Nanowrimo - 14

“I often find myself coming to Emerson in those moments when I just feel like I need to hear the voice of an old friend. And this week was one of those times. Some of you have heard that one of the quiet hands behind this community, Jones Martin, made his transition this week.” Some of the faces I look over register a note of trauma and grief. But, many are wear blank expressions. “He wasn’t very loud, you’d never see him at a town hall meeting, but he always had a kind word to share. If you have been coming here for a while, and you brave handful know who you are, you’d see him going around here every Saturday between March and November. He tended the garden that surrounds our lovely spiritual home. And he did it for no pay. His payment, he told me once, came from the many things he learned from our weeds and roses. Although he did once confide that the weeds were far better teachers.” A collective chuckle ripples across the room.

It’s standing room only. Bodies are silhouetted and black against all of the windows at the perimeter. I know not all of them have come to hear a lick of what I say. I spy the minister from the Baptist church down the street sitting about halfway back in the center. His arms are folded high across his chest in defiance. His chubby, pink body looks like someone poured him into that arrow collar shirt and polyester pants and then forgot to stop. Next to him at least five seats are filled with equally disdainful and stiff looking folks. They’ve come in under the ruse of showing some solidarity in the wake of this week’s brutal crime. I know what they’re up to. Come to see who’s draining off their crowd, they have. But it’s not me who is making the leak in their tithe baskets. It’s the comfort people feel when someone stands up at a pulpit and, rather than condemning them to eternal punishment for so much as letting a vegetable rot in the refrigerator, says out loud what deep down they have known all along to be truth and have been too afraid to admit. It is just that, though they burn out quickly, these bright stars are the glint in God’s eye.

“Jones was almost ninety years old. He couldn’t get around as well in these last couple years and so the precedent of his volunteer service has been passed on to new people with their own lessons to learn at the hands of nature. But he was bright and happy up until his last day. I sat with him on his last day, and we talked about his roses. Unfortunately, a few hours after our chat, I was called back to his home for a much less happy reason. It was then I saw what I hoped never to see. Our good friend and humble fellow traveler had been murdered.” Now comes the wave of gasps and knitted brows. None of this is for Jones, it’s worry for themselves that has them clutching the arms of a loved one and making eye contact with friends. In the back I notice the porcine figure of the Police sergeant shift his weight from leg to leg. Obviously not a regular church-goer, he arrived too late for a seat.

“He was not the type of man to wish for any sort of memorial service. He didn’t much care for attention being drawn to himself. In fact I think if he were in this room right now he would probably blush and hurry out the door! But I believe we can do him just as great an honor by turning our attention to the nature he loved.” And while I’m at it, why not get in a jab at that Baptist preacher?

“Ok, just by show of hands, how many of you, when you found this church community, cried your first time here?” At least half the hands rise into the air. “Ok. How many of you felt like you had finally found ‘your people’?” More hands shoot into the air, with less reluctance about the gesture this time. Well who wants to admit they cried?

“I bet I know why. I didn’t tell you anything new under the sun. I simply said the words that you knew to be true in your hearts. For all your lives you had been asked to render life from what Emerson calls “the dried bones of the past”. You were supposed to fashion the ‘armor of God’ from these worn and faded robes. You were bidden to serve at the altar of religion and denied the truth of your personal revelation. Your parents, well meaning and living out their own imprint of God and maybe some fear, warned you of all sorts of behaviors that would put you squarely on that God’s bad side and get you into trouble. Don’t talk back; be seen, not heard; be a lady; act right or the devil’s gonna get you; and most of all you must never EVER touch yourself! Am I right?” The room ripples with laughter.

“And probably a lot of you went in exactly the opposite direction as soon as you could! Am I right? I did. Heck yeah. I went to Paris! And the magic ingredient we were searching for was for once not to be told but to really experience something. I wanted to break the rules but mostly I just wanted to KNOW.”

“I don’t know about you, but no one ever told me that this curiosity I had in my mind was natural, was God-given. No one ever told me that it was ok to trust my experience, or my gut instinct. You women out there know what I’m talking about. How many of you had your life decisions taken away by a well intentioned father or husband or brother or had your intuition treated like superstition?”

