"Peace is not the absence of war." Spinoza said it, but it is mindlessly quoted out of context, for he added, "It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
~ from A LITTLE COMPENDIUM ON THAT WHICH MATTERS by Frederick Franck
The news flickering daily on our incessant screens is nearly always heartbreaking, but last week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was particularly excruciating because it concerned everyone and everything we love. The IPCC found that Earth will cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade. The continued use of fossil fuels is dooming any possibility of slowing the warming of the planet. The panel pleaded with industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s. If both these actions happened, said the panel, the Earth and her inhabitants would stand half a chance.
A small group of friends in the cohousing community where I moved almost two years ago have been meeting regularly to deepen relationship with one another. We try to practice authenticity and help each other navigate around the eddies and whirlpools of life in intentional human community and through the shoals of this chapter of Earth’s story. Not long ago we watched a video of the storyteller Martin Shaw relating an old and powerful tale, “The Handless Maiden”. The invitation was to allow the story to sit beside us for a while and perhaps, if it seemed right, to relay to one another what happened. What emerged for me seeded this reflection.*
It’s the season of waiting, a thin time. The shadows along the river in the afternoon are long. The coral sun, tinged with gold, slants between the trunks of the sycamores and poplars. Margaret Atwood wrote:
This is the solstice, the still point
Of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
The year’s threshold
And unlocking, where the past
Lets go of and becomes the future;
The place of caught breath, the door
Of a vanished house left ajar.
It is the time of stories, cherished and familiar, the cadences falling off the tongue in song and poetry:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…
In early June I helped to lead a women’s retreat at Rolling Ridge. About a week before the retreat, we each received a suggested assignment to reflect on the experience of the past two years, the strange time between the pre-pandemic world we thought we knew and whatever might be ahead. “What have you learned in this interim? what has been revealed? what might you want to remember and carry into whatever is next? what is best left behind?” This was my reflection:
Early in the new year some friends, who for a long time in the pre-pandemic world had met and worked together on leading retreats that touched on “nature and soul”, gathered on Zoom to contemplate a return to this work. The following reflection is based on what I shared as we began our meeting.
“Now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” This quote by Rainer Maria Rilke, with its echoes of wonder and unbridled anticipation, is appreciated by many of us. I have always liked it; though my enthusiasm for the expressed sentiment is curious, because the imperative to welcome all things is a fierce one. Rilke is also the poet who wrote, “Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror.”
It's been six months since my husband and I moved the last box from our home at Rolling Ridge to our place in the cohousing community we have been part of visioning, building, and weaving together for more than a decade. Now when I look out the window over my desk I see a narrow band of oaks, firs, and maples ringing cottages clustered in twos and threes with small yards overflowing with all manner of native and medicinal plants. The sky overhead is wide and wild. The field to the south stretches to the horizon, just beyond the community's meticulously tended permaculture garden. On the north, the cottages form a gentle "U" looking toward the Common House, the central hearth and shared home of our community.
In spring, as friends met under freshly greening branches, we thought of a retreat at Rolling Ridge, “Returning to Holy Ground.” We dared to imagine a group gathered once again within the Meditation Shelter for ceremony and council, camping in the early autumn woods, and lodging for two nights in the shared cabin where simple meals might be prepared and eaten together. We thought of beautiful questions that might arise from a time of pandemic during which many were apprenticed to loss, sorrow, uncertainty, and perhaps to unexpected angels. What has been true for us? What have we learned? And what, now, do we hold in our open hands?
A season of dappled light followed, drenched in the sun’s bright rays. Around my home in Shepherd Village a landscape of wildish native plants blossomed: delicate pink milkweed, bright suns of coreopsis, bold coneflowers, spikes of lavender beardtongue, vibrant blue delphiniums in a riot of happy color.
More than a year ago, last April, a few of us began taking a silent walk at sunset around the field and garden at Rolling Ridge. We walked past the clusters of daffodils, the trees with bare branches dusted pale green, the quiet garden. We wanted somehow to be present to the precarious, uncertain circumstances since a pandemic had rolled across the planet and we fell out of the world we had known. I remember resonating with Lynn Unger’s poem “Pandemic”, which called on us to consider the invitation to slow and cease:
As February slid toward March, the harsh grip of winter tightened. It snowed, and snowed some more. Fierce winds thrashed the oak and fir trees around my new home, a cohousing village community built not long ago on the edge of an old and vibrant small town. To the south of the circular cluster of duplex and triplex homes that make up the community there is a field where cows graze when the snow melts. On the east we have a tiny forest preserve lovingly salvaged from the construction perimeter. This is where I sometimes take a slow walk. I am barely beginning to know this place.
