Читать книгу Cairn-Space - N. Thomas Johnson-Medland - Страница 5

Watering the gardens at the beginning and the end of the day has been an activity that has peppered my life from youth. It is relaxing. It also feeds me in ways other activities do not. It has been a cairn in my life since childhood. It has been a sacramental landscape for meeting God. It has taken me into my heart.

When I am about the task of watering gardens, I am reaching back into my life and doing something that is self-soothing and connective. It integrates the disparate pieces of my life. It is wholesome for me.

My life is a train of stories of watering gardens. I can remember watering gardens as far back as elementary school. In all of that practice, I have learned to be in God’s Presence as I water. The magnitude of repetition over the years has been a force capable of establishing union with God through this simple act.

Some years I take to watering much more regularly than other years. It has partly to do with the gardens I plant and the needs they have for water-flow. It is also connected to the fact that some years are naturally wetter than others and require less garden tending from me—“the waterer.” Sometimes I simply water because I need to: it is good therapy.

However often I water, I am reminded of the tending that needs to accompany all forms of life and growth. I am reminded how I am tended by the “Gardener of Souls.” Watering helps me conform to His image and likeness. Watering nourishes my heart-space. Watering is an activity that sacramentally transforms my life—when I am attentive to the process.

One particular season had called me to the task of watering more often than in years past. That year I learned to love the routine for its calming affect in a new way: the sound of water, the greenery, and the repetition of a simple task. It soothed me and gave me peace. I learned a lot from the regularity of the task that year. I learned from mindfully practicing the art of watering.

***

Stone Cairns

I have piled stones,

one on top of another,

for decades now.

Fingers

slipping over rough

granite -

my heart

is settled in

simple tasks.

I have piled

stones of habit

over the days

of my journey.

Praying is a stone.

Watering herbs

and gardens of flowers

is another stone.

Hymns and chants

and acts of

kindness are stones,

too.

My words

have become stones

I pile to settle

my heart.

Long ago,

across the pond,

in Scotland

and on the isles of

the Hebrides

they piled stones

to find the same

simple way on earth.

One pile marks

a grave. Another marks

a battle. Still another

marks a place

where prayers poured forth,

where words pierced

God and His

heart and

His universe.

There is a rhythm

to rock on rock,

a sound

that fills the

heart with the comfort

of familiar sound,

familiar passage.

I bake my bread

and brew my soups

because they are stones

of comfort for

this man’s heart.

I water my gardens

and read my books

because they help me pile

stone on stone.

Listening,

reflecting,

encountering,

wrestling

each stone

placed down firmly

on another stone.

These piles of stones

have something to

say about who I am

and where I have been.

These stones are my heart.

***

The thing that most presented itself to me that particular year of watering, was what I learned from the praying mantises. They taught me the art of slowing. They showed me an image of watchfulness and waiting, of discrimination and patience. While watering, I was able to silence enough of my inner chatter to focus on my surroundings as the water flowed, saturated the earth, and beaded on the leaves and flowers. I watched the mantises on the rise. I became intensely aware of reality.

The watering flushed praying mantises up and out of the cover of stalk and stem; onto walls, and branches, and posts. Had I not been paying attention, I would have missed them. I would have never seen what they had to teach.

They climbed up trying to avoid the water I was adding to the garden. As they climbed, they would often spot a bug and settle in for the kill. Patiently they would wait for the “perfect” moment before striking. In their rising, nourishment presented itself. They would stop and dine. They watched and waited—like the Wise Virgins of Jesus’ parable. They were watchful and alert.

I had the good pleasure to encounter their watching and waiting. Slowly focusing on the meal, almost hypnotizing it before the strike, they would become careful, and lose their place in time to a slowed attention. It was the “Power of the Slowing” that Gerald May wrote about in “The Wisdom of the Wilderness” (HarperCollins Books, NY, 2006). Their slowing to capture food made me pause, pay attention, and enter into the slowing myself. It taught me about what it takes to discriminate and discern the quality and nature of things in my life. Although all things can move us toward union with God, some things pose potential dangers and threats of entanglement that are just not worth risking. It requires watchfulness and alertness to become nourished—to grow.

Slowing helps us to focus and become aware. Nature has a tendency to help us enter the slowing, if we watch her examples in other sentient beings. Could my praying become the same? Could I still myself enough to become observant and watch what would arise from my heart as I watered it? Could I become still enough to see the many options for nourishment all around me: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, self-control, community, forgiveness?

