My tongue has no bone.
And neither does yours.
That’s just the way it is.
Gerald May challenges us to take a closer look at this truth in our book club chapter this week: everything is just the way it is.
Sounds simple, right? Of course everything is the way it is, you may be saying to yourself. And yet…we look through things every day without realizing the way they really are.
Chapter five of The Wisdom of the Wilderness–Of Time and the Seasons–begins with a discourse on time. Through an imaginary conversation with a cicada, we realize how different our view of time is from the way the natural world operates.
Nature, says May, our own and that of the world around us–lives in Presence instead of “in the present”. Rather than moving through time, it simply exists in cycles and successions: sound and silence, light and darkness, birth and death, activity and stillness, courting and nesting, eating and sleeping. Everything is rhythms. Everything is seasons.
May further illustrates this point with a story about an inscription he was once given by a Korean Zen Master. The inscription, translated, read: For Jerry: The tongue has no bone. Spring comes every year. Love, Me.
Upon the reception of this gift of words, May says, I bowed and smiled knowingly, though I didn’t have a clue what the words meant.
It took him nearly fifteen years before he began to understand the meaning of the Zen Master’s words: Everything is the way it is.
Indeed, the tongue has no bone. And spring will return. Year after passing year.
By way of further explanation, May expands upon the concept of joining that we discussed in chapter four.
In gazing at a tree, for instance, May says:
Nature invites me to really look at the tree and just see her for herself. As my gaze deepens, all commentary stops and there’s just the being of the tree, the tree being tree, beyond even my label of “tree”, and me being me with no self-images and it’s all one complete immediate being-experience, breathlessly exquisite…The gift of joining, of direct, participative communion, is a very real possibility in every moment. When my comments cease and my symbols evaporate and my feelings dissolve into pure Presence, I join the tree in its real, immediate being.
May is describing the difference between observing the tree and perceiving the tree–joining with the tree.
The rest of this chapter is, perhaps, my favorite part of this book thus far. The author describes his attempts at joining with various aspects of nature through the change of seasons. We are treated to his feeling, thought, and sense commentaries from one of his favorite vantage points–his canoe in the water reservoir near his home.
As we move through spring, summer, fall, and winter with May in his canoe, I can almost feel the organic nature of this passing time. I sense the acceptance in his words–the attempts of a dying man to make sense of the remaining moments of his life. And though I am an observer to this story through the reading, I can feel the joining he describes.
And it is beautiful.
Food for Thought:
**May believed that we must first be receptive to this joining before it can occur. He says, I think God respects our individual integrity and will not invade us when and where we are unwelcoming…
Do you agree? Has nature ever taken you by surprise by erasing all mental commentary and sweeping you into a totally perceptive experience?
**May describes this contemplative awareness as the place where you and I dance into realizing, realizing our eternal embrace of one another and the earth within God’s endless, infinitely intimate embrace of everything.
I found these words extremely touching coming from a dying man’s pen. Yet, when I consider that we are all perishing, I wonder that I don’t make more time for contemplative experiences such as May describes in his book. Did you interpret these words in a similar way? Thoughts?
related posts:
L.L. Barkat’s Unpredictable Paths of Grace
Glynn’s In the White Tanks
Monica’s Stars and Sunrise
Photo by Ann Voskamp, used with permission. Post written by Laura Boggess
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May describes a moment (or moments) when “it becomes ALL experience” — when everything fuses into a kind of oneness, and you’re part of it. That happened to me and my college son in the White Tank Mountains near Phoenix — it was completely unexpected but truly a gift. Terrain, sky, strenuous hike, view, expanse, dust, dryness and us — fused into one moment. (Details at the blog,)
I too felt the context of his life… how he had become aware of its brevity… how this helped him experience the “isness” of things.
We don’t have to wait. I do know this. The past few years have been helping me remember.
As a woman, it is when the Lover of my Soul wants to give me an intimate tangible gift
which I experience to the fullest when I’m most receptive and open. He fills me, we become one once again. Purest intimacy, pure worship. I first show up then respond to the wooing. He’s wants a lover too, one who responds when He initiates. Nature is a never fail way He uses to woo and invite me.
This post touched me, as I’ve always thought it is harder for a man to relate to being the “bride”, and yet even though the words are different, the experience is the same.
Oh, yeah. The dying man’s perspective makes a huge difference (and I almost forgot this until he mentioned the needle in the vein for chemotherapy).
And certainly, God won’t bust down the door if we don’t open it. I was just reading in _The Homesick Heart_: “Jesus’ life and death pressed in on me like a passionately worded love letter. He came courting. He stood close enough that His warm breath fell on me. He whispered alluring words, but He respected my personhood.
He will not rape; He will not violate our wills. God treats humanity, debauced and sinful as it is, with a dignity far beyond the dignity we afford ourselves or one another. No one values the sanctity of our will and affection more than He does.” (p.84)
Glynn,
I love how you picked out those words: It’s all experience. The fun of sharing this book, getting to see passages I skimmed through different eyes. Thanks again for sharing your experience over at your blog.
L.L.,
Yes, this is one thing I am learning with time too. We don’t have to wait. This book is driving it home for me.