In the back a tawny-skinned woman yells “amen!” I love it when they get fiery.

“Listen to what Emerson has to say: ‘We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He (or she) acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.’ So he’s saying that God’s gift to us, that the great teacher we have each chosen is not in a monument to religious tradition but our experience - as our own inner nature unfolds it to us.” I’m quoting Emerson and not the man known as Jesus and I can just feel that Baptist start to boil. Fuck him.

“How does that hit you? Hm? Wouldn’t you just rather have a devil to blame? Wouldn’t it be easier if I submersed you in water and just washed all of that junk out of your life?” I get another round of reluctant ‘amen’.

“But I can’t do that to you. I would be denying you the divinity of your true nature to create the life from which you must learn – from which you must remember, re-member, that God is in you as you are in God. That YOU are the creator. And that nature, your nature, your desires, are god-given and can be trusted.”

“How does that feel? How many times have you been told that it’s ok to trust yourself in mainstream churches? Hm. It’s a lot of responsibility all of the sudden, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” they shout back as one chorus.

“We live at the crest of an awfully inquisitive and materially progressive wave in human thinking. Our chemists, our doctors, our researchers and scientists have poked at nature and truly believe that they have forced her to relinquish her secrets. But are we any closer to understanding ourselves as people? Are we any closer to loving each other? We can see the wood that will build homes and make our Sunday papers but are we any better at seeing the trees? We all can look out our windows or drive down the road and know who owns what land around us, but who among you owns the horizon? We can go after nature, investigate her, divide her up into boundaries and buy her and sell her, but none of us will ever own the her best part. Who owns the sunset? Who owns the starry sky? Who owns the smell of the flowers? The one who owns these is simply the one who perceives them. Who stops to drink them in. And there is God, in that momentous evening light, in that fragrance, in that twinkling. Today. Now. Calling out to you to pause and simply allow yourself to be taught by that natural wonder that we are so good at pushing to the perimeter of our lives.”

“And this is what Jones Martin found in those rose bushes. Again as Emerson says: ‘The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.’ In every thing he found a delight. One time I was hustling along to the parking lot, running off to some meeting or another, and he came running up to me all excited. He was holding out something he had just yanked out of the ground. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘I just pulled this up! This is what I saw popping out of the dirt.’ And he showed me this little bitty green sprout about two inches long. ‘And THIS is what I pulled up when I decided to take it out of there!’ And he held out a root system that honestly was at least four feet long! Little bitty green sprout – Four feet of roots! Does that remind anybody of anything? How many little things you harbored in your mind that you didn’t really WANT the Lord to heal you of? Well it’s just a little resentment and she deserved it! It was just a little bitty lie and it was for the good. No one will know! But below the surface that little bitty thing is connected to a whole web of issues and other lies and resentments and dirty stuff that needs redemption. Those roots run deep and flourish in our psyches if we don’t tend to them regularly. Do you hear what I’m saying? It’s on us to cultivate our god nature.”

“Emerson continues to say: ‘Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result’. And I know, everyone figures well that guy was writing in the early 1800’s. Things are different now. But, not necessarily; not so fast my friends. This man was living in Massachusetts where he saw the industrial revolution rapidly remaking the landscape. In addition there were a lot more farms back then and as a result there was wide spread de-forestation. There are more trees in the Northeastern United States now than at the time of the Civil War. He’s beseeching people of his OWN time to not go too far, to find nature in their hearts – to experience directly and live deeply in the moment.”

They’re awful quiet. “So next Saturday I expect to see all of you out here planting petunias!” And they finally lighten up with a roll of laughter. “Hey, I’m serious! It’s almost the season! Just another month or so now.”

“So lets settle into our chairs, relax, and get in touch with that wise silence within. As you quiet your mind feel that still pool in your center. The presence of divine spirit within you is stronger than any calamity around you. Rest in that place and for a minute, let’s just allow God to love us…”

And I lead them through their meditation. Halfway through I open my eyes to see Jack seated near the front. He smiles as I spy him.

In my ear I hear him “Death may be natural, but not drought. You must choose to live.”

I have to kill or he will. What’s natural about that?