For many years prior to this experience of the mantises rising, we had hatched mantis pods as a family. We would buy an egg casing from the local garden store and leave it out in the backyard in a covered aquarium. As the weeks wore on, we would almost forget it was there, until one day someone would notice hundreds of mantises on the walls of glass. It was hard to believe that so many mantises could be in one casing. They were a shifting mass of life and limb covering the aquarium walls. We would take off the lid and watch them scurry throughout the yard.

There was another time we had watched the mantises. Glinda and I had just begun dating. We hiked the woods and collected scraps of nature to weave into a wreath. We started with grapevine. We wrapped it into a circle. We tucked dried garlic-mustard fronds into the hoop. We tucked in some mullein leaves and sassafras roots. We also wove in a mantis pod. We had no idea what it was.

One night, when we returned to her room, the walls were covered in moving spots. At first we thought our eyes were deceiving us. We thought we saw shifting movement. As we stepped closer, we were assured that we did. Hundreds of young mantises covered the wall. This was an accidental hatching. The hatchings in the aquarium were not.

I am glad that we took the time to hatch them. They gave me pause in their hatching, and a renewed sense of stillness in watching them rise while watering the gardens. For years, we had more praying mantises in our gardens than anyone around. For years, I had a new way of seeing prayer.

Their presence has been a cycle of routine. I have seen their daily morphs and the slow changes that happen to them over time. I have seen how their colors change as summer lengthens and draws to a close. From green to brown they fade. Their numbers decrease throughout the browning, until they leave the yard altogether. Gone.

I could only notice this in the repetition of a daily routine. The routine of watering the garden daily brought me to the mantises everyday. Routine reveals so much about how life is going; how it is moving ahead and how it is standing still. The things we place into our lives on a routine basis have so much power to affect who we become; particularly when we pay close and steady attention to them—over time.

Stepping toward the hose at watering time almost felt as if I was entering a holy place; a place where I would uncover some immense glory. The air that surrounded me during the watering time was palpable. I could feel myself entering into sacred space as one hand reached for the hose and the other hand for the spigot knob. I was becoming an act that would transform all space and time. I became a holy event for a moment. That is the best I can do to describe it. A stillness reigned in the act itself. A sacrament was born. Words about phenomena, union, and the sacred are meaningless. The NOW became Divine Milieu.

As I am crafting the description of these moments—with my words—I remember other moments that time slowed down and stood still long enough for me to become transformed. The birthing of our sons. The death of my father. The boarding of our plane home from Greece.

They all had this numinous quality that not only made me feel alive, but also aware. Stillness prevailed. It was not as if they made me feel aware of any one thing in particular. It was that they made me feel aware of everything, all at once. I owned space and time in these events. I was at one with everything. Life itself became a sacrament; living became a cairn. I realized that whether we slow down or the events of life slow us down, slowing is vital for deepening.

Every time I approached the hose I could almost begin where I left off the last time I had watered. The routine itself had some part in my discoveries. Doing the routine over and over built up some sort of energy within the act itself—an energy of seeing. Layer after layer of meaning is added to the pieces of our lives that we repeat again and again. After a while, I began to slow down as I simply began to approach the routine task. As I thought about watering, I would shift into stillness. Could this be the same with my prayer life?

This intrusion of awareness on a single moment is often revealed in routine events. It may also come as we enter into the fruition of some long awaited moment. It can be a result of a process or an event. The mantises were able to open in me this sacred space because of the routine and regular nature of my watering encounters with them. The birth of my sons opened me to eternity because of the culmination of long hours of anticipation and hope. Both can spawn awakening.

***

Coming into the Presence of the Holy One is the same. We may enter into the Presence through a routine event like daily prayer and contemplation. We may enter into the Presence through a long awaited event like a sacrament or rite of passage—even a crisis. Philosophically we would say that entering the Presence can be facilitated by either a process or an event.

Either way it is the same. We must make space for the encounter and notice the encounter if we are to unravel the meaning of the encounter. We must provide time for the wrestling. Without space and time for the encounter of and union with the Divine Milieu, there can be no reality of the Divine Milieu in our lives.

Like the daily watering that produced an encounter with the mantises, we first strike out to find a place—a garden to water. Once we have come to that place to do the work of “watering” we must learn patience, repetition, and watchfulness. We must look for the markers that will call us into encounter and wrestling. It is the same with our prayer life. We can build up a routine that will begin to settle us, even when we simply think about enacting the routine.

We can begin a habit of prayer that will open our awareness with a simple routine. Finding a daily time and place to sit and remember God is how we begin the “watering of the garden.” Set aside a time and a place and then we are ready to begin. We must build a cairn—a place of remembering (space). We must visit that holy place often—again and again (time).

