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A WGREN Meditation for the Week of September 28, 2008
This week marks the first anniversary of this meditation web-page. In our first year we have been treated to a variety of meditations: some leading us to comtemplation, some moving us to action, and some simply taking our breath away with their beauty. To celebrate our year together we're throwing a meditative birthday party. Each person who contributed to our meditations during the last year was asked to submit a short poem. The following mini-anthology is the result. Enjoy!
Invitations
To choose to use; to respond upon –
the meeting of wind, rock, bird, and rain;
So are we made: Initiator – Respondent.
and ‘which shall I be?' I said aloud
asking the wind, the rock, the bird, and rain.
‘We only invite, said they; no answers allowed.’
Wayne Albertson, Pastor
Ada First United Methodist Church
Evening DragonfliesMeditation with Cat
Sleek fur rumbling against my shin.
Morning light reveals an olive mold on the tree bark.
Trembling spheres of sweet gum,
Spiked seeds dancing in the wind.
Kathleen M. Dixon
Wind moves through the trees,
The evening fades to night.
As the mist rises,
The last dragonflies hover,
Then glide across the water.
Mark Dixon
Department of Religion & Philosophy
Ohio Northern University
MysteryOctober's Muster
Crimson
rime-dusted leaves
murmur and rustle low.
Each leaf whispers its sacred name
and falls.
Bill Fuller
Department of Mathematics
Ohio Northern University
The craft of the universe:
to keep us guessing,
to keep us interested,
to give us clues,
to give us a mind
to work on the puzzle.
Lawrence Templin
Emeritus Professor of English
Bluffton University
A WGREN Meditation for the Week of September 21, 2008
Cottonwood Seeds
There is a light breeze, a mostly blue sky, a dove cooing,
a lone dog's lone bark, the shade of several maple trees, green grass,
and the sight of various flower and vegetable plants in the garden.
I am sitting at a patio table moved under one of those trees.
The light breeze brings a seed floating by -
thin white filaments centered at a hub,
and one filament with a seed smaller than a pinhead at the outer end.
The seed is heavier than air (of course), for it will land somewhere.
But, it floats - the lightest of breezes carrying it along, -
a slight arc up, with pause to await (does it choose?) the next direction,
or perhaps a short 'zip' for a foot or two -
its meanderings inviting me to guess its next direction,
to follow its next direction;
its pauses inviting me to count its filaments,
admire with awe its delicacy.
And, I do - all of those.
It is a guest of uninvited, but welcome gentleness.
Wayne Albertson, Pastor
Ada First United Methodist Church
A WGREN Meditation for the Week of September 14, 2008
On a recent trip to a conference on ecological restoration in Clemson, South Carolina I had the chance to revisit the Great Smokey Mountains. It had been over two decades since I was last there, when I was a graduate student at UT Knoxville. During the visit certain experiences brought home to me Thomas Wolfe's infamous aphorism that it is impossible to go home again. While perhaps an over-exaggeration, it is nonetheless undeniable that time passes and that its principal measure is change - sometimes past all recognition.
As natural wonder the Great Smokey Mountains are a popular destination and there has been continuous development in the area to attract tourists since the 1930s. Nevertheless the commercial expansion since even the 1980s has been dramatic. What precedes the entrance to the Mountains is a 30 mile-long commercial corridor that one must navigate, sometimes at bumper-to-bumper pace. What were once three separate towns - Sevierville, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg - have become one continuous and homogeneous testament to modern development that ends right at the entrance to the Great Smokies. In a distance measurable in minutes and footsteps one moves between the artificial and incongruous human-built stores, hotels and restaurants to the forest that covers the entire mountain range. The temperature difference is no less dramatic than the difference is colors, odors and sounds.
What amazes me though is that this juxtaposition seems unproblematic to most visitors to the area. It is one more contradiction amongst the numerous contradictions that define human existence. So much so that we might well rename the human species homo contradictus. Perhaps even more incredible is that Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg have become as popular as destinations as the mountains. And to those whose principal purpose is to visit the towns and their various (and indistinguishable) tourist attractions, the Great Smokies are themselves little more than an amusement or diversion to squeeze in between the other entertainments.
Across the earth there is little that constitutes 'wild nature' at this point in time, and those areas that pass as such have become enclaves within the human-built environment. So where once the human-built areas were islands within the natural environment, now the reverse has become true. Nature exists on human sufferance and at human beings' all too capricious whim.
An ongoing ecological disaster in the Great Smokey Mountains themselves illustrates that even entire mountain ranges are susceptible to human indifference and negligence. In the past three decades there has been a 95% decline in the Fraser Fir population in the area due to an insect - Adelges piceae - that was on European trees brought into the US, and against which the trees have no natural defense. The dead trees are all too discernible on the mountain sides. At this stage the sole practical solution has been to collect seeds to preserve the genetic material in hopes that it will be possible to reintroduce the species sometime in the future (www.gsmit.org).
What seems to me to be uncontroversial in all this is that unless human beings have the intelligence and commitment to reign in rampant over-consumption and environmental destruction another Thomas Wolfe quote, the passage that prefaces Look Homeward Angel, might well describe a rather too possible future:
"...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."
Mark H. Dixon
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Ohio Northern University
A WGREN Meditation for the Week of September 7, 2008
May the Wind breathe healing upon us,
prolong our life-span,
and fill our hearts with comfort!
from the Vedas
Raimundo Panniker, translator
Already in this first week of September the breezes have turned away from summer. In the fields this evening a gentle breeze slips a comfort of coolness across my skin, while the sun, now surprisingly low in the sky, lets its warmth talk of autumn baking days. Perhaps this is what it feels like for the Wind to breathe healing upon us. It may even be that the openness of our senses, here the sense of touch, is what invites this healing breath to move around us and through us. It may also be that the openness of our hearts is what invites Nature, here imaged as the Wind, to move into our inner being to comfort us and to cleanse away whatever barriers we have constructed to experiencing directly what is real. Nature has the power to heal, to ease pain, and to comfort, but we must first open our senses, our minds, and our hearts to it. One way to develop this practice of openness is to create some time each day, just to be outdoors and to observe what Nature is doing. We might like to find a quiet spot near a lake or pond, or we might prefer the flowing rhythm of walking along a rarely travelled country road. Then we leave our cares and preoccupations go, and open our senses to all that Nature is doing around us. Slowly with time the quietness or the rhythmic motion will draw us into a stillness where we find healing and comfort. It is then that we might come to say
The winds shall aid my progress.
Water shall cleanse me from fear.
Fire will purify my doubts.
And the earth shall nourish me to health.
All is well, all is well, all is well.
Zsuzanna E. Budapest
Bill Fuller
Department of Mathematics
Ohio Northern University
