The first time I ever rented an apartment with a patch of
yard, I was so excited to put in my very own garden. I went to the garden store
and bought one of each of my favorite plants and put them in rows in the plot
of soil I had prepared. They did not thrive, and I couldn’t understand why.
What was thriving in that yard was a massive calla lily. Around here, the
dramatic calla lily is an expensive flower you buy at the florists. But the in
my new backyard in California it had clearly been growing there for many years,
because it had grown into a big clump almost as tall as me. Why was this Calla Lily thriving despite years
of neglect, while my carefully planted garden struggled despite my best
efforts?
After moving 3-4 times I finally realized that what I was
really doing was flower arranging, not gardening. None of my favorite east-coast
plants were really going to be happy in the semi-arid climate of the San
Francisco Bay Area. And while May is a
great time to plant seedlings here in the southern tier, this is not the right
time to be starting a garden in California because it is the very end of the
rainy season, and the beginning of the dormant season, when the grasses on the
hills become “golden”, when forest fire season begin.
When we moved to Ithaca, I planted the calla lily my mom gave
me as a housewarming right in the center of my garden. As the fall turned cold, the calla lily bulb
turned to mush. You cannot grow calla lilies in Ithaca. My mom, who grew up in
the south, always told me “don’t even bother with Tulips, they never do well.”
But here in Ithaca the tulips a previous owner planted still come back with
annual clockwork.
The main thing I have learned in 20 years and
9 different gardens, is that place matters. If you find the right group of
plants for a place, they will be unstoppable. But if you try to grow a cala
lilies in Ithaca, you are just asking for struggle and disappointment.
Unitarian Universalists are people who claim as a source of our living tradition
“the Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the
sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of
nature.” With this widely drawn circle
we include earth-centered traditions from all over the world. Every place has such traditions which grew
organically out of the relationship between a particular place and the people
who live there. These include the Shinto traditions of Japan, the Celtic traditions of Ireland, the
Vodun traditions of the African West Coast, and the spiritual traditions of the
Cayuga which developed closest to the lands we all share today. These traditions
are older that Judaism, older than Islam, older than Buddhism. Unitarian Universalists
affirm that earth -centered are not only legitimate religious traditions, but
that we need them. They are part of our bedrock, and we want them to be among
the moral and spiritual wisdom traditions that guide our future.
Here’s the tricky thing about earth centered traditions. When
we say “earth centered” we mean not earth-- the blue marble viewed from space--
but the earth that women and men experience and live from each day. If we really
embrace and want to learn from earth-centered traditions, we need to start from
the foundational point that the earth itself is sacred, not in the abstract,
not in general—but the very earth that you walk each day, that feeds you, that
you share with your very particular neighbors.
You cannot even begin to engage with indigenous traditions, as I
understand in my limited way, without that sacred connection to place.
Anyone engaged in a deep and authentic spiritual search, is
changed by that search. And so when you engage with a particular patch of land
as a sacred place, as a place that has something to teach you, you may realize
you are being changed by that search. If
we allow the wisdom if this place, of this community of living things into our
hearts and minds, it may change how we live in the world. If instead of
thinking of gardening, for example, as a monologue, in which I express my
vision in my garden, perhaps I might start thinking of it as a dialogue between
myself and a complex ecosystem (more complex than even our smartest, most committed
scientists have even begun to understand). It might change my relationship to this
place. If you are really listening to
the place where you belong, it may tell you that it’s time to give up planting calla
lilies.
One of our greatest Judeo-Christian mis-understandings of the
people indigenous to this land is the fact that place matters. Our Judeo-Christian tradition is a tradition
of the diaspora. We learned to collect all our stories, all our histories and
laws into one book that we could take with us whenever we left our homelands,
as the pilgrims took their bibles on their ocean voyage to America. When we
drove the first nations peoples from these lands, we didn’t understand that
this was a place that peoples have lived for tens of thousands of years, a
place that has a particular wisdom to teach. We must face the possibility that
the impact of ejecting people from their ancestral lands means something
fundamentally different than what
selling my home in California and moving to Ithaca meant to me. Says cultural
ecologist David Abram “…the deep attunement to place characteristic of so many
oral people emerges only after several generations in one general terrain.” [i] If your land is your sacred text, if you lose
your lands you lose your religion. When
the indigenous people of these lands were driven away they “suddenly found
themselves in a world where their ritual gestures, their prayers, and their
stories seemed to lose all meaning, where the shapes of the landforms lacked
coherence, where nothing seemed to make sense”
Throughout these past 400 years of wars and treaties and
legal battles, I suspect that when we of Judeo-Christian roots heard the phrase
“sacred place” and we thought of a place like this one, our fellowship building.
We would be very sad if someone bulldozed this building and we had to build a new home somewhere else.
But what if place were not only our home, not only the
land that gave us food and the river that gave us our livelihood…what if this
land were also our scripture, our
teacher and the dwelling place of the holy? What if this particular place were the source
of our religion, our moral teacher, the grounding of our ethics, when we left
we would be stripped of all that is important, all that is meaningful, all that
connects us to the web of life? If we start to listen to the earth, to the
water, to the places where we put down roots as a source of our living
tradition, we would have to humbly acknowledge that we are beginners in this
land, and there is much we do not know or understand.
So where does that leave us? Those of us who have moved from
place to place, whose religious stories come from all around the world, instead
of here in the southern tier? We need to start at the beginning. We need to go
to the source: the Chemung River and all the creeks that feed it, the hills and
valleys, the trees and the grasshoppers
in your own back yard. Just as some of us were taught as children to read and
re-read our holy book, just as our neighbors can quote chapter and verse by
heart, we must read and re-read this land until we know it by heart.
One of the simplest ways you can do this is to choose a spot
near your own home to visit regularly. A spot close enough that it fits easily
in your daily life- perhaps a place in your own yard, or on your walk to work. Take a moment to quietly there and just
observe, listen, journal, sketch. Visit this place over the full cycle of
seasons to see how it changes as the seasons change. Visit it over the course
of years until it becomes a “home base”
in your life. Or if you prefer moving to sitting still, you can find a
path to walk. One of my friends took on
the practice of walking the same path day after day through all the seasons,
even in the rain, even in the bitter cold, and each time we met would tell us
what was happening on her walk as the seasons visited her on her path.
If you are really paying attention, you will begin to have
questions. What is that flower called? Why did that tree grow in such a funny
shape? Where does that creek go, and where does it come from? Who were the
first people to live on this land? What were their lives like? There are plenty
of folks here in this area- [maybe over at the Tanglewood nature center, or the
Friends of the Chemung River Watershed for example] the who would love to help answer your questions
as they emerge. Also be curious about yourself. Who am I today? How am I changing with the seasons and the
years? How does this place work on me?[ii]
The most important thing as we sit or walk is to open our
senses, to open ourselves so that we are receptive. Let us approach our very
particular patch of earth with the open mind of a student, and with the open
heart and spirit of a seeker in meditation or prayer. Many of you who garden or hike or climb or
boat have secretly suspected that it is a spiritual practice. As Unitarian Universalists whose living tradition
is drawn from Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions, I propose that
those teachings are valuable because they show us how to listen deeply to the
earth. This very
place can be our text, our teacher and guide if we listen
with an attentive and receptive spirit. Not the land in abstract but this very
place right here can make all the difference.
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