deep immersion in nature – Page 3

Summer sweet & sorrow

July 28, 2014/16 Comments/by Christina Baldwin

Picking raspberries on a Sunday, early evening. The sun is coming through the leaves of the plants, creating a golden green, the veins illuminated, infused. This is how it happens: the Earth doing her earth-thing, providing us with what we need, and more… It is a zenith moment, high summer… just before the first tip toward autumn.

We have pulled the peas that our grandson planted last March, visiting us on his spring break. They were wonderful Jaden, and we thought of you with every bite! Earlier this day, we planted another row of lettuce and spinach, hoping for the garden harvest to extend long into the cooling days. I love this tending–such an antidote to all things digital.

I am entranced in my task, eating as I pick. Our little corgi is sitting at my feet, waiting her share. Her dog lips gently pluck the offered berry from my extended palm. I am a smile–my whole being is happy and running with juice.

A couple of newly married neighbors walk down the gravel road that is our shared string of homes. They are holding hands and talking softly–their almost daily ritual at the end of work: he in the local shipyard, she at the local grocery store. They wave. I walk out to meet them.

“Cup your hands,” I say to them. And into their empty bowls of flesh, I pour a mound of raspberries for each. We stand in our delight. They move on, their conversation punctuated by raspberry sucking. I go back to my happy harvest.

Earlier today I was fashioning a memorial card for next Sunday’s gathering on the shores of Lake Superior in Duluth when Brian’s Minnesota family and friends will spend the day remembering him. We remember you every day, Brian… Eight months into this passage, I am the stage of grief where I find myself calling out to him from my heart, “What an amazing journey, this grief walk… Your mother and I have learned so much… and we miss you so much. I am sure you are learning wondrous things over there on the other side of the garden, your being infused with golden green. Could you come back–just for an evening? Let’s sit on the patio in the high point of summer, sit where we sat last summer and did not know it would be the last time, please…. I have raspberries, and so much I want to tell you and hear from you!”

The “dead” respond as they can. I hear his voice in my head. I receive him in my dreams. I look at his photos. I watch the raspberries turn to rubies through the prism of my tears. I look up– The white stag who lives in the neighboring woods is walking down the road. He stops, unafraid, turns and looks directly at me. We hold one another’s gaze.
I move quietly to the patio, Ann and I stand arm in arm… I feed her berries. The deer regards us still, then moves on, hoofs tapping lightly on the gravel. The dog has not barked.

This is how it is. Sorrow is sometimes sweet and juicy. Grief can be infused with light.

You who are freshly suffering–know that the juice returns. Know that magic happens, that the veil is often thin. Hold out your cupped hands and they will be filled with what you need to get through this moment, and the next. This is how it is.

Dirty Fingernails

May 12, 2014/1 Comment/by Christina Baldwin

Half an hour in the morning.

Ann swimming at the club, I’m dressed for yoga when she returns with the vehicle. Dog still in bed. I put down her breakfast to entice her out. I have scrolled through emails, thank goodness stayed off Face Book. My mind is racing with ideas… shall I communicate with myself in the quiet of the journal, or communicate with “you”—whomever reads this blog: today, tomorrow, or in the mysterious digital timeframe that streams on and on… (Robots are still reading older entries here: if I get a comment on a certain outdated post—it’s not from a human… the rest of you, I love hearing from!)

Half an hour in the morning. Unload dishwasher? Start laundry? Turn on the office computer? Clean my desk? For a few minutes I stand whirling in the midst of tasks and choices. Then breathe. What do I want? What would give this moment meaning?

I want to communicate something quieter than my mind, something small and green, a thought with bud and possibility. My primary reader is myself—I need to know I am capable of settling into the level of quite notice that writing is capable of instilling. If you want to come along, welcome…

Raven sculpture in the garden

It is rainy/cloudy/sunny today. Wherever you are, suck in this soft sweet air of gift. Rain. Cloud. Water above and below. A patch of blue is drifting down from the north. Puget Sound is an undulating grey blanket, the foothills are completely shrouded. Sometimes the clouds are so low it doesn’t seem that rain is falling, but rather emerging out of the grey and green of things.
This world offers so much beauty. The neighbor’s lilac bush is weighed down with purple blossom clusters as big as grocery grapes. We have nearly 40 peony buds shooting up in the garden. The spinach is ready to start munching, and we laid out a line of chicken wire fencing for the peas to climb. We weeded the beds, beheaded the tulips, and mowed the lawn before the rains came in.

