The fields of our residential community: the little one behind Pinestone, and the larger one that embraces the garden and often hosts the sheep, are awash in shades of green. The grasses are growing, it seems, more than an inch every day. The hummingbirds are back, dancing in the azaleas; the whippoorwill sings like a fool in love outside our windows and doors every night. Rabbits and squirrels hop and scamper. In the garden, radishes are busting out of the earth, lettuce and kale and an array of other growing things make a thick green blanket from fence to fence. Insects buzz and hum and chirp and whirr. The wood frogs trill and the air is thick with pollen dust and the smell of warm earth. The rain and chill of only a couple weeks ago is another world.
This weekend the Still Point partners gathered for two days of work together, part of the commitment each makes to share in the care of the cabin and grounds. This weekend had a twist: on Saturday evening, Still Point hosted "Celebrate Spring and the Breathing Earth", with the intention of raising some money for scholarships for the retreat with David Abram in October, 2015. On what can only be described as a perfect late spring evening, friends enjoyed a lovingly prepared meal, a dancing game around the may tree, a delightful concert, storytelling, and a fire drum circle, all lit first by the glowing sunset and then by the full moon. Earlier, just after breakfast, we had met for business and to get ourselves organized for the day. This short reflection began the meeting:
Once, around this time of year, I walked alone into the creek valley behind Foxfire, where Bob had made a small pool in a bend of Deer Spring Creek. I was headed past this, on my way to the Meditation Shelter, when I heard an eerie racket, like banshees in an argument, or ravens in battle. A few yards away from the pool, I stopped in my tracks. The usually still water was rolling and frothing, embroiled in a mini-tempest, a witch's cauldron. I took a step or two closer and then, as if an invisible hand had abruptly dropped a veil over the scene, all was still. The pool returned to its looking glass state and was profoundly quiet. I waited. Nothing moved except the occasional water skimmer. Then I glimpsed a small brown back just under the water surface; then another. I slowly backed off and went on my way.
It's Easter, just after the spring equinox: the season of emergent life, resurrection, and creativity, of the coming of the light and the primal fire--and the forest near our house is full of long-fallen pine trees. The gray trunks and limbs, all helter-skelter amid brambles and vines and mounds of decaying, brown leaves, resemble skeletons in a ghostly battlefield. Scot explained once that pines are pioneer trees, the first to take root and grow in poor soil and relentless sun.
Today the air is raw again. Bare-branched trees sketch tangled patterns in a leaden sky. The forest scene is painted in straw and pewter. The spring equinox was a week ago, and I am trying to have a right relationship with the bitter breezes and hard-scrabble ground.
Winter is on the wane at last. On Sunday morning, 13 of us, seven adults and six children and babies, took a walk eastward up Peachey Trace into the bare-branched woods and over to the clearing known as Hunters' Field. We were giddy with the laugh-out-loud happiness of being out of our houses, liberated from days of confinement by snow and ice. The white stuff still shushed and crunched under our feet, but it hardly reached the tops of our sturdy shoes. Lingering small icy stretches made us use our walking sticks, grabbed off the porch at Foxfire as we went by. Our progress was slow. The children wanted to touch the textured bark of trees, peer intently at fallen twigs, wander into the pale winter field grass, and sit down on the intriguing ground.
On an intensely cold and sunny day, in a lovely old church in Rhinebeck, (in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City), Scot and Linda watched their son Galen marry a vibrant, intelligent, and beautiful woman. A few days later, as snow fell here at Rolling Ridge, we received an email from Mary Ann about the death of five-year-old Jacii, the nephew of Mary Ann's foster daughter, Karen. He had that morning lost a long battle with leukemia. Mary Ann wrote how Jacii had loved snowmen, and the movie Frozen, and that the family had gathered at his bedside, singing a song from that movie, as he died. Later that day, Josh, Kate, Emma, Wren, and Ana made a snowman for Jacii, rolling and rolling the powdery and sparkling snow. Then they took a picture and sent it to Karen.
It's snowing, and the temperature is hanging just below freezing. The flakes are light and small and fast, almost sleety; but they don't amount to much, a dusting of powder over the brown leaves and fallen twigs. Still, the sky is sunless, a blanket of soft gray. The elegantly arching branches of the tulip poplar and the robust, sinewy branches of the oak are dusky brown against the pale sky. Evidently, a winter landscape.
