An Unending Cycle of Generosity (Sermon preached 29 August 2021)

Just a few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to take part in a meditation/writing/ kayaking retreat in Alaska. There were 14 of us in all, in a small lodge, off the grid, accessible only by boat, for five full days and six nights. On a small channel above the Wrangell Narrows on the Inside Passage – which is that panhandle of Alaska that runs north-south with the Pacific Ocean to the west and British Columbia to the east. 

The Inside Passage is part of the marine ecoregion called the North American Pacific Fjordland. Shaped by massive glaciers millions of years ago, boasting majestic mountains, wildlife-filled waterways, and thousands of islands blanketed by temperate old-growth rainforest, it is home to bald eagles, sea lions, porpoises and whales.

The lodge backed up to towering spruce and hemlocks that shaded a lush world of shrubs, ferns and mosses, in which bright fungi sprang up overnight on decaying stumps and four-inch-long slugs crept across lichen covered logs. When the tide was in, the deck was maybe 100 feet from the water’s edge, the rocky shore buffered by tall grass. When it was out, a graveled carpet of shellfish, anemones and algae was laid bare...(read more)

Low tide on Keene Channel

Resurrection

What first drew me to you? I think it was your pale, creamy green flesh, perhaps once white, when you stood upright, stretching toward the sky. An aspen? No, too far north we are. Some kind of birch? Or is it a trick, the trick of the lichen that now flourishes on your skin as you lie on the tender blanket of earth that once covered you in your infancy?

I bend to take hold of your jagged end, softened by mosses, and pull; a piece of you comes away in my hand. With a muted crack, swollen fibers yield. A mere twelve inches in length, you are an entire landscape of a different world. 

A world of sphagnum forests bordering smooth verdant meadows that, as I run my finger across them, betray the damp of rotting wood. And at one end, darker moss grows tundra-like, home to fungi the size of pin-heads. No wild animals graze here, but microscopic herds, invisible to the naked eye, move across your surface and feast on the riches of your decomposing body. 

You are a world unto yourself and, at the same time, a dying fragment of another one. The miracle - for that is what it is - of death’s seemingly limitless capacity to not only yield to the burgeoning life that presses on it from behind, but to become its host. To feed and nurture it. You are so exquisitely beautiful in your decay. 

You are still tree. And you are more. You are raft, you are banquet, you are mother. You have never been more alive, more vibrant, more fertile than you are in this moment of breaking down and returning. 

What, I wonder, might my aging and failing, my faltering and mortal dying look like, were I to offer my very self to what might be born and nourished as I fall from full upright to recline and eventually rest upon the ground?

Rest in Peace

Laid out on a small rise just behind a shattered trunk, under the watchful eyes of forest sentinels, the skeleton rests on a bed of moss. No funeral wrappings other than the tender hemlock seedlings pushing up between disarranged bones. Hooves, their soft black sheen evidencing recent attempted flight, and a pelvis, set a bit apart, witness to the savage tearing limb from limb.

The trees gather around this fallen one of theirs. Theirs to feed, shade, protect and, after the grisly picking clean, to grieve. Mute mourners, no hint of blame…just acceptance: this is the way of things in the wild. A doe. And on the other side of a slender, moss-covered sapling, hardly further than the length of an umbilical cord, four tiny hooves and three bones; the rest of her baby small and light enough to carry off to be enjoyed elsewhere.

 

Their branches spreading overhead, spruce and hemlock shelter the gravesite that, months hence, will have disappeared under the soft blanket of the forest floor.

Alaskan Passage

It has been a little over a month since I returned from a week-long meditation/writing/kayaking retreat on the Inside Passage in Alaska. There were just fourteen of us at a small lodge that sits on the shore of the Keene Channel, several miles north of the Wrangell Narrows. These past four weeks, I have been planning to write this post as a way of kickstarting a writing practice that has been more intention than reality for too long. Now, finally, it’s time.

 

For seven days, two of them mostly travel, I stepped out of my life. Or, rather, I took an amazingly beautiful alternate route through a world of towering spruce and hemlocks, wildlife-filled waterways and the freshest air on the continent of North America. A scenic byway along which I meditated and noticed details with all five of my senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting). A less worn trail with just a few fellow travelers, kayaking, reading, writing and sharing. A pilgrimage during which, as the days passed, my mind, my heart and my spirit opened. My lungs filled. My soul drank.

 

Sometimes you have to just get away, right? You have to be someplace else in order to find your bearings. It just so happened that every one of us, in that little band of ten retreatants and four supporting staff, was contemplating or moving through a transition of one kind or another. All of us were navigating that liminal space between what we had been doing and what we were thinking about doing next. We had all come to listen: to listen to ourselves, to one another, to the breathtaking natural world that surrounded us, to the whatever or whoever was present with us, in us and among us in that energetic field that sustains human existence.

 

For the first couple of days all I could do, in response to the “invitations” offered by the poet who facilitated our writing, was jot down random words and phrases in my “Rite in the Rain” notebook. From the first page, below my name: “tenderness/textures/soft undulating hillocks/bright green tan brown; fleecy covering of moss; harsh edges mute now once sharp”. And below that a sketch of a tree trunk. On the third day, triggered by a discovery on one of the islands, some internal dam gave way. As prose began to flow, I realized that the crafting of language is both nourishing and deeply rewarding for me.

 

So what does that mean in practical terms? I don’t know exactly. But I do know that I have come back from Alaska more committed to my writing. And that this space is the obvious place to begin working that out. I will be sharing a couple of short pieces from my trip here. And then, after that, you who are reading this are my witnesses! I will keep writing for writing’s sake. I will keep writing, just as I keep walking.

View north from the deck of Keene Lodge