Some people choose a rocking chair. Others a straight back chair. It may be in front of an icon, or window, or in an out of the way corner. It may be on a porch, or deck, or shed out back. There may be a “Holy Book” and a candle, or a simple stick of incense. The senses must join the prayer in being able to make this time and this space a shelter from life’s usual. But, there must be a place. There must be a place where we can go, sit, and enter into an encounter with Divine union. There must be a place for wrestling with our observing awareness.

When we come to the holy place we have chosen we can begin by offering a simple spiritual practice—a simple prayer. This may be an invocation of the Presence, it may be a sacred salutation, it may be a favorite prayer, it may be a prayer service (like Morning Prayer, or Vespers), or it may be a Psalm.

Once the words are offered, it is as if we have drawn a line around our place, we have marked it. “This is sacred space, this is sacred time” our prayer tells us. We have added another stone to the cairn. Eventually we will learn to sit and inhabit the stillness of that time and space itself, but at the outset, we must have a spiritual practice of prayer that we can begin and return to in our sacred place. We must have a “watering act.”

It is important to find a space that you can return to with little or no distraction. You are going to return here daily—perhaps even more often. The time you spend here will be like the “watering of a garden.” It must be routine and it must be thoughtful.

There are a myriad of practices you can pick up in this space. First, going to this place must become a regular habit—a routine visiting. Second, our spiritual practice in this prayer-space must become a regular habit—a routine visiting.

Go to this place often and just begin with a prayer (or a psalm, or a prayer service) and conclude with a sitting in silence. Remind yourself that you are here to water the soul, to commune with the Divine. Let what comes to fruition in your silence be a natural out-flowing of what your heart, mind, and soul hold inside after offering up your spiritual practice.

Let your sitting begin with a practice. When the practice is finished, simply sit. Become aware of your own presence in this cairn. Become aware of what the stones of practice are building. Listen. Watch and wait for what arises as you water the garden of the soul.

The more we visit this space, the more meaning it will have for us. When we pass by it, we will sense the history it has in our lives and it will begin to have a feel all it’s own. It will radiate a sense of identity to us. We must return to this cairn-space over and over again.

Our thinking does the same. When we have a thought over and over again, it builds up a sense of identity in us. We collect whole bunches of associations around the things we think.

Perhaps we have the thought of “apple pie.” As we think of “apple pie” over the years, we will begin to attach experiences of “apple pie” to the idea. Perhaps we think of grandma’s pie, or our mother’s. Perhaps we remember the permeating aroma. We may have intense autumnal memories when we think of “apple pie.” Maybe we are galvanized by the texture and flavor of the crust.

We add to the thought of “apple pie” the memories, feelings, impressions, and inner tastes that go along with all of the pies we have experienced. These things get all glommed together. Images and impressions begin to affect our perceptions. In time, depth is added to an idea. We develop multiple layers of meaning. A thing (or the idea of a thing) becomes a concept.

This concept carries much more weight than the simple beginning idea of “apple pie.” The concept becomes our icon of “apple-pie-ness.” Eventually, all of the surrounding associations that go along with “apple pie”—crust, grandma, autumn, smells—become a part of the history of “apple pie” in our lives. All melds into concept.

Neuro-scientists tell us that this familiarity and development with and of an idea or thing is very real. Repetition of phenomenal contact enhances meaning. The brain selects toward protecting thoughts and experiences that express familiarity because of regular and routine exposure or encounter. Things we experience over and over again get protected in our neural processes.

The axons in the brain transmit neural messages. The dendrites in the brain receive neural messages. The path these thought/messages travel between the two is called a neural pathway. Each time we have a particular thought or sequence of thoughts, the body wraps a myelin sheath around the neural pathway this thought travels (making the connection stronger and more readily accessible).

The subsequent thoughts that emerge from our initial thought also begin to develop neural pathways as well. A system of associative connection is built—a superhighway of meaning and understanding. Firing off certain thoughts may automatically trigger groups of thoughts, entraining them together based on their repetition and proximity.

When we have the thought of “apple pie” a pathway is created from the idea that spawned the notion of “apple pie”, to the image we have of “apple pie”, and then (perhaps) to our memories of specific apple pies from our past. The firing of the neurons for the thought of “apple pie” become entrained with these other associative images mentioned in our above thought scenario and they begin to learn to fire in sequence together. Perhaps we tend to think of Grandma (who made the best apple pies) when we think of apple pies, or of autumn (since we tend to make apple pies during harvest time).