Evidence, though, is a poor foundation on which to make a case. Evidence is about surfaces and edges and boundaries. This planet, this earth, this life is blurry and messy and uncontained. Things like times and seasons bleed into one another.
It is cold. The mud on the path to the Meditation Shelter has frozen up in small bubbles and lumps. It crunches and crackles underfoot. The tree trunks and tangled branches are etched crisply against a pale sky, the high contour of the ridge clearly visible through the dry air. There are long pauses in the conversations of the forest creatures: a woodpecker's thunk-thunk, silence, a blackbird's caw, silence. The water in Deer Spring creek has stopped in icy patterns against the stones. I am reminded of the phrase we use when calling on the directions at the beginning of restorying retreats: "let us turn to the North, place of frozen stillness and quiet waiting, home of wolf and the season of winter..."
Our custom at Rolling Ridge is to mark the turning of the year quietly. Before midnight we walk softly, in silence, through the moonlit forest, down into Deer Spring Creek valley and up again, past the Memorial Grove, and to the Meditation Shelter, which glows from within with candle and firelight. There we gather in a circle and share what we have brought: a poem, a song, a thought, the warm silence of our hearts. Thus, as one of us said last night, we midwife the new year.
What follows is what I wrote for the occasion. Erin is the sweet, boundlessly energetic dog who came to us out of the woods in October, a little more than a year ago. She resides with us, and has a bed and a place in every one of our community homes. We are her pack.
The shadows of the trees in the creek valley behind Foxfire and Pinestone in mid-afternoon are long and slender strips. The sun's rays slant almost horizontal and deeply gold through the forest. It is nearly the winter solstice, and the dark comes early in this third week of Advent. It is a thin time, perhaps the thinnest of all: a threshold time of waiting and expectancy.
Annie Dillard wrote a book called Teaching A Stone To Talk. It's a trick title. The book is about human beings learning to listen. Stones talk all the time.
This weekend there was a retreat at Rolling Ridge for Advent and the Winter Solstice. We spent some time in the Meditation Shelter tuning our senses and psyches to awaken to the animate, breathing world around us. We gathered by the glowing woodstove in candlelight and read poetry, danced gently, sat quietly, sang a bit, and told stories. Then we went out into the forest, that world, which as Mary Oliver says, "is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith, our deepest prayers", and listened.
The trees are beginning to unveil their skeletal frames, releasing leaves of truest hue to carpet the forest floor. Autumn is in middle age, and while bursts of scarlet and amber still explode in the woods, for the most part the trees stand dark and airy, branches crossed and twining against the blue and pewter sky.
A couple weekends ago, a group of 16 people gathered here for a retreat called Restorying, which sought to help us cultivate, or re-cultivate, the stories that will sustain and nurture us in our time. On the first night of the retreat, we clustered near the head of the trail that leads through the enfolding forest to the pond, which waited in stillness below. Singing, we walked under the darkening trees, to a fire, where each one was asked, "Are you willing to enter the door that leads to the realm of heart and soul and mystery?"
This is the kind of stuff that goes on at Still Point.
I'm looking through my east window at the maple tree next to the woodshed. I can't take my eyes off of it. It's on fire, or at least pulsing with red-gold light, moving ever so slightly in a light autumn wind. For sure it's the angle of the sun's rays this time of year, hitting aslant, that makes the tree glow, framed elegantly by its still-green neighbors.
On the other side of our house, out the west window, this morning before dawn, the moon hung near the horizon. A full moon, it was almost completely eclipsed, a delicately traced dark circle holding a slender crescent of light.
If I were Mary Oliver, I would exclaim, "Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful..." or "every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight..." and then I would write simply magnificent poetry.
Three nights ago, according to the planets and the stars, autumn began. For those of us walking through the forest to the Retreat House or splitting wood beside Homestead, the season's edges are less defined. For days and days the trees have stood green and glowing, suffused with shimmering sunlight as the air blows alternately warm and cool around them. Then a crimson leaf appears on the path to the front door and the maple and buckeye next to Homestead are tinged red and yellow. The scruffy, molting cardinals are shaking off their summer plumage, replacing feathers to stem winter's chill. Second by second, dark cloaks the earth earlier each night; songbirds are departing; we hunt in our closets for sweaters and quilts. All around, here and there, incremental but persistent change is happening.
