SENTIENT TIMES April/May 2003

Wild Grace

Nature As A Spiritual Path

By Eric Alan

Inside, we are all born for the outside. We breathe the naked air, grow in the light of the raw sun. We spring from the soil as surely as the most tentative grass. Through the astonishing and mysterious grace of the natural ways, we have come to be creatures of awareness as well, capable of wonder, faith and deep feeling. We see the remarkable stretch of the place beyond and below us, and develop spiritual conceptions to make meaning of the vast patterns. For long ages, humanity has applied intuition and knowledge to create paths of spirit, to make sense of the larger universe, and to provide daily guidance for our individual footfalls.

Two thousand years after the founding of the west’s dominant religion, spiritual seeking is a resurgent theme. Some who have grown up in a material rather than spiritual culture find themselves sensing an absence, and wishing to return to more calming ground. Others who have pursued traditional faiths find those belief systems now incomplete or inadequate. Many seek to integrate a heightened ecological consciousness with a spiritual one. All of us are challenged by the commingling and collision of different paths, as a global culture increases our exposure to vastly different notions. The result can be a crisis of spirit within the renewed awakening.

There is one spiritual path which contains all others, though; which conflicts with none. It is nature itself. Nature is the path which fosters the life of all seekers. Nature neither requires nor precludes belief in deity. It includes both creation and evolution, without conflict. It demands no dogmatic rituals, and damns no disbelievers. Nature speaks only silently, offers no absolution, and has hard ways as well as sweet vistas. Yet within its silence and its graceful, tightly woven forms, it offers philosophical and practical answers. In the way that plants, animals and even the elements are and relate to each other, is an almost holographic, complete key to the balance we must find within ourselves and with each other.

We can follow nature’s path through the tiny details of it present in our everyday lives—regardless of where we live and how damaged the natural order may be there. Nature offers a practical spirituality to be integrated into our daily lives as they are, rather than something we must radically alter our usual routines to include. It’s a natural mindfulness which sees the whole of the answers to our questions and difficulties in the tiniest details of the living, natural earth.

What is this spirituality, and how can we apply it daily?

In the answer to this is both a beautiful celebration of the details of the natural world, and a meditation upon living in it. All that’s required is our vision. This is a prayer for, and a glimpse of, that vision.

In the Cathedral

At this sweet moment—whichever it is—you’re in a cathedral. So am I. Always. Spires of trees may not embrace you as you read this; the soft prayers of stream whispers may be too far beyond walls for hearing. Still we can listen for them, seek them, remember them. We can recognize the clarity that comes from moments in pure wilderness, and learn to hold that clarity inside. We can use our connectedness to recognize that, despite the layers of concrete and pain we have layered over the land, nature still reaches us. In even the urban settings, which often contain and confine us, there is nature to be found in every sight, every breath. That breath you’re taking right now—which you could live only seconds if disconnected from—is in turn connected to the entire protective atmosphere that embraces the planet. So, too, the sip of water from your glass is connected to every ocean beyond the walls. Even the dust that now settles on your floor is a reminder of connection to nature, for it’s a trace of the elemental ground of home. And in that nature is clear guidance to our questions. Calm answers to silent prayers.

We are always in the cathedral because we’re an integral element of it. Nature is something we are; not just something with which we relate. In the beauty of following nature as a spiritual path comes an ability to recognize that: to feel nature’s order in ourselves as well as in every surrounding.

For me, it’s easier to feel the whole earth as a divine sanctuary while at the base of a redwood whose patience has lasted a thousand years, than at the end of a traffic jam that seems as if it will last the same. It’s easier to flow with the spirit of water at the bedside of a river whose commitment to flow never ceases or tires, than it is at a drinking fountain in the lobby of a sterile city hall.

Yet I’ve learned that with practice, nature’s vision and reverence can be brought forth via even the smallest, driest urban leaf. It’s entirely contained within the fewest lingering drops of dew on back alley windows.

In even the most barriered, forsaken, desperate building, there is still that breath of air to be drawn. And on each breath is a remembrance which is always available: Breathing in, the wind is a part of me. Breathing out, I am a part of the wind. I use it to bring awareness back to the truth of our constant presence in the cathedral. To our integral part in its being.

I find that connecting to nature’s spiritual presence only while in wilderness is akin to only seeking connection with a higher spirit while in church. For those who choose it, that Sunday hour may be vital. It may be restorative and centrally grounding. But it’s only one hour of the week. It’s the thoughts and deeds of the other hours that put the faith into practice.

It’s the ability to see high spirit and beauty everywhere that brings the faithful into the realization of their faith’s healing powers. Along other paths, it’s one definition of a saint: those who can see beauty in anyone, anywhere, and dare to look that beauty straight in the naked eye; to face the pain that’s inevitably within the beauty. I think it no different in looking at nature. Our own darkest, most violent sides, are a part of nature too. We are always in the cathedral. We are stones in the cathedral’s floor, ourselves.

