Lectio Naturae: What Is Nature Telling You?
You Are A Poem Waiting To Be Read
I like to take it easy, but I’m terrible at taking it slow. In other words, I like to keep very busy while I do nothing. This can mean scrolling on my phone while watching TV. Talking on the phone while walking. Lying in bed while reading with the music on. There’s a lot of multi in my life, but very little tasking. It’s almost as if I’m afraid that any encounter with solitude or stillness will burn me like the bad guys looking at the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones.
Yet, underneath all the empty business that my restless soul craves is a deeper desire for peace and stillness, which I find deeply rewarding, but also difficult to access because it takes effort.
Lectio Divina is a practice that I was introduced to recently that I really enjoyed. It was begun by medieval monks, and it involves choosing a short passage of text, originally scripture, and reading it with deliberate care. Meditating on a short message, with prayerful intention, allows new meanings to enter without trying to figure things out. It is a powerful practice.
It has allowed me to let text read me as much as I’m reading it. It opens me to the possibility of a plurality of meanings in a single passage, which ripples outward into multiple perspectives on everything around me, enlarging my view while loosening my grip on meaning. I like it.
The practice of Lectio Divina also surprised me by giving my mind a new tool for seeing the world. The other day, my wife and I took a walk in the woods. We came across a dead branch, dangling from a crook in a tree. I stopped and gazed at it, in an almost prayerful way. I felt my mind open to what I saw. The longer I gazed, the deeper my vision of the branch entered my mind.
I could tell that the branch had fallen off a nearby tree and then been caught in a crook. It was not from the tree on which it hung, it was not growing off the trunk. Its bark had fallen off in places, leaving bare dead wood exposed to the sun. In some patches of that wood, rows of fungi grew in mottled patches like tastebuds on a tongue. The branch was licking the space between us. I stuck out my tongue and licked back, feeling the sun dry my spit.
Below the fungus, another tiny dead branch was hung up on the larger one. Even in death, the branch had caught another as it fell. I felt myself, suddenly, in an unbroken chain of living and dead things, catching and holding each other, both aware and unaware of the life surrounding me, depending on me, witnessing me as I witnessed it.
The part of me that can’t sit still finally sat stopped and was as content as a cat lying in a patch of sun. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a much more powerful experience than mine in nature. He said, “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
What had caused this newfound calm? There’s a theory about allergies and autoimmune disorders. The idea is that we have made our environments so sterile and our bodies so free of parasites that our immune systems have nothing to work on so they turn against us. In the absence of something to fight, we fight ourselves.
My mind is a story-making machine. It wants to protect me by foreseeing danger and warning me. But, thankfully, my life is generally fine. Unlike far too many people in this world, I have food and shelter. Just for today, my immediate needs are met. But my mind worries, nonetheless. It creates phantom threats about the future of my finances, the state of the world, my career, my health. It attacks the peace within me and I respond by escaping into my phone or whatever distraction is at hand.
But the world is full of things for my mind to do. If I take the hamster off the wheel and play with it by gazing at a branch in a forest or sitting still in silence, then it can play rather than fret.
I’m trying to do that. I want to let my restless soul off its leash and watch it run. For years I was afraid that doing so would cause harm. As a sober person, I have experience with letting my impulses run roughshod over myself and other people. But lately, I’ve come to wonder if there a way to disinhibit without causing harm or being selfish. What if love and service is the ground my heart always want to play in, and I can let it find its way there if I loosen my white-knuckled grip on it? What would that look like? I do not know.
This all began with a branch, hanging in a tree. So today I’ll try to stare at a snail. I’ll gaze at a leaf, turning red in Autumn. I’ll watch the rivulets of rain streak my window. I’ll stare long enough at nature that it begins to read my heart and tell me stories about myself that I am too busy to hear. Will you join me?
Absolutely.