I suppose it's customary on a work day that falls on Labor Day to reflect on the transformative power of using our bodies and minds to create, restore, sustain, build, and assist life on this planet. At least, in some small way, that's what we hope we are doing as we split and stack wood, weed, sweep, and plant. During our last work day in March, we took a moment to recognize the beginnings of a new and hopeful vision for work among the Rolling Ridge community, whose members are exploring ways to help one another live and work in relationship with the land and ecosystems that surround us. We realized that this vision went against the tide of conventional expectations about how to make a living, but we felt it was a good vision and one that felt right for our community and that we should try.
I have been musing about friendship, a train of thought sparked by the recent visit of my very dear friend Pat. She arrived last Thursday, in time to join us for community supper. Before we ate, I shared the gist of my thoughts for the evening's reflection:
Pat and I have been friends for at least 36 years. We met when she came to do an internship at Sojourners; but our friendship really began when she and I fell into the habit of walking together, for miles and miles. We walked to work (about two miles down D.C.'s streets) and home again every work day of every week, for years. We walked other places too: around and through city parks and in the wildlife refuge that bordered All Saints Convent outside Baltimore. At some time early on in that cocoon of shared pedestrian movement, one of us cracked open just enough, a crack that spread to the other. A rush of vulnerable air blew in, carrying wonderment and friendship on its currents.
Our family has been going to Chincoteague for a week or two in July-August for nearly 30 years, and this summer was no different. Only now the little boys have become men, husbands, and fathers, and instead of a dome tent or pop-up camper, our growing family rents a several-bedroom house (or houses). Not much else has changed, though. We still enjoy biking through the wildlife refuge, passing egrets and marshmallows, turtles, herons, and wild ponies; and setting up our rusty old chairs and rickety umbrellas on the coarse sand of the national seashore, accompanied by raucous seagulls and the rough Atlantic surf.
Last weekend the Rolling Ridge Study Retreat board and the residential community came together for our annual retreat. The experience for all of us was wrapped in awareness of the changes afoot here. Luke and Joy had just moved in one week earlier, with their little daughter Wren and newborn son Gael. Only a week or so before that, we had had our last community supper with Bob and Jackie.
The first session of our retreat was given over to each of us sharing what we brought to the moment. This is what had risen in me:
The reflection shared here has no tales of garden, turtles, woodpeckers; no sudden discoveries or mesmerized moments. It does have a back story, which begins: in the late 1990s, after more than a decade of involvement with the people and vision of Rolling Ridge, Bob and Jackie Sabath began their journey to residential community here. This meant, among other things, building a home. After profound giving of time, creativity, artistry, nurturing energy, sweat, and personal resources, a lovely, gracious and ever-hospitable home was built, Foxfire; and here Jackie and Bob have lived and loved for 15 years. Words cannot describe, but we all know, what a profound gift their presence (vision, dreams, energy, love, skill, compassion) has been for Rolling Ridge.
No apologies this time. It just happens to be a season rife with opportunities for sharing reflections at various gatherings, and they seem to be coming only weeks or days apart. This one was given last Sunday morning as Circle Community gathered for worship at the Retreat House.
I had planned to give this reflection at a Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Board meeting that was unfortunately cancelled. I gave it instead at a residential community supper. Afterwards I was encouraged by my friends to share it here. I hesitated because it was originally intended for a specific group of listeners. After consideration, though, I think that it is one way of telling part of the story of Rolling Ridge and in that way may be of interest. So:
Reflection given for the Friends of Silence Board Meeting
Being "friends of silence", we spend time wondering about what it is, as we would with a life-long companion or partner. At least I do. What makes him or her, or it, tick? What are its contours, its hills and valleys, its depths, its joys? What is its personality, its mood, on any given day? What or who is it?
I suspect, indeed, that these are the questions which bring readers to the Letter. They find inspiration in the quotes for sure, but deep down, they are asking, what is this silence we are all so drawn to? They read the Letter hoping for a glimpse at an answer, or perhaps at least a signpost pointing to another layer of exploration and wonder.