Not far from here is the mountain whose familiar trails, contours, and inhabitants I have cherished. Rolling Ridge is where I lived, closely with friends, for many years; and where now, I visit.
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.
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.
A new year’s turning at Rolling Ridge. The moment held a peculiar potency, for it passed on the hinge of a turbulent decade, when so much is at stake. The Earth and all her inhabitants, all that we love, is in dire straits.
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.
Children gambol on the gentle hillside between our houses where forsythia blooms. The fronds adorning the old willow stump are filling out, a green fountain. These are bright compositions of happiness and hope, the faithfulness of Earth greening once again. Yet for me they are splashed with other thoughts and emotions. Perhaps it is the times in which we live or, just as likely, my particular heartbreak, but there are moments when I crave a more mottled canvas. In The Seasons Book Parker Palmer writes
…there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.
The old willow stump by the creek has sprouted pale green fronds. The crocuses are pushing up through brown leaves. Water in the creeks gurgles irrepressibly over rocks, bird song wafts delicate music in the trees, and frogs make frothy love in the ponds. Spring has arrived, despite the world’s troubles. This means that for the next few precious weeks, or maybe only days, it will be possible to walk comfortably in the wild woods.
Something inside of me has reached to the place where the world is breathing.
--Kabir
Days each week, I go walking in the woods with a story in my pocket. It’s winter now, and the landscape is a mass of tawny leaves, twigs and branches. I pass trunks sprouting delicate scallops of pale fungi and fallen logs green with moss. My boots rustle through the brown leaves, crisp with cold, and thunk in the mud along the creek banks. A flash of red and a harsh call announces the pileated hurtling through the gray trees. The rest of the forest is quiet.
The news flickering daily on our incessant screens is nearly always heartbreaking, but last week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was particularly excruciating because it concerned everyone and everything we love. The IPCC found that Earth will cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade. The continued use of fossil fuels is dooming any possibility of slowing the warming of the planet. The panel pleaded with industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s. If both these actions happened, said the panel, the Earth and her inhabitants would stand half a chance. 
A small group of friends in the cohousing community where I moved almost two years ago have been meeting regularly to deepen relationship with one another. We try to practice authenticity and help each other navigate around the eddies and whirlpools of life in intentional human community and through the shoals of this chapter of Earth’s story. Not long ago we watched a video of the storyteller Martin Shaw relating an old and powerful tale, “The Handless Maiden”. The invitation was to allow the story to sit beside us for a while and perhaps, if it seemed right, to relay to one another what happened. What emerged for me seeded this reflection.*
.jpg "Shutterstock Images")
In early June I helped to lead a women’s retreat at Rolling Ridge. About a week before the retreat, we each received a suggested assignment to reflect on the experience of the past two years, the strange time between the pre-pandemic world we thought we knew and whatever might be ahead. “What have you learned in this interim? what has been revealed? what might you want to remember and carry into whatever is next? what is best left behind?” This was my reflection:
More than a year ago, last April, a few of us began taking a silent walk at sunset around the field and garden at Rolling Ridge. We walked past the clusters of daffodils, the trees with bare branches dusted pale green, the quiet garden. We wanted somehow to be present to the precarious, uncertain circumstances since a pandemic had rolled across the planet and we fell out of the world we had known. I remember resonating with Lynn Unger’s poem “.jpg)
As February slid toward March, the harsh grip of winter tightened. It snowed, and snowed some more. Fierce winds thrashed the oak and fir trees around my new home, a cohousing village community built not long ago on the edge of an old and vibrant small town. To the south of the circular cluster of duplex and triplex homes that make up the community there is a field where cows graze when the snow melts. On the east we have a tiny forest preserve lovingly salvaged from the construction perimeter. This is where I sometimes take a slow walk. I am barely beginning to know this place.
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 .jpg)
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.
