A Year of Spiritual Thinking: 1.2 (First Month, Second Week)

Breaking my heart open

dawn flares clouds 
coyote chorus resounds 
breaking my heart open

This morning, I set out for my walking meditation in the half-darkness under low clouds with a wind-chill reading of twelve degrees. “Perhaps I’ll just do the short loop,” I thought. But as I approached that trail junction, the eastern sky woke up: pink clouds flared to orange and then, as they seemed to burst into flame, the coyotes began to sing, a chorus of rising howls. If it hadn’t been so cold, I might have dropped to my knees in the snow right there, a supplicant to awe. The color faded, the coyotes hushed, and I walked on, shivering, heart wide open.

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A Spiritual Field Trip and Resources You Suggested

Hello friends and welcome to Practicing Terraphilia in a Year of Spiritual Thinking! If you’re just joining us or haven’t read the newsletter in a while, go here for an explanation of this project, and here for the first month’s “call” or challenge.

Although I said I am not going anywhere for this year of refocusing my every day life on matters of the heart and spirit, I am planning short spiritual field trips to places that speak to my inner need for sacred wildness. Read on for this week’s field trip with videos. After which I’ll share an annotated list of some resources you suggested for this year of spiritual thinking.

The Field Trip

Last Tuesday afternoon, I headed south to experience the wintering flocks of sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in the Rio Grande Valley, about two and a half hours from where I live. The entire Rocky Mountain population of Greater Sandhill Cranes, birds who stand an impressive four feet tall on long, graceful legs, migrates south from nesting grounds in the central and northern Rockies to wetlands in the southern Southwest each winter. After spending the summer in small family groups, the cranes gather by the hundreds or thousands to feed and dance and call in their sonorous voices.

The Bosque del Apache and the state-managed wetlands nearby are home to the largest of those immense wintering flocks, along with some 80,000 or so snow geese and other geese, plus wintering shovelers, teal and other marsh-feeding ducks; bald and golden eagles, harriers, great-horned owls; and a whole riotous panoply of other wildlife.

When I told my brother, a birdwatcher of some renown, that I was playing hooky to go see the cranes, he said, “Seeing the cranes is a spiritual experience.” My jaw dropped. Those were not words I expected to hear from my no-nonsense fisheries biologist sibling. And they led to an interesting conversation about spirituality. This year is already yielding surprises, in part because I am open to them.

Wonder and Awe in Abundance

I intended to get to the refuge in time for the evening fly-in, when cranes and geese fill the sky with their voices and the rushing of their wings as they commute between the fields where they feed and the marshes where they take refuge at night. But I was too late. I drove the loop road after sunset, and was rewarded a family of white-lined peccaries (also called javelina), who snorted and grunted as they foraged in the river bottom woods. (The smaller, almost black peccaries in the video are this year’s young.)

I had never seen peccaries at the refuge before and was totally charmed. They are expanding their range north up the Rio Grande as the climate warms. Which is not without consequences, as a biologist friend pointed out: the peccaries will likely have a serious impact on ground-nesting birds that haven’t evolved with peccary predation. A reminder that change is never simple: alter one species’ range and a cascade of changes will follow, not all ones we humans would prefer.

Just before leaving the refuge, I stopped at a marsh where I knew a small group of sandhill cranes often roosted at night. Sure enough, just as I got out of the truck, three cranes dropped out of the dark sky to join a group already in the water. Turn the sound up and listen for one sleepy crane call at the end.

The next morning, I headed north to the Bernardo State Wildlife Area up the valley from the Bosque del Apache just in time for sunrise with cranes and geese. The edges of the marsh were frozen in a thin sheet of crystalline ice, and hoarfrost coated every plant stem and fence-wire, but the cranes were wide awake.

Some of the mass of cranes up close

After an hour of hanging with the sandhill cranes, my heart was full and my body was cold. I climbed back into Rojita, my pickup, and started the drive home, choosing back roads instead of the faster interstate highway to give myself time to digest. And to prolong the immersion in wildness.

As I drove across the valley, I spotted movement in the bosque, the river-bottom woods. I slowed instinctively, and then stopped on the shoulder as a herd of about 30 elk jumped the highway fence and streamed across the road, headed south toward the wildlife refuge. I managed to grab my phone to shoot a not-great video through the windshield as the last of the herd raced across the highway, leaped the fence, and disappeared. Wow. Just wow!

Remembering Our Place in the Whole of Life

The marshes of the Bosque del Apache and the state wildlife areas nearby that draw and nourish the cranes and other wildlife are not untouched by human hands. These landscapes are highly managed: Irrigation ditches precisely distribute water to different areas in different seasons, farmers plant and till fields of crops specifically to feed the sky-filling flocks of waterfowl, and invasive trees (salt cedar and Russian-olive) are removed with chain saws and herbicides.

But the obvious management does not dilute the experience. Being immersed in the sights and sounds, the comings and goings of so many other species gives the feel of wildness, something my soul very much needs right now. The sheer numbers and nonchalance of those other beings reminds me that in truth, humans do not run this world, although our impact is immense. We are just one part of the universe.

If we screw this up and make earth uninhabitable to human life, life in the larger sense—capital ‘L’ life, the web of species and interactions that animates this extraordinary planet—will adapt and carry on.

That is somehow comforting and reassuring. Why I feel that way is a nugget to chew on in this year of spiritual thinking.

A List of Spiritual Resources

Thanks to all who recommended books and other resources for this year of spiritual thinking. Here is a partial list with annotations:

Several people mentioned mindfulness meditation teacher Jack Kornfield’s book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. (Which is the source of the pull quote in last week’s newsletter.)

From

Stephanie Raffelock

, three books: The Monastic Heart, 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life by Joan Chittister.  “A Catholic nun with a broad theological brush stroke, and my favorite book of hers.”

A Life of Meaning, Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity by James Hollis “Of all that he's written, this book feels the most accessible to me. It's what I'm reading now and I'm loving it.”

And Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer by Brother David Steindl-Rast “One of my favorite go-to books for sustenance.”

Longtime friend and deep thinker Jody B recommended Emptiness Dreaming by Bill Bauman. “It offers a quantum perspective by someone who speaks fluent light, love and energy and brings together science & spirituality.”

Scholar and author

Priscilla Stuckey

suggested Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta as a paradigm-sifting read.

Reader Monica S offered Christian McEwen’s World Enough and Time: “One of my all time favorites. It’s one I re-read often.”

Kathryn T, a cleric and reader, recommended two books: Douglas Wood’s A Wild Path: “By a man who loves the Earth, especially trees.”

And The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkel: “A short essay for each week of the year about her backyard, with beautiful art for each one, and an occasional ode.”

Susan S suggested The Boy and the Heron, a film by Hayao Myazaki. “It deals with thoughts about life and death and multiple universes. … An immersive fantasy that will keep me thinking for a while. ...mind-bending.