No Ceilings

One deep reason for seeking a spiritual path is to gain a sense of perspective on the greater order and our place within it. There’s limitless comfort in the resulting feeling of belonging. A conscious way of being evolves; a reason emerges for every reverent step, and daily motions become made with certainty. There’s also an end to a sense of isolation. Randomness recedes in the face of a clearer view.

So why the proliferation of ceilings which destroy that clearer view?

Our warm walls are welcoming and protective at times—they’re a strong element of all that we label “home.” Yet if we dwell too much inside them, we lose a much greater sense of home. We have lost the sky.

Our little constructions of plaster, wood and steel do exactly what they’re designed to do: contain us. And sometimes that’s nice. In winter, it’s essential. Yet when all of nature is the cathedral, being contained under ceilings is like sitting under a cardboard box in church. All the spacious sights, sounds and other sensuous connections are muffled, even suffocated. All the realizations that they bring are dulled as well. There’s a sadness in ceilings that the vigilant can’t deny.

Light, illumination, is what we often say we’re seeking when staring at questions and challenges. Yet, out from under those restrictive ceilings, it’s the dark night sky which often allows the best soothing return of perspective. In that sky and beyond it, almost all of the cathedral rests.

It extends beyond the borders of perception, even aided with the most miraculous telescopes. But we need no technological aid to regain perspective. We need no electricity. In fact, the perspective of the stars is best gathered without it. With no electric lights in the vicinity, a simple upward glance returns us to a clear view of our almost invisible celestial place.

The purity of a wilderness sky, though, is rare for any of us to be able to reach with regularity. The wilderness has been driven out of our homes, and with it has gone the wild grace it placed in our hearts alongside the hard danger. We have to reach for what slivers of sky are available to us, and learn to be grateful that with a practiced eye, an open window and one star will do, for clear vision and remembrance.

Each star makes its steady, persistent statement of scale and presence regardless of the attention of any viewers. That kind of persistence and steadiness has been one of the greatest lessons for me, has provided one of the best role models, in pursuing my path of expression. The stars inspire me to continue being my true self as best as I can, regardless of my distance from the crowd, or my invisibility within it. The stars teach me to continue speaking my quiet truth even if there seem to be no listeners. Words, like starlight, can take far longer than their source’s life to reach their destination.
There are those who find our infinitesimal size frightening—especially compared to the distance between even the most neighborly stars. Some cannot look at the stars for fear of disappearing alongside. But our smallness doesn’t make us insignificant. In fact the vast black stretches where no life dwells make this planet’s exception that much more sacred; our own life within its weave is that much more precious.

In our own near disappearance is also the largest personal comfort. There’s infinite room to breathe deeply, mindfully. In that space of breathing under the stars, your own airy rhythm can easily contain whatever ails you.

Explore tonight: take the largest problem you currently have with you, to whatever sliver of sky you have available. One window and one star will do if they have to. Focus on that star and breathe, and remember patience; for remember how long the light from that star has taken to reach you. Give it respect, and give it attention; for that particular starlight, after its journey of ages, will have traveled for naught if you ignore it. It will never return. Its tone is as pure as that of a bell—harmonize with it. Sing to it and breathe. And again compare yourself and that problem to the distance. If you can still remember that problem by now.

You are far larger than your problem; and you too have noticed how you vanish against that star. No matter if the problem is one of love, family, friendship, career, health, trauma, disconnection from spirit … It, even more than you, fades into nothing in face of the stars. Even our planetary tug-of-wars and environmental screams cannot cross the smallest black gulf to trouble our closest neighbors. Our problems are tiny, remote, and yet we are centered exactly on the point of the only living sphere for a great stretch of space. A freedom from ceilings, and we immediately remember.

No Floors

On occasion, just for a moment, I catch a glimpse of the truth of the universe. It’s not an intellectual grasping of some serious large Truth; it’s not a mind understanding at all. It’s just a fleeting, wordless awareness in the heart: it’s a pure sensation of grasping the absolute, wondrous, unknowable enormity of all that exists beyond our tiny sphere of perception. It instills an awe that washes all tension and thought from my soul. All voices are silenced inside. Only the breath remains.

That silence only lasts for an instant, before the tides of chattering verbiage veil my awareness once more. But those instants are enough to instill lasting memory, and memory of that truth helps bring the awareness forward again.

The silence of the awe was most reachable at first for me through the grace of the night sky. It was only after enough brief openings to the truth of the endless natural wonder that I began to sense that the same cleansing awe, the purifying silence and refreshment of the soul, could be found as easily through the miracle of the minuscule as well as the extensive. The endlessness that pervades the sky also informs the distance that separates us from—and connects us to—the unknowably small.