World’s biggest lilacs

I need to keep doing this—bringing dirty fingernails to the keyboard. I need to touch the green, find the beauty, tend to nature—especially in places not so easy to find it. I have stood in a parking lot on a cell-phone call, knelt down and weeded the beds of struggling landscape plants. It literally grounds me in the conversation and in my place on the earth. I am tending. Tend, tendance, attention all stem from that same source.

Tend, v.t. means 1) to care or minister to, 2) to look after, watch over. Tendance means ministration, as to the sick. Tending is an antidote to all the pulls of attention that stream in from the machine world… Tending is a ministry—to my yard, to my hearth-friends, to what is not connected to the Internet and is connected to the web of life.

Half an hour… paying attention. I know I will put some green-time into my day.

Entranceway

Angel in the woods

December 31, 2011/0 Comments/by Christina Baldwin

Madrone in Whidbey woods

The day was gloomy and these woods in particular, standing on the north side of the hill, do not get sun in winter and were muted into half-light. The trees grow tall or snake through one another, reaching for light. Winds blow off Puget Sound and all those that stand are strong trunked.

We—my beloved and I and our perky paced corgi—are making our way through this loveliness—polished green shine of salal bushes, the last yellow leaves falling off the salmonberry bushes, grey skeletons of alder and maple mixed among fir and hemlock and Madrone. Alone. Such stillness when we come to rest, only the forest breathes. We are not drawn to talk much, just finding our way, with occasional exclamations of wonder at the mushrooms or pointing out the flight of small grey bush birds.

Our dog’s head goes up, attention on the path ahead, and here come a man and woman wandering our way. They turn out to be dear island acquaintances Mary and Robert, and we are all happy to stop, to make a little circle in the middle of the path and inquire into this happenstance of intersection. We plunge into the heart of conversation—about our travels, dreams, health, work, and families. Like boring through the growth rings of the tree, we tap into story-glimpses of our lives. After awhile we release each other with another round of hugs and move on our ways through the meandering afternoon.

A question then rises in me: What got transferred between us in the guise of a “chance” meeting on the trail that is, in fact, exactly the message Spirit was trying to transmit this afternoon into our minds and hearts?

With this inquiry in mind, I drift back over the conversation. “Just do something for 30 days—make a month commitment and see what happens…” They are reporting on a seminar they attended, a challenge from a webinar—I don’t remember the source, just the message. This is what I needed to hear: to choose one thing in the New Year that I commit to, and give it a chance to become integrated into my life.

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s we have made a commitment to walk the woods, trails, and beaches of our island every day—to get re-grounded in our home after a year busy with travel. And on these walks I formulate a vow to write in my journal every day in January— to re-establish connection to my own life narrative as we head into 2012 and all it portends.

This encounter on the trail leads me to consider how often “spiritual guidance” seems to come through the apparently chance remarks of other people. We are, indeed, angels in the woods to one another—delivering insight, challenge, guidance, inspiration, often without knowing it, or even meaning to. Everything is reciprocal—for we have mutual impact on each other in these exchanges. A niece calls for “advice”—and what we say to her, we say also to ourselves; what she says to us is meaningful across the generations and different situations.

With Gracie on the trail

In this portal time—when contemplating the year past and the year coming, I practice listening for guidance in ordinary conversations: to set out into the day with a question and to notice how, in the jumble of the day’s big and little events, a hint, or even an answer, emerges from the patter of our lives. One day at a time—for 30 days.

Ecology & Travel: Thoughts from the Beach

April 6, 2011/0 Comments/by Christina Baldwin

A week after the earthquake and tsunami, in the midst of the nuclear crisis at Fukushima power plant, we left for vacation, an exotic trip funded almost a year earlier by a little financial windfall.

