Holy Sun, Holy Earth

Nurturers of the Real #3

This is the third part of an essay series which takes as its inspiration something Wendell Barry said in The Unsettling of America: “Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real.” Resounding in the background, too, as if across an empty canyon where our hearts used to be, is Vine Deloria's rhetorical question to the sunset of the West: “Can the white man's religion make one final effort to be real?” The first essay in the series was All Over the World the Faces of Living Ones Are Alike, which is free for anyone to read and listen to.

Let’s have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs. Let’s have the grass for a mattress, experiencing its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals. Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath.

—John Fire Lame Deer, in David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous

When I was a teacher, my students were all totally sweet and lovely in every way, and curious and brilliant and wonderfully openminded, so it was hard to find ways to annoy them, but one thing that worked every time—since most of them were Christians—was I’d hold up a branch of pink azaleas or something, or a fistful of fresh grass, or a rock which moments ago had been basking in the sun and say This is as real as it gets. Nothing is more real than this, not even God.

It was amazing, what a conversation-killer that was.

Kids who otherwise had no problems solving differential equations or writing iambic pentameter sonnets would gape at me as if they’d become fish tossed on the seashore of my feet gasping at the burning amazement of the air, as Mary Oliver says her in poem The Fish, now painfully washed up on the tiled floor in the slow pouring off of rainbows—you could see their eyes opening and closing like eyelashed gills, their minds gushing out from their ears like gallons of seawater, trying to come up with an answer to that—something, anything—finding only emptiness instead.

Which of course was exactly the point.

It probably would have annoyed them even more—them, and their parents—to know I was only recycling an old sermon delivered by Siddhartha Gotama, the “Flower Sermon,” where he ascended the platform, and instead of preaching just held up a lotus flower in silence and smiled. (Siddhartha’s nickname in Sanskrit—Buddha—the Awakened One, the Blooming One—is related to our word for an embryonic flower, the flower bud, which “awakens” as it blossoms and unfolds, so there are two wordless flowers in the Flower Sermon, both of them smiling.)

I’m not a Buddhist myself, but I find a kindred heart in anyone who yearns to journey outward from the self-isolating skull-cave of mental projections and fantasies into the sunlit realm where real things are allowed to be really real, as the Zen Buddhists do:

The way is crossed by many paths,

The moss by sandal tracks.

White clouds lean, at rest

On the silent island.

Fragrant grasses bar the idle gate.

Rain past, observe the color

Of the pines.

Out along the mountain, to the

Source, flowers in the stream

Reveal Zen’s meaning:

Face-to-face, all words gone.

—Liu Changqing

I love that: Face to face with the flowers in the stream, gurgling fresh water carrying the dust of thoughts, words, concepts, narratives away until the mind is clean again, as it was in early childhood, full of sunlight—there’s liberation in that, a kind of unfolding, as I myself tasted this very morning (as anybody can), sitting here, breathing slowly and deeply, morning breeze blowing through the window screen, the willow tree, yellow with pollen, growing brighter and brighter in the sun.

Here comes the paywall, placing my hat on the sidewalk of the world as a writer. Past the wall, you'll find the rest of the essay, an easily printable PDF version of it, a recording of me reading the essay in a soundscape that fits the mood—a seashore maybe, or bustling city, or a sunlit forest—and the comment section, where you're safe to say what you really think.

-graham