Soon, all of the associative images we have for an idea get glommed in with the circuitry of meaning that we weave for that thing. We may not be aware of the connections we have made, but “apple pie” sure feels like grandma and autumn to us for a reason.

The myelin sheath that wraps the pathway of transmission is a lipid. It is made of fat. Repetition of thoughts and sequences of thoughts actually strengthen the pathway and the likelihood of relying on this pattern in the future. More myelin sheathing is wrapped around a pathway each time it is traveled. A neural cairn is born. Repetition of neural firing strengthens the likelihood of survival. Thoughts in close association tend to enter into the firing sequence of the neurons.

This is why we tend to associate one thing with another. It is why we sense autumn’s approach when we notice a shift in the intensity of the sun’s rays. Something inside is connecting these things together.

A symbiotic bond is formed between ideas we have that seem to go together. When one idea fires off down a neural pathway, it may trigger the firing off of other associated ideas. We may have wondered why in the autumn we always long for apple pie. It may be attached to the changing of the leaves in our memories. When autumn arrives and the leaves change, patterns and associations are fired off in our hearts and minds.

So it is with prayer spaces. Slowly over time we add all of the experiences we have had in this place—and others just like it—to the idea of this space. We build up a concept of prayer space. We plant, water, and nourish the notion of prayer. A cairn-space is created.

It does not take long to be able to build up such a deep and expansive notion of prayer space that it becomes portable. We no longer need to enter the exact first space of prayer, we may then simply enter the concept that has been built over time. We surround our prayer with the myelin-like sheath of repetition. We learn how prayer time may become a peaceful encounter.

Once this peaceful encounter is hardwired into us, we may be able to enter into prayer and its subsequent peace-space in a new location. Once we do that, then this new location gets added into the repertoire of prayer-peace. Cairns become linked together. But we cannot hardwire these notions together unless we have a regular and routine practice of these experiences that will ensure the myelin sheathing necessary for cellular familiarity.

It becomes possible to enter into prayer space, then, while in the grocery line. We can go into our sacred place while in church pews, stuck in traffic, or while rocking our tired new-born to sleep. This is only possible if we start with a specific place and go there for specific times—repeatedly. We must build this space in our world and in our interior lives. We must visit it often, to make the impression stronger. We build, one stone at a time. Once this happens we can add new associations, new places to the pathways of prayer that begin to fire when we settle ourselves into prayer.

Over time we will begin to notice what is going on in this space. Like being able to watch the mantises rise from the plants to find a meal and safety, we will observe thoughts and feelings arise in our space. We will sense patterns and themes arising from our heart. We will hear cries of love and desperation climbing out of our interior to the One Who Is. We will recognize patterns and smaller cairns. Over time.

Perhaps when we sit to pray, we get fidgety at first. If we do not find something to do to calm this fidgetiness, then we will be hardwiring fidgetiness into our prayer associations. We will find ourselves getting fidgety whenever we pray. So we find an antidote to the fidgetiness and we apply it.

This is why it is suggested to have something to do in our prayer spaces, something to bring us back around to our center. This ensures that “centeredness” is hardwired into our neural firings and not “fidgetiness.”

We start by finding a time and place. We add a habit of prayer. We return to that time and place again and again. We use our habit of prayer—our spiritual practice—to settle us and begin new neural associations. We sit, we practice, we enter the slowing.

So far we have looked at a simple prayer practice to help us do this. If once we have said our prayers and sit in silence we find that we are distracted in a thousand directions, we cut off that experience by returning to the prayers again.

We retrain our distractions by replacing them. We sit, we pray, we slow down into stillness and when the slowing is disturbed by a thousand and one random thoughts, we go back to our prayer and try to approach stillness again. We build better neural pathways.

We can choose to reroute all of our arising thoughts and feelings in prayer. When we do this, we are structurally changing the types of ideas and notions that we allow to fire in the sequencing associations of our interior life. If anger arises we can learn to hear it, trace it to its roots (perhaps jealousy or hatred) and then cut it off with the antidote of returning to our prayer. If discord arises, we can learn to hear it, trace it to its roots (perhaps lust or spite) and then cut it off with the antidote of returning to our prayer.

What we are doing in this work of returning to prayer and a re-approach of the stillness is helping us to learn new ways to process our emotions and thoughts. We are wrapping myelin sheaths around new associations we have built. Once we have done this for a while, we will have learned a process of helping our mind deal with distractions. Eventually it will slow down and tire, allowing us to enter silence in a fuller way.