This weekend the Still Point partners gathered for two days of work together, part of the commitment each makes to share in the care of the cabin and grounds. This weekend had a twist: on Saturday evening, Still Point hosted "Celebrate Spring and the Breathing Earth", with the intention of raising some money for scholarships for the retreat with David Abram in October, 2015. On what can only be described as a perfect late spring evening, friends enjoyed a lovingly prepared meal, a dancing game around the may tree, a delightful concert, storytelling, and a fire drum circle, all lit first by the glowing sunset and then by the full moon. Earlier, just after breakfast, we had met for business and to get ourselves organized for the day. This short reflection began the meeting:
Our custom at Rolling Ridge is to mark the turning of the year quietly. Before midnight we walk softly, in silence, through the moonlit forest, down into Deer Spring Creek valley and up again, past the Memorial Grove, and to the Meditation Shelter, which glows from within with candle and firelight. There we gather in a circle and share what we have brought: a poem, a song, a thought, the warm silence of our hearts. Thus, as one of us said last night, we midwife the new year.
The trees are beginning to unveil their skeletal frames, releasing leaves of truest hue to carpet the forest floor. Autumn is in middle age, and while bursts of scarlet and amber still explode in the woods, for the most part the trees stand dark and airy, branches crossed and twining against the blue and pewter sky.
A couple weekends ago, a group of 16 people gathered here for a retreat called Restorying, which sought to help us cultivate, or re-cultivate, the stories that will sustain and nurture us in our time. On the first night of the retreat, we clustered near the head of the trail that leads through the enfolding forest to the pond, which waited in stillness below. Singing, we walked under the darkening trees, to a fire, where each one was asked, "Are you willing to enter the door that leads to the realm of heart and soul and mystery?"
I'm looking through my east window at the maple tree next to the woodshed. I can't take my eyes off of it. It's on fire, or at least pulsing with red-gold light, moving ever so slightly in a light autumn wind. For sure it's the angle of the sun's rays this time of year, hitting aslant, that makes the tree glow, framed elegantly by its still-green neighbors.
Three nights ago, according to the planets and the stars, autumn began. For those of us walking through the forest to the Retreat House or splitting wood beside Homestead, the season's edges are less defined. For days and days the trees have stood green and glowing, suffused with shimmering sunlight as the air blows alternately warm and cool around them. Then a crimson leaf appears on the path to the front door and the maple and buckeye next to Homestead are tinged red and yellow. The scruffy, molting cardinals are shaking off their summer plumage, replacing feathers to stem winter's chill. Second by second, dark cloaks the earth earlier each night; songbirds are departing; we hunt in our closets for sweaters and quilts. All around, here and there, incremental but persistent change is happening.
I suppose it's customary on a work day that falls on Labor Day to reflect on the transformative power of using our bodies and minds to create, restore, sustain, build, and assist life on this planet. At least, in some small way, that's what we hope we are doing as we split and stack wood, weed, sweep, and plant. During our last work day in March, we took a moment to recognize the beginnings of a new and hopeful vision for work among the Rolling Ridge community, whose members are exploring ways to help one another live and work in relationship with the land and ecosystems that surround us. We realized that this vision went against the tide of conventional expectations about how to make a living, but we felt it was a good vision and one that felt right for our community and that we should try.
Last weekend the Rolling Ridge Study Retreat board and the residential community came together for our annual retreat. The experience for all of us was wrapped in awareness of the changes afoot here. Luke and Joy had just moved in one week earlier, with their little daughter Wren and newborn son Gael. Only a week or so before that, we had had our last community supper with Bob and Jackie.
The reflection shared here has no tales of garden, turtles, woodpeckers; no sudden discoveries or mesmerized moments. It does have a back story, which begins: in the late 1990s, after more than a decade of involvement with the people and vision of Rolling Ridge, Bob and Jackie Sabath began their journey to residential community here. This meant, among other things, building a home. After profound giving of time, creativity, artistry, nurturing energy, sweat, and personal resources, a lovely, gracious and ever-hospitable home was built, Foxfire; and here Jackie and Bob have lived and loved for 15 years. Words cannot describe, but we all know, what a profound gift their presence (vision, dreams, energy, love, skill, compassion) has been for Rolling Ridge.
No apologies this time. It just happens to be a season rife with opportunities for sharing reflections at various gatherings, and they seem to be coming only weeks or days apart. This one was given last Sunday morning as Circle Community gathered for worship at the Retreat House.
I had planned to give this reflection at a Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Board meeting that was unfortunately cancelled. I gave it instead at a residential community supper. Afterwards I was encouraged by my friends to share it here. I hesitated because it was originally intended for a specific group of listeners. After consideration, though, I think that it is one way of telling part of the story of Rolling Ridge and in that way may be of interest. So:
Reflection given for the Friends of Silence Board Meeting