Kathleen,
Your comment strikes a cord. Yes, being open to His overtures…I love how you say this. Nature never fails to woo me either.
Great thoughts!
i have experineced thoughts, feelings of interconnect with God and everything, yet, i have no words to describe this. the closest i can come is power/energy/ life… and Love.
Perhaps because of my experience of my brother’s cancer, which took his life this past May, and my long participation in an online support group at NPR where I truly feel “participative communion” with other hearts seeking to be accepting of what is, not what was, not what should be or might be, I read May’s book with great regard for what he came to find in wilderness, perhaps just in time. When you are with someone who is dying, the “possibility in every moment” sometimes is reduced to nothing more than a single moment. But in that very one can be everything you will forever after remember. And often in that single moment is when God feels closest–or farthest away.
Monica,
He doesn’t push it on us, does he? And yet, in his writing, I can feel his acceptance–the melancholy but also the joy. I am awed by the beauty of sharing in this experience with Gerald May. Love that quote from the Homesick Heart. Yet another one to add to the list.
Nancy,
I know exactly what you mean. I struggled with this post a bit because so much of what I wanted to say had no words. I’m glad to know you understand.
Maureen,
I am humbled by your sharing, so glad for the “participative communion” you received through such a sorrow, and thankful for the wisdom you gained through it–that you share it here. Your words continue to open my eyes wider; give me reason to strive for that mindfulness in each passing moment.
Thank you.
This was my favorite chapter so far Laura. The descriptions are just beautiful. When he wrote : “I think God respects our individual integrity and will not invade us when and where we are unwelcoming.” it struck a chord.
In recent days I’ve been thinking so much about the way the Father simply waits – waits for me to choose. He has done all – given all – and now it is my part to receive it all. It astounds me that this Holy God wants relationship with the likes of me.
I felt, as I read, that May was perhaps moving closer to the Lord in what he experienced in nature. It is, I think, inevitable to be drawn to Him when we take the time to really “see” the world around us.
I think I may not be understanding this in the way it was meant, but this chapter had real meaning for me.
I finally caught up ( okay and went a little ahead) this weekend. I wonder why May felt such surprise at the peace he felt in nature, when he’d spent so much time in it previous to his dying. Perhaps he’d always approached it with an agenda, or with a taking for granted attitude. Yet he knew that peace waited for him there. And I was so glad for him to have found it. Or that , God found him.
It is sad that we try to complicate the very primitive of our yearning. That we try to quiet this voice that wants to sing and dance with the heart beat of life and death .
I remember as a little girl wanting to sleep outside in my snowfort, cold, alone, and staring at the stars in the dark sky feeling loved at last.
Linda and Deb,
Both of your comments make me think of these words by G.K.Chesterton:
**Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never go tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature man not be a mere recurrence,; it may be a theatrical encore.**
Perhaps May grew closer to that pure state of a child as he drew closer to death. I don’t know. But somehow, he was surprised by the beauty of Nature that he had experienced time and time again.
Isn’t that lovely?
This chapter was a great reminder to me to take a step back and allow my children to be in the moment with nature in their own way. I can organize an excursion, encourage them to spend time interacting with God in the wild, point out specific sights and sounds, but what I cannot do is force them all into the same exact nature experience. Each of my kids brings something different to the wilderness and each child takes something different away from it… and that has to be ok.
I have one that likes nothing better than to sit and read a book or curl up and take a nap in the sun. My two others want to play house/ orphans/ hotel/ restaurant and dig in the mud or stack branches to make rooms. Occasionally all three like to take sketch pads and to draw what they see. Sometimes they’ll catch a bug and watch it crawl for a while. Lying still in the grass looking at the clouds or running across the yard whooping like banshees. I have been served many a mud pie and cupful of “grass soup.”
It’s all experience, right?
Who am I to calculate and orchestrate how and when Wisdom is going to stop them dead in their tracks and draw them into the joining? I can try to make something happen, to force what I think they need to discover in nature- and even what they need to think about it once they’ve discovered it- but I just can’t pull it off. I become like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, just getting in the way.
We can be so hyper about controlling the outcome of experiences that if the Holy Spirit were to whisper to us there we’d be so consumed by an agenda that we’d never even hear him.
Things that, as a parent, I think about often.
I’m lately making a more conscious effort to step back, stay out of it, and let the Lord do the work He wants to do in my children’s lives. Naps and mud pies are fine.
Isn’t that interesting that as May gets closer to death, his desire to comment on and interpret life and nature is heightened? I’d have thought he’d become even more quietly aware, more contemplative, more drawn to just letting go and allowing things be what they are in the moment without analyzing and describing. That he’d be more interested in “joining” and “the power of Presence.”
Instead he wrote a book about it.
I agree , Laura.
And Erin, you are so right. My children taught me how to let the sand run through my fingers over and over.
Erin,
This is wise advice for the parent and bystander. Sometimes we leave no room for the Holy Spirit to move. I’ve learned this the hard way, being an overplanner. Often times my biggest lessons have come when all my plans fall apart.
Amen, Deb. It’s the little things…