Holy Listening

The erratic climate these past few years has taken a toll on the woods. The drought is over, but steady weather patterns have not returned and it is the trees, who until recently have managed to withstand the stress, which are now displaying the cumulative effects of too much dry and too little wet. Over the summer several of the older giants have relinquished their green canopy of leaves and now stand as gaunt skeletons with rusty crumpled hair. The deck and surrounding gravel paths are littered with their dark shriveled leaves.

I have always loved the trees. Gazing up into their branches over the years has become a comforting and settling experience akin to prayer and meditation for me. They have an innate majesty that draws me in. Rooted deep into the earth with their arms in the sky they represent the balance I seek to achieve in my own life. Their size humbles me and helps me remember my place in the world. But it is their ability to simply be there, witnessing to whatever I feel inside, to hear my thoughts or words without judgment, that endears them to me the most. While we come and go about our lives, building up and tearing down, they remain rooted where they are silently watching.

Witnessing is a powerful gift. I sometimes wonder if we are drawn to television reality shows because of our culture places so little value on the human need for this 'holy listening'. This spiritual side of human nature longs to be seen, to connect with the divine inside of us and its source. If we live in a culture that does not openly honor that, we look for it in all sorts of other places: food, shopping, drink, chemicals, unhealthy relationships, fanatical religious constructs and even by trying to create it in TV shows. In the short term they appear to work because all these things have the power to numb our longings for connection. But because they are not genuine they are not interested in listening. That is an experience that exists only in an atmosphere of acceptance. We encounter it in the intimacy of friendship and healthy relationships, standing before a piece of art that moves us, listening to music or reading poems and writings which give voice to our feelings, in the confessional sanctity of our religions or therapists, in the beauty of the world all around us and most profoundly, when we witness to the voice of our own deep selves.

It began raining last night, slow and steady. This morning listening to the sound it makes on the leaves and deck it is easy to imagine the roots of the tall ones drinking it in and then following the wet as it soaks down deep into the ground. Perhaps we can remember to do the same for ourselves.

Whoever you are: step out in to the evening
out of your living room, where everything is so known;
your house stands as the last thing before great space:
Whoever you are.
With your eyes which in their fatigue can just barely
free themselves from the worn-out thresholds,
very slowly, lift a single black tree
and place it against the sky, slender and alone.
With this you have made the world. And it is large
and like a word that is still ripening in silence.
And, just as your will grasps their meaning,
they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes…

Rilke, "Entrance"