As it came time to pack we were still glued to video images of destruction nearly beyond comprehension and the possibility of nuclear meltdown hung in precarious balance. We found it decidedly difficult to pull out of the story and head into a week of isolation and relaxation. We were headed to a small island—more of a sandbar, really, 35 miles off the coast of Belize at the point where the atolls of coral fall away to 2000+ feet (610+ meters). It took us two days to get there and two days to get home: we bid the last CNN feed goodbye in the Houston airport, and let go…

It was impossible, upon arriving, to avoid thinking of our vulnerability—the high point of land being about one meter above current sea level. And it was gorgeous… azure waters, amazing fish swimming around coral patch reefs, and lots of athletic opportunities we could practice at whatever level of competence we brought. And, we were completely unplugged: didn’t think about filling seminars, book-sales, or who wants to “friend me” all week! I prayed for the people of Japan, for the people of Libya, for safety to prevail in the world, and surrendered to a week of awesome fun in nature.

The last day of our visit, the camp staff gave everyone a large capacity garbage bag and the challenge to walk around the edges of the island and collect whatever needed picking up. There would be contests for “most useful, most unusual,” etc. As a group of about 20, this meant we filled 20 bags with gifts from the sea—Styrofoam of every shape and size, plastic bags, plastic water bottles, plastic picnic forks, fast-food containers, more plastic water bottles, old running shoes, ruined snorkel gear, fishing line, more plastic bags. Prize for most useful, a condom, still sealed in its packet; prize for most unusual, a front grill for a Honda car. And then what?

What do they do with 20 bags of plastic garbage? Well—they burn it in a tucked away clearing in the midst of the sea grape and coco-palm trees, down near the Osprey nest. They will send the Honda grill back to mainland, where it may be tossed into a landfill—or just into a ditch on the road into Belize City. We’re not talking about high-tech incineration with careful gasification and attempts to neutralize noxious and poisonous off-gases (still a debatable success): we’re talking about a campfire of unsorted chemical formulas, minus the marshmallows, lit when most the guests are off frolicking in kayaks and snorkeling over a nearby reef—grateful that the coral is still alive and the fishes seem healthy.

I loved the week away: and realized—there is no away. We are always “here,” living with the problems we have created for ourselves and our little blue planet.

So, back home, and back on the Internet, I have spent some time this week trying to understand a bit more about the challenges to the use, mis-use, recycling, and attempts to unmake plastic. One good source is the site: pollutionissues.com This site declares that, “More than a hundred billion pounds of plastic were produced in 2000. Their increased use has resulted in concern with (1) the consumption of natural resources such as oil, (2) the toxicity associated with their manufacture and use, and (3) the environmental impact arising from discarded plastics.”

One can presume that this is an annual production amount—enough to make reefs of plastic off the shores of many countries—as well as the floating islands of plastic now viewable from space. Look for plastic heaps on Google Earth—they are everywhere.

The point is: every gesture in our daily lives matters. Everything is connected to everything. The radioactive seawater that was pumped into the reactors to prevent one disaster is now back in the sea where it will create some other kind of disaster. We are facing a huge learning curve concerning the consequences of what we have “made”—plastic, nuclear waste, the ingredients to face cream and over the counter drugs. “Better living through chemistry,” a DuPont corporation advertising slogan from the 1950s, is absolutely embedded in modern life.

The difference between Whidbey Island where I live and Glover’s Reef in Belize is that we have more systems in place that make our attempts to put our garbage “someplace else” appear to work. We recycle, there is garbage truck pick-up, we take cloth bags to the grocery store, my own cup to the coffee shop– and it’s all still here. Somewhere around here…

I have increased my awareness of what I bring into my house, how I treat it once here, and where I put it when done. And I’m talking about garbage, thanking every restaurant and public place that serves food on cardboard or china—practicing as radically as I can little slogans, such as, “Just say NO to Styrofoam…” and refusing to accept things offered to me in plastic—foam, bottles, non-recyclable containers. For efficient—and entertaining– education about this, go out to Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff Project. Her cartoon videos make great family, neighborhood, and church conversation starters and her science, based on 20 years working in environmental health, is sound.

We talk a lot about making a new story… part of that story is what we will do with all the stuff that sustains and threatens modern life. So, let’s be bold and talk about garbage: what to do with what’s already here and how to prevent more and more garbage being made. Raise awareness in the social networks and media in your lives–and share some of your stories here.

And thank you!

http://www.storyofstuff.com/blog/

http://www.facebook.com/planettrash