Winter 2008

For years I've walked along the shorelines of Lake Superior near our home, in every season, in all kinds of weather. I'm discovering it takes a lifetime to learn that everything is changing, everything is impermanent. For the young among us, such lessons are lost. We take for granted there will be no erosion of the riverbank we once fished from, that a tree we once climbed will never age and topple.

A few weeks ago I sat in a pew of the church in a far-off city where I was baptized. Years have gone by. I returned with my sister and her husband because a final decision is being made to officially close its doors. This was to be a last anniversary celebration. Fifty years ago it was a congregation of almost 900, now on Sunday mornings not more than 12 - 15 persons gather, most of them in the last years of their lives. The church's location is in the roughest part of north Minneapolis. Drugs, transients, gangs and violence now shape this one-time quiet urban neighborhood where, as a boy, I played in front of a church parsonage on a set of streetcar (trolley) tracks.

When we become aware of the constant, unstoppable flow of things, we react, most often, with a response of grief and a longing for the past. Wise voices from the medical community warn us about the dangerous consequences, physical and emotional, of being stuck in such memories, either of sweet nostalgia or of bitterness. It's healthy and appropriate to spend some time there, but not for long.

Spiritual teachers teach us that a clue for living in better balance is found in the wisdom of animals; they live in the power of a mindful now. Such places are shaped by measures of peace, alertness, immediacy. If we ponder how this Eternal Now intersects the emotionally frozen worlds where we spend the majority of our time, priorities become clearer, choices more intentional. We discover the between times are ultimately what shape the best of our hearts and spirits.

With idealized views of trees that never decay, of forests that never burn, we cling to a past, however appealing, that's rigid and deadening. We forget nature leads us into a deeper insight of living. We begin to realize what ultimately matters most often arises out of our being rather than doing. Such moments of clarity appear in the midst of hectic lives, in circular places of quiet, fleeting grace, of rest, of Presence. In the coming year, in, around and under the many projects and work of The Cedar Tree Institute, I'll by looking to meet you there.

-JWM

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