How to enjoy a wet May: Finding your inner fire when the sun won't shine

This is an update on a blog I wrote two years ago: I am very aware of the wet bits of May 2014, having spent a week on an off-grid camp where it rained almost continually. I was leading groups on resilience at this camp, and it was touching to see how the community dug deep to find reserves of kindness and tolerance as the mud got deeper too.

Living in mud for a week is a great model for modern life in general. You could see the mud as yukky and dismal, or choose to change the story, remember the playful child in you, and see it all as an adventure... Now back to the 2012 blog:

I am writing this at Hazel Hill Wood, sitting at the foot of my favourite beech tree, with a struggling campfire.  It has been raining heavily for days, now it’s merely a light drizzle pushed along by a strong South-Westerly wind.  This seems to be the shape of May 2012.

Early May is my favourite time of the year, especially at Hazel Hill: the bluebells are usually abundant, the birdsong is intense, and there is new growth everywhere.  As you may guess, this year it’s all pretty subdued.  Many bluebells haven’t even flowered.  The wood is damp and chilly like early March, and yet the Spring growth is here.  The green of young beech leaves is brilliant, almost electric, even in this weather.  But the lack of sun has shown me how much I, and probably most people, depend on Spring sunshine for our own sense of growth and renewal.

I know many organic farmers and gardeners who say that it’s best not to water and fertilise your plants too much.  Their approach forces the plants to root deeper in order to find water and nutrients.  There’s a useful parallel here for humans in a wet Spring.

The silver lining in these clouds is the chance to strengthen your will and intent, and dig deeper in yourself, in order to find the inner fire to fuel your Spring growth.  It’s like cycling instead of driving a car: not so easy and convenient, but it makes you fitter, stronger, less dependent on outside support.

How to do this?  Robert Osborn, who co-leads some Men Beyond 50 groups, offers this method: Find a quiet place outdoors, and sit comfortably on the earth.  Now imagine you are like a tree, and that your spine extends into roots below the ground, and branches with leaves above your head.  Visualise drawing deep red fire, the physical vitality of the earth, up through your roots.  Then combine this with drawing white fire down through your leaves from the sky, the inspiration of spirit in whatever form you conceive it.

Nature remains one of our greatest teachers.  Even in a dismally damp May, the trees’ roots are reaching into the warmer earth below ground, their leaves are finding whatever light there is, and they are growing with the season.  To quote from a song by James Burgess:

 By the fire that is under the earth,
 By the fire that is over the earth,
 By the fire in the heart of heroes… 

Spiritual Roots for Personal Resilience

A valuable deeper dimension... at least for some

My own resilience benefits from spiritual roots, but it’s a topic I rarely speak about.  It seems that many people are averse to the idea of a spiritual dimension in life, so this blog feels like a risky experiment in describing what spiritual resilience means to me.

To give some context, my spiritual path has been evolving for over 40 years, and feels like a personal tapestry, woven from many traditions, especially the Christian, Sufi and Buddhist.  Only in 2001 did I start leading retreats and workshops with an explicitly spiritual flavour.  Since 2011, I have facilitated a dozen groups on spiritual resilience, with such titles as ‘Inner Peace in a Changing World’: it is on these recent groups that this blog is based.  It’s impractical to convey the rich delights of a group journey through this material in a short blog, so I will simply focus on ways that a spiritual dimension can add to regular personal resilience approaches:

Divine Unity: Many Middle Eastern traditions use variants of the same word, Alaha, to describe sacred unity.  In the desert, it is easier to see humanity as just one part of a universe which is all divine.

Creation spirituality: this is the idea that creation is not a historical event, but an ongoing process, and our role as humans is to embody divine qualities and contribute to the ongoing process.  For more on this, see the Thomas Berry book review.

Changing the Story: The need for a new story to realign humanity’s relation with the planet is much discussed currently, and links to the need for each individual to find a new story which takes us beyond material hedonism.  This can be helped by sensing our personal link with divine unity, a personal role in creation, and seeing the whole natural world, including humanity, as a single divine entity which needs re-creating.  Again, see Thomas Berry for more.

The Three Jewels: this is the Buddhist concept of three key parts to a spiritual path: the Buddha (all the enlightened teachers), the Dharma (the teachings, and how we embody them in daily life and work), and the Sangha (the community of mutual support for this journey).  All three elements reinforce each other.

Gratitude and celebration:  what the spiritual dimension can add to these qualities is the sense of expressing them to divine unity, to the creating power in all life, including ourselves.  The groups I lead draw on teachings from several spiritual positions, and are offered for people to use or not as they wish, so there is no evangelistic edge.  Given a safe space to experience these approaches, people taking part in these groups get a lot from them. 

How to bring these qualities into more mainstream groups remains an open question, which I would welcome your views and experience.

Book Brief: Thomas Berry: ‘The Dream of the Earth’

Is myth both the problem and the solution?

Berry has an unusual, eloquent, and valuable view of how we humans got into the current crisis, and how to move out of it.  This view is powerfully presented in the ‘Dream of the Earth’, one of his many books.

Thomas Berry described himself as a cosmologist and Earth Scholar – he was also a Catholic priest, who was born and lived in the USA, and died in 2009 at the age of 94.  The idea of the universe as our context, and the universe as a story that we need to read and contribute to, were crucial to his work.

Berry has a clear and stark view of the current situation: “we could describe our industrial society as the addictive, paralysing manifestation of a deep cultural pathology...”  He comments that not only does materialist society regard the planet as something to be used, but also our cultural and even spiritual values see humans as separate from the Earth and other life on it.

Berry believes that an important reason for this situation is a rise of ‘redemption spirituality’, which largely regards this world as a vale of pain to escape from.  By focussing too much on the link between human and divine, “We have lost contact with the revelation of the divine in nature.”

Berry believes that myth is at the root of both the problem and the solution: “the main difficulty in replacing the industrial order is not the physical nature of the situation, but its mythic entrancement... the myth is primary... so far the energy evoked by the ecological vision has not been sufficient to offset the energies evoked by the industrial vision – even when its desolation  becomes so obvious...”

This new myth “must emerge from our new story of the universe.  This... can be understood as soon as we recognise that the evolutionary process is from the beginning a spiritual as we as a physical process.”  He comments that, “The human community must assume adult responsibilities in our role on Earth.  The recent centuries have been like an adolescent period in humans’ handling of this power.” To do this, “we must invent, or re-invent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive, resources.”

So it’s crucial to the new story that we humans see ourselves as part of the continuing story of creation, “as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself.”   This is the essence of creation spirituality, which is well explored in the book Genesis Meditations by Neil Douglas Klotz.

Deeper contact with nature is crucial, both to give us the insights to move forward, and the passion to act on them and preserve this planet where, in truth, we are “a species among species”.  As Berry says, “The mythic dimension of the ecological age is... a deep insight into... the entire earth process.  This includes its seasonal rhythms as well as its historical transformations, its revelatory communication as well as its pragmatic functioning.”

Berry has a sense of optimism about the future, which may seem surprising.  It arises from his sense of the intelligence of Gaia, and a belief that if Gaia allowed humans to create this mess, it must be a huge growth opportunity for both humans and the planet: “the basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the earth.  If the dynamics of the universe... guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process.”

For more on Thomas Berry and his work see: www.thomasberry.org