Deep Time

Today marks a special red-letter day.

Together with Uli, I walked 4,000 steps back to the collision site at Broadway and Violet in North Boulder. I marked the moment with prayers of gratitude and a snow heart on the sidewalk. The blood stains are long gone, so grateful that I could walk away, buy a coffee and return home without being carried away by an ambulance.

Today, I’ve decided not to date these blogs back to the Aug 19 event anymore. There are too many living events that hold personal and communal memory, and it is time to move forward, marking soulful steps along the way as Spirit leads me.

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One of the times marked in my memory will be this week of living in the immediate after-experience of Election Day 2024. (I’m not talking here about newsfeeds!). On Wednesday, constricted by a snowstorm and my increased chances of falling, I was forced to stay home, but needed to keep moving, doing something - alone. Slowly, I deep-cleaned our small apartment while listening to soulful music, holding space for whatever emerged.

One of the joys that escaped up from my desk drawer was this photo of an old friend. My most beloved tree lives at the Pendle Hill Quaker Community in the Philadelphia suburbs where I co-guided five years of retreats with my dear friend Valerie Brown. This 300+ year-old beech tree was alive in the 1600’s in the days of William Penn. I have spent countless hours enfolded, hiding, finding comfort in this giant’s roots, in awe of the Elder Soul who is slowly decaying into the ground, being composted to come back in other forms.

Deep-time is hard for us humans to live in.

If we want something now, we panic and in our anxiety rush in to force change and usurp the laws of nature. It takes time to change our patterns of growth. Those of us who have experienced the presence of this Elder Beech-Being are immediately humbled by our inability to endure the ravages of time. What she has experienced over three centuries is extraordinary to consider. Painful experiences like initials are carved into skin. Limbs ripped off by inclement weather leave gnarly dark caverns for disease to fester. Yet life is still growing from the roots through each beauty-filled season and each ravaging experience of time. Yes, we too as humanity are in the midst of shattering storms of change.

As I stood in the wet snow today with my man of 53 years, for one more time, I expressed that this cataclysmic event of meeting Cristina and her car was no irreparable accident, instead I know that together as we reach out to hold each other and all our Earth relations in close loving attention, (no matter how they have harmed us), we are more like trees planted by a river of Mystery that brings a forest of fruit in the generations to come.

So join me in this journey as we learn to rest and grow in the uncomfortable, yet loving hands of Deep-Time with all that lies ahead.

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I offer segments from another prophetic poem from Wendell Berry as a meditation on the power and the hardship of being more like growing trees in deep time.

Work Song, Part 2: A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows. The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy....

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground....

Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

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