ACT 1: LIGHT
Perhaps because my father was an early riser, I understood, at a relatively young age, something that many people fail to gather for much of their lives – that is, I discovered that there is a sunrise and a sunset everyday.
You will say… but Mark everyone knows that.
And of course, everyone does know that there is a sunrise and a sunset everyday.
But knowing it is one thing.
Being present is something else altogether.
There is, of course, one primary reason why the sunrise is hard to see. It is because we tend to be asleep when the sun comes up.
The same problem does not cause us to miss the sunset – the opposite problem makes us miss that – we are awake and just too busy, commuting home from work, making dinner, picking up the kid from ballet class, having a zoom meeting with colleagues, vacuuming the basement, standing in line at the Hannaford’s.
Isn’t it interesting?
There is basically one reason we miss the sunrise, and a million reasons that we miss the sunset… so…
even though both events happen everyday, we rarely witness either of them.
We recently had a solar eclipse.
During the solar eclipse, the moon got in the way of the sun for a few minutes, making everything dark.
People drove hundreds of miles to witness it.
Hundreds of people decided to get married during it.
And yet, this same series of events – the sun moving behind another celestial body, or moving out from behind another celestial body, happens everyday.
Amazing!
The world is created in front of us every morning!
Beautiful light peaks up from behind the horizon, gradually filling the sky.
The birds start gossiping about eternity.
The clouds shift.
Let there be light!
By God!
This sacred occurrence happens everyday of our lives.
There’s only one problem.
You have to be there!
ACT 2: WATER
I once had a dream that I was lying on the beach, looking up at a bright blue sky. Soon the tide came in, and the white froth of the waves started pulling me out to sea.
I must have been vaguely aware that I was dreaming, because I was not afraid. Instead, as I looked up at the sky, I became fascinated with the idea that I was a person who was on the edge. I was, of course, on the edge of the land – at exactly the spot where it met the sea. But lying there, I was also on the edge between the earth and the sky.
Land and sea. Earth and sky. These are the elements of creation.
The mystery of consciousness, the capacity to love and play music, and dance – our very lives take place because we teeter on this miraculous edge.
Scientists believe that life on this planet originated in the ocean. When astronomers seek life on far away planets, the first thing they look for is the presence of water. Diviners use forked sticks to find underground water. The 9 million people who live in New York City consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a day. 60% of the human body is composed of water. When we grow in our mother’s wombs, we float in amniotic fluid that has a similar saline composition as the ocean.
Water, simply stated, is life.
A human can stop eating for months and survive, but after about three days without water, our internal organs start to fail.
Is it any wonder, then, that water is a core symbol in our religious life? The ocean opened to liberate an enslaved people. A samaritan woman gave Jesus water. Water was central to many of Christ’s miracles – he turned it into wine, walked on it, and used his spit to heal the blind. This water that sustains us, also marks our baptism into lives of faith.
ACT 3: EARTH
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
From The Mountains of California by John Muir
Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the music of its topmost needles…
I chose the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass… Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobo-link on a reed.
My eye roved over the piney hills and dales as over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea-waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.
ACT 4: IT IS GOOD
What is Good?
This happened 21 years ago, when I was living in New York City.
Join me, if you will.
I am, sitting in the library staff room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
I am alone.
You might not recognize me. I’m a bit thinner.
No beard.
But the real difference is the dreary look on my face.
I’ve been working the swing shift for too long.
As I chew at my disconsolate sandwich,
this is what I see…
In the foreground:
the window – a wide expanse of muted glass.
Across the street:
One of many hospital buildings – an immense block of gray cement cut along rigid edges, framing a multitude of opaque rectangular windows.
Up and down the length of the avenue – a multitude of other buildings, with their own rigid lines.
But then
I notice another small rectangle at the base of the adjacent building…
It’s an opening where a flight of stairs leads away and down to the west.
And at the bottom of this stairway, something glistens.
What is it?
I peer at it for a while until, at length, I figure out what it is.
It is a minute, postage stamp-sized square of the Hudson river.
I can just barely make out the current moving as it catches the last rays of the setting sun.
In my entire field of vision – almost, I realize, in my entire waking consciousness that day — that tiny speck of river is the only evidence I have seen that the natural world exists at all.
In that moment, I know something.
I know it not only with my mind, but with my whole body, and spirit.
I know that this is not good.
That I cannot live this way.
Down at the end of Black’s Road – about a five-minute walk from my childhood home, lay a crook in the hills that led down into a sharp ravine.
The year was 1975.
I was ten years old.
And these woods at the end of Black’s road were not New Hampshire woods.
In 1975, I lived in New Zealand.
A geographer would call that crook in the hills a “temperate rain forest”
New Zealanders call it “native bush.”
It was a magical realm…
Huge extravagant ferns bobbed in the shadows of the trees.
Deep green moss covered rocks and rotting logs.
The piercing, pure call of the wood thrush.
Dappled sunlight filtering through the high canopy.
And at the ravine’s deepest point, a chatty stream perfect for rock hopping, building dams, hunting crayfish.
It was my playground.
One day, as I was careening down the muddy path into depths of Black’s Bush…
I stopped.
I was being followed!
Looking behind, I saw two tiny birds peaking at me from a thicket.
I’d seen them before. My friends called them “fantails.”
The Maori people, who’d lived on those islands for hundreds of years before it was ever called New Zealand – they have another name for this bird…
They called her “Piwakawaka.”
Piwakawaka!
As I watched, piwakawaka swooped down into the path.
In that moment, I saw why they were following me.
They were eating the insects that were revealed by my footsteps in the mud.
A child’s wonder is intense but brief.
When I reconstruct the moment I see myself turning abruptly to the next adventure—
Black’s Bush was the first place I slept under the swaying branches of a tree;
the ring of my first fist fight;
the place I first heard the cry of a wild animal and smelled, for the first time, the pungency of its death.
But unlike those other childhood highlights, the moment with Piwakawaka remains with me—
remains within me—
It has become a part of who I am.
Why?
Because,
In that moment I was changed…
I do not know if my mind was changed
Or if it was my heart
or my soul
But somehow, I knew then…
that I was part of something.
Something far greater than myself.
I was part of a functioning ecosystem.
Part of a fabric of being.
Part of the goodness of creation.
I saw that it was good.