Reverence: A Force of Nature
What do you think of as a force of nature?
The wind howling? Lightning striking? Thunderous storms? Ocean tides? There are other forces of nature that are equally powerful and vastly more subtle.
One of these is the subject of today’s story.
First, three concepts:
The word “gestation” is an old word, referring to the time between conception and birth, a time when nature creates a new member of a species. The creative process needs time for gestation also. New ideas, new concepts, new feelings, new ways of doing things need time to come together. New ideas need time to form themselves up, to embellish their roots to be nurtured. The word gestation describes a process whereby things come together.
Deep in the Earth, there are similar processes. Roots grow, even beneath the snow, roots that will branch a hundred times to bring water to the plant. Roots that will dig deeper, roots that will repair damage done when other roots were pulled up, roots that tear up the hard packed soil: Earth cares for her own. Earth restores the balance that ultimately promotes new growth.
Rich fields of roots grow in ever widening circles, become entwined with the roots of other plants and trees, ultimately forming a network of intertwined root systems. What if people did the same thing? Well, they do!
So let us begin our story. It began a long time ago. The story begins in a land we call our own. The land was lush with trees and grasses, an abundance. Cougar, elk, deer, big horned sheep, antelope, magnificent birds, buffalos, and mighty bears inhabited the land. The rivers were full of fish, otters, beavers, bullfrogs, and alligators. One by one they began to disappear as human beings moved into their lands. They were hunted almost to extinction.
So we began to do something about it. We formed parks to preserve those species that remained. We carved out areas where people could not go. We studied the plants and the trees and the animals so we could see how to support their survival. We owned our shame for the habitats we had destroyed and wrote laws to preserve wilderness. We owned that the losses were too great to even comprehend.
But the work did not stop there. For we had polluted lakes, rivers, all manner of waterways, including the oceans. We had poisoned our fish and drastically narrowed our bird life. The rivers were choked with garbage, with pollutants. Our biggest crime was forgetting that we are all part of the same system, and that system is sustained by water. We had to learn to inhabit the planet we are living on. We had to see ourselves as part of the planet. The waters of life were slipping away from us until our homes were filled with tap water that smelled like chlorine, something we added to kill off the bacteria that grew in our polluted waterways. We began to see our mistakes. We began to make laws to support clean water.
Our proclivities for pollution did not stop with the waters, for the air itself became filled with sediments. Acid rain fell from the heavens and damaged what was on the ground. Smog from our cars thickened the air to the point where we could no longer see the nearby mountains. Until we began to change some things, our air became difficult to breathe. Our eyes burned from the impurities in the air. We forgot what it was like to breathe deeply. We changed our ways and cleaned up the skies. There’s more work to be done here, but it’s a start. As with the waterways, the job of cleanup is a big one.
The task before us now is a bigger one: Rearranging our lives, our thinking, and our feelings to create sustainable living is accomplished a bit at a time. We need to learn to approach our planet with love, reverence, awe, curiosity. We need to formulate in the depths of our souls a mountain of curiosity about how our planet works, coupled with awe and reverence as we discover these things. The task is one of coupling deepest reverence with the desire to take care of the gift that is ours. What we have learned from our mistakes, the laws we enact are the tip of the iceberg. It is what is beneath the surface that counts, for there are depths of spirit to which we must go to heal our beloved planet. Now let us begin to think about how we can do so.
Ardent desire to care for the Earth is not enough. The planet needs love, just as people do. Every bit of life on Earth is interconnected with every other bit of life here. Reverence is a way of deeply appreciating and loving our interconnections. So how do we develop reverence for life here?
Take a walk every day somewhere in the natural world.
Visit a state or national park as often as you can.
Spend some time at home in a garden.
Take in a breath of fresh air. Exhale. Breathe in again.
Walk in silence whenever you are in nature.
Take time to listen to the birds, to the wind in the trees.
Notice the fragrance of growing things. Breathe in the scent of grasses, the aroma of oak, maple, bay, and juniper.
Watch the light change, the water as it moves along and through the Earth, the changes that happen at sunrise and sunset.
Notice the softening in your heart with these changes.
Contemplation of nature opens up our REVERENCE for nature, deepening our love for Earth. Our Contemplation Rooms provide the opportunity for visual contemplation of Earth, and the meditations within them cultivate reverence for the natural world, for life on this planet.
We deepen reverence and love for the Earth further by contemplating the natural world directly. This contemplative approach further articulates reverence, connecting it with sight, with sound, with smell, with touch, with movement, with breath, and with the elements of Earth that give us life, with water and light.
Reverence binds people together like roots under the ground. Individual reverence becomes collective reverence. Reverence strengthens the bonds that exist and makes new ones. Reverence creates a space where something new can develop, like gestation that happens in a womb. Reverence creates and deepens the spiritual roots that are needed to care for the Earth profoundly. When people stand together in profound reverence and love, powerful lasting changes occur. Reverence creates a gentle, fertile ground for learning to love the Earth.
Reverence is indeed . . . a force of nature!