At each level between our own existence and that of the smallest particle, an entirely distinct world exists, radically different but not separate from our own.

It was glass that began to show this to me most clearly. More clearly than if the glass was not there at all. A certain kind of glass; a focused glass through which focused vision developed. The lenses of my camera allowed me to enter the earth at a level other than my own. That level wordlessly showed me what it was to feel the truth of small color. How does the bold red of a single blooming petal feel to the senses, when it’s large enough to fill the whole vision? How does it feel to be the insect absorbed in the world of crawling across that petal?

I learned I could cross huge vistas by disappearing into the tiny. Suddenly I knew that there are no floors, ultimately, any more than there are ceilings. There is no ground so solid as to be impermeable to vision. This changed everything.

In the miniature worlds at my feet, now, with or without lenses, I can see realities as removed from our own as that of unknown creatures orbiting distant stars. The differing lives and realities are at the end of our skin on all sides, within a place small enough to require great sensitivity to see, smell and taste. Even more than that: the endless levels are inside of us too—it’s obvious and yet continually forgotten. Inside, lives of blood cells and bacteria and other life know our bodies as the universe, as surely as we in turn only know the belly of a larger universe that we cannot conceive beyond. It too, may be only one body of unknowable billions.

Peering into the endlessness of small details—countless levels of which exist beyond even the reach of the best assistive lens—restores perspective as much as another comforting disappearance under the stars. Just sitting, closely watching the tiny details at your feet, is a practice that can bring release as well as perspective. It is indeed a practice, just as yoga and meditation are practices; and in fact yoga and meditation have much to do with the perspective of the details and the stars. Every yoga pose asks for a counterpose for balance: perspective asks the same. A view of the enormous sky asks for a view of a single inch of soil at our feet. Only with both is there completeness, and only with bringing a meditative, still eye to both is there depth.

While disappearance into a field of untouchable stars returns a comforting smallness, and gives a soft dark blanket to be deeply enfolded in, disappearance into the tiny returns an equally valid sense of our great effect on the small elements of the world—elements which provide the basis of our lives. Every footstep can respect or crush a thousand tiny lives; each breath inhales and expels more life than we can measure.

The spiritual path which preaches avoidance of all harm to any individual creature, while noble in its intention and result, is not what nature teaches by example. Instead it teaches the necessary loss of individuals in favor of the greater balance. In its insistence on struggle, nature teaches the central role of pain as well as peace in the higher harmony. It’s a hard spirituality, in that sense. It offers no promise of a sweet by-and-by; not even a certainty of a soft present—although it does not preclude either.

What it offers instead is a staggering depth of real beauty in each present moment. It offers an unspoken proof of the remarkable possibilities of higher harmony between millions of species—of collaboration within the struggle to produce an astonishing weave of graceful life—all with no effort more than instinct required. It offers the knowledge to the observant that beauty exists on so many levels that we can only begin to imagine how beautiful our own world is, let alone the totality of the exquisite universe it’s nestled in, and whatever may lie beyond.

In recognizing our power over the tiny lives we often don’t even perceive, nature grants us an opportunity to develop respect and consideration in every footstep. It also offers an awareness of our individual strength. Through our relation to the small details, we can come to know that there is great cause and effect in every motion. To know that despite the enormity of the universe, we have an enormity of our own. This appears true for each creature within the great chain of sizes that we can perceive.

We are therefore, in that regard, exactly equal to the creatures and living systems above and below us in that chain of size. So do we not have equal responsibility to be humble before that order? To participate in it and care for it as it needs? And since instinct provides all the care necessary for the balanced evolution, is it not true that every step away from instinct and into intellect has led us away from balance and into “civilization”? True civilization and progress would mean an evolution within nature’s balanced order, and not one which transiently arranges human comfort at the expense of all else.

To return to the beauty of floorless details can return a soul in an instant to a more balanced place of the heart. I find that a view of an insect on a leaf, for instance—seen without the temptation to analyze, classify, capture or otherwise disturb—can return me to that inner balanced view without effort or words. That’s a remarkable discovery: that despite the key elements of struggle within nature’s path, it’s an absence of struggle that returns the heart to balance.

That place of balance is a place of pure sensation. A place of simultaneously knowing our enormity, our tininess, our equality, our strength and vulnerability. It’s a calming silence we were born to know.

The above is excerpted from Eric Alan’s forthcoming book of photography and writing, Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path, to be issued nationally by White Cloud Press May 1, 2003. More information on the book will soon be available at www.wildgrace.org, or www.whitecloudpress.com. Eric Alan can be reached at ealan@jeffnet.org.

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