You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
―
#MemoirFest Day 3 Prompt: Write about a place outdoors where you have felt that you were part of more than yourself–a place where you experienced a bit of the sublime through nature. Some people might call that place a spot where they feel the presence of God, but when I use that expression, I believe that I am talking about God in a plural way. I am talking about a place where all spiritual people feel the presences of their Gods–be they the God of the Sun or the God of the Wind or the God of all that there is. Perhaps I am more liberal than most people who grew up in the Southern Baptist Bible belt, but I believe that most religions are united in that space from which all of our Gods emerged–and that is the place where I want you to visit in your writing today.
“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
For many years, I have realized that it was in natural places that I felt closest to God. Even as a child, I felt that way. When I was a child, I attended camp each summer, and on Sunday mornings, all the young campers would gather on the top of a rocky pathway that led down into a cathedral of trees. Even at the top of the hill, the seasoned campers knew that there were benches made from logs down where they would be hiking, and they knew that they were about to decline to a holy place. Not their typically raucous selves, they reverently assembled on that hilltop each summer Sunday morning, and they stood In stillness, waiting until someone would begin singing: “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,” and cautiously, they would pick their ways along a narrow passage that was topped by small stones, natural gravel, and a splattering of loose boulders. The only sounds that were anywhere about on those mornings were those of the crunchings of the rocks, as they slid beneath the tiny feet, the twitterings of the birds, and the child voices singing “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder…Soldiers of the Cross.”
But again, that song was slanted to the Christian perspective. Now, I realize that we were soldiers of something spiritually greater than ourselves, and we always found that greater something down that hill, and in the center of a grove of ancient trees that, like stained glass windows, were scrawled across the sky.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”― John Lennon
“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays
I’m not quite sure how to make this clear, but I may or may not be talking about that place where the God of my Southern Baptist Sunday School lives. I am talking about spirituality–a feeling of being connected to a divinity that runs through the veins of our very beings.
I have said this before, but allow me to say this again. #MemoirFest is as much about reconnecting to that divinity as it is about writing. I’ve also said this before, but allow me also to say this again, too: #MemoirFest Is A Way to End Writer’s Block.
The fact that I am mentioning Writer’s Block and Spirituality in almost the same breath is not coincidental. When I am creatively blocked, everything about me is blocked. When I am creatively blocked, I cannot feel–much less express. I lose my awareness of the Divine, but without fail, as soon as I begin journaling again, my spirituality also swells within me again.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”― Anaïs Nin
The odd thing is that when I am creatively blocked, I resist any effort to unblock myself. I believe that I am always aware that somewhere behind the iron curtain that prevents me from seeing clearly, I still have an abundance of feeling. But something urges me not to tap into that reservoir, and my feelings become stagnant. When I am in that state, I don’t even want to listen to music. Yet, within days after I begin journaling, the river begins to flow again, and again, my heart swells when I hear old, familiar songs. When I am longing to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir once again, I know that I am on the road to being creatively unblocked. But I grew up as a Christian, and for that reason, Christian music is somehow linked to my spiritual spot. For non-Christians, they may return to a different kind of music or rejoicing. But the first step toward that goal is to begin to write daily once more.
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
― The Dharma Bums
I am lucky. I learned to connect with nature early in life, and if you have not discovered the sublimity of nature yet, I definitely advise you to bury yourself alone in some beautiful natural spot, and to do that soon.
“How I go to the woods
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
I currently live in the Ozark mountains, which is an almost infinite natural wonderland, and to top that off, I also grow a garden.
My garden might be the place that I can grow a few tomatoes and a few roses and a few zippy zinnias, but primarily, my garden is the place that I go daily, to connect with that something that is much greater than I am, alone. Read the following that I wrote one Sunday, a month ago, about my church in nature, where I sit in the presence of my God:
Church In My Garden – August 29, 2021 – Jacki Kellum Garden Journal
For today’s prompt, write about a place in nature where you have connected with something greater than yourself, and sing about your own Lord of Sea and Sky:
Lyrics
by Dan Schutte
I, the Lord of sea and sky,
I have heard My people cry.
All who dwell in dark and sin,
My hand will save.
I who made the stars of night,
I will make their darkness bright.
Who will bear My light to them?
Whom shall I send?
Here I am Lord, Is it I Lord?
I have heard You calling in the night.
I will go Lord, if You lead me.
I will hold Your people in my heart.
I, the Lord of snow and rain,
I have born my peoples pain.
I have wept for love of them, They turn away.
I will break their hearts of stone,
Give them hearts for love alone.
I will speak My word to them,
Whom shall I send?
Here I am Lord, Is it I Lord?
I have heard You calling in the night.
I will go Lord, if You lead me.
I will hold Your people in my heart.
I, the Lord of wind and flame,
I will tend the poor and lame.
I will set a feast for them,
My hand will save
Finest bread I will provide,
Till their hearts be satisfied.
I will give My life to them,
Whom shall I send?
Here I am Lord, Is it I Lord?
I have heard You calling in the night.
I will go Lord, if You lead me.
I will hold Your people in my heart.
“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh
“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
― John Keats
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir
“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”
― Robinson Jeffers
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein