also numbered.
Here, too, we see the same lesson, that absence is presence. T.D Suzuki and Paul Carus translates the last line of Tao Te Ching, chapter 11, as,
“Therefore, existence renders actual, but non-existence renders useful,”
and Kari Hohne as,
“Therefore, something is shaped into what is; but its usefulness comes from what is not.”
Pure white light without any mediation or reflective object is blinding, and without contrast, is indistinguishable from darkness. Therefore, alone, it is effectively the same as darkness, nothingness. Colors come into being by means of the absence—the absence of all other wavelengths of light. Aristotle and Goethe suggested a theory of color that was displaced by Newton’s. They believed that colors arose by varying combination of light and darkness. They were not wrong. Red is the light of the longest wavelength, and the absence, or darkness of every other color. In this way, as the quote above explains, the existence of light makes it actual, but the absence of it makes it useful.
An identical phenomenon is the foundation of life. Every piece of DNA within any particular organism encodes every last necessary detail for the entire organism, regardless of how large or complex. It gives existence to the being. However, DNA and the information it holds is entirely useless except that uniquely within each cell, depending on location and function, all other elements of the DNA are deactivated apart from what is needed for the particular expression that is that particular cell. The absence of expression, the non-existence of expression of the majority of the information within the DNA is what makes DNA useful, what makes the organism to be what it is.
The universe is the same way in relation to God. Divine Love has within it the potential for all that could ever be. Everything within the cosmos is experienceable because all the potential of Divine Love that is not that particular entity is deactivated, is absent. Therefore, as the quote explains, existence provides actuality, but non-existence provides usefulness.
The separate entities that come into being as the result of absence, or deactivation, are able to enter into relationships of care with one another. The love that comes to exist between two unique entities is real, and the unique shape or quality of that shared love is also real—a kind of reality that did not previously exist, and cannot exist by means of Father, or God, alone. Mother is just as important and worthy of honor and adoration. Mother is all that is not-Divine, not-God.
Heron is not the only teacher. Every plant and animal has a lesson, possesses wisdom. Just as a healthy ecosystem has all manner of plants and animals, each fulfilling a role, so human society needs people of all kinds. The bear, the fish, the mink, the chipmunk, the sparrow—all have a teaching, all have a song. Each of us will resonate differently with these many notes in life’s symphony, with these many songs in the Song of Songs. We each have a niche in the family of life and a song to sing.
In the book of Genesis, we read that Adam names his wife Eve because she is the mother of all living. Eve means “Living One,” or “Source of Life.” She is taken from Adam’s rib, as the narrative goes, but she is not just an extension of Adam. She not only has her own life, and independence, she is described as the mother of all the lives, source of life. We might imagine that in the Bible this title might be reserved for God, but we’d be wrong. The universe isn’t just the body of God as the body’s spirit. Were this true, there would be two aspects of God, but that would leave us with just God and because reality depends on relationship, if the universe isn’t actually other, and not-God, then God is not.
Love is life. The Cosmos, or Nature, is the Mother of Life because she is where relationships and so love becomes real. Love not only becomes real, it also adopts a particular unique shape based on the personality or quality of the beings participating in a loving relationship. The substance is from Father, the form is from Mother. In this way, the universe is no more just an extension of God than Eve is just the rib of Adam.
In the West, as inheritors of the Abrahamic, paternalistic monotheism without any feminine counterpart, we tend to think of the not-Divine, or not-God as less than the Divine. That is no more true than saying the functioning body is less important than DNA, or that color is not as beautiful, wonderful and important as uniform white light. We can even see how these false ideas lead to the terribly destructive and false social ideals that elevate uniformity, so called “racial purity” and “superiority” of one group over another.
The light and heat of the sun, without a non-solar recipient, is functionally the same as darkness and cold. These attributes find life-giving meaning in conjunction with Earth. Conversely, Earth is lifeless except for the sun. Only when together do either Sun or Earth have meaning and purpose. God and Cosmos, Father and Mother, only make sense and only have meaning together. Earth is not lesser than the sun, just different. The universe is not lesser than God, just different.
Because we have for so long diminished the beauty, meaning, and value of the realm of difference, division, individuality and finitude, we have come to think of it as a machine. We are constantly fed a steady stream of paradigm propaganda that the universe is a system of mindless mechanics of physics and chemistry. There either is no spirit at all—physicalism and materialism–or if there is spirit, the three major Western religions explain that the universe does not possess it, and is evil, or an illusion, or minimally, less than. Physicalism and materialism may be the inevitable result of paternal monotheism. Among the stereotypical male characteristics and values, power is perhaps at the top. A god of power leads worshippers to adore power, and in emulating their god, seek power. Technology reveals the power of physicalism.
However, after 1187 chapters of the Protestant, and 1332 chapters of the Catholic, the last two chapter of the Bible, representing less than 0.5% of the total verbiage, an entirely new reality is introduced: discussion of a glorious femininity that is equal in importance to God; indeed, she is the Bride of the Divine. She is introduced immediately after the words, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” This is not referring to the literal earth and heaven, but to the old paradigm that did not include woman or femininity as of equal importance to man and masculinity, did not appreciate the realm of differentiation, form, and definition as equal to the Divine. The heaven that passes away is the old concepts, and the earth that passes away is the old functioning, the old society—the one we are in now and which is at this very moment crumbling away under its own unsustainable weight of wrongness.
I’m not saying the Bible is wrong, I’m saying we haven’t gotten to the end yet. I’m saying that the end is when we wake up and come to understand it, and everything else, in a new way, a way of balance, harmony and honoring of not just Heavenly Father, but Mother Earth as well.
I don’t worship Mother Earth, but I adore, revere, and honor her no less than I do Heavenly Father. Neither has meaning or any real existence except in relation to the other. Without Father and Mother together, life does life exist. Platonic perfection pales in comparison to the imperfect messiness of relationships and life on Earth. The Divine is perfect, and therefore imperfect. The Cosmos is imperfect, therefore she is perfect.
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