The Wisdom of Poets and of Nature on Days Like This

So like many others, I woke up Saturday morning to the news that my / our country has begun a bombing campaign to try to force regime change in Iran. I found out about this when my phone started buzzing at about 4am Saturday morning with a notification from a completely random app that somehow got through my do-not-disturb setting. As I looked at my phone, I saw another notification that this attack had begun. Suffice to say, I wasn’t getting back to sleep at that time and I was at the gym on the treadmill by 5am.

As well on Saturday morning, Diana Butler Bass (DBB) shared several things connected to the theme of “Blessed are the makers of peace” - a prophetic message, a poetic reflection, and a prayerful lament and call for peace. There’s lots I could say about what is taking place in the Persian Gulf right now but the internet doesn’t need another hot take on this - there are plenty. Believe me, I do have thoughts if you want to hear them.

But like DBB, I’m going to go to poetry and, true to me, I am going to go to photography for today.

A few nights ago, I read the following from Rainer Maria Rilke from his Book of Hours (11, 16)

Knots of Our Own Making
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.¹

This so goes along with what I continue to read in Refugia Faith and I continue to see in what we are doing to our world, to one another, and what is happening around us. We keep making more and more knots and we are not listening to the wisdom that is ever-present and has been passed down over the ages. Debra Rienstra quotes Wendell Berry speaking to something very akin to this when he writes:

“Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.”²

Lots and lots of knots.

So, when I’m feeling knotted up with the knots of my own making and the knotting of so much else, I go to nature - not to avoid or to get away but to center and clear. Here is some of what I have seen over the last few days. Comment on one of the photos coming at the end.

Even a smudged lens can create something uniquely beautiful

This is a progression of (nearly) the same flowers (all were in the same yard) over a 27 hour period

This reflection just felt so unique to me. Loved it

I'm not yet sure what it is, but there's something with this tree that I am really starting to be drawn into

The early glimpses of Spring. I especially love the one of the daffodils that are just starting to poke up out of the ground. I don't know if this is how it works, but the tiniest tips of yellow - is that the flower?

Ok - this photo...

This early-not-quite-yet-Spring bloom is one of so many tiny yellow blooms I saw all around Rowe Woods on Saturday morning. But this one looked to me like two hands coming together in prayer but the way that I photographed it with the super-shallow depth-of-field gives it an unsettled and (literal and figurative) unfocusedness. It feels to me like the prayer of one who feels the knots within and without and yet continues to bring the hands together in hope and in trust for something, somehow, some way.

And as I’m writing this now, I also see the sense of something fragile and precious being carefully held - enveloping it fully lest it falls. What is within? Peace? Connection? Hope? Whatever is within, it is precious and vital but the time will come that it will be released. And with that, the other poem that spoke to me in recent days - also from Rilke but not about knots but about connections and what binds (but doesn’t knot) us together.

What Links Us
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move alongside our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day’s doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 12³

In closing, I am grateful for the rapid witness of Karen Georgia Thompson, The General Minister of the United Church of Christ who shared this today (ending of her statement and her prayer)

We pray for a lasting peace, a deep peace which is more than the end to violence and brings about a just world with flourishing for all, remembering also in our prayers other parts of the world where wars and civil unrest persist.

Giver of life, how you must grieve at the callous infliction of death and destruction, the easiness with which people choose the path of violence when you have shown us a better way through your love for all humankind. We remember the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who said, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. They acted shamefully; they committed abomination, yet they were not ashamed; they did not know how to blush.” In these moments, we cry out for peace, while leaders who do not know how to blush choose bluster, bombast, and bombs.

We pray for your intervention and a settling of your Spirit on the hearts of those which are now set on the path of domination: turn them back to the path of life. We pray for your intervention in the midst of our fear, that we persist in your truth with courage as we seek peace and justice for all. Protect those who are now in harm’s way and send your healing spirit to each one afflicted by acts of violence. Show us a way where there appears to be no way, a peace where there is now no peace, a path to restoration of community and a just and lasting peace.⁴

Scout says Amen (and also wonders why the white hand of Saruman is on this post at Rowe Woods)

Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed

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1. Barrows, Anita; Macy, Joanna. A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke (p. 53). Kindle Edition.

2. Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 98. quoted in Rienstra, Debra. Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth (pp. 130-131). (Function). Kindle Edition.

3. Barrows, Anita; Macy, Joanna. A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke (p. 54). Kindle Edition.

4. https://www.ucc.org/ucc-gmp-issues-statement-following-us-israel-attack-on-iran-calls-on-elected-officials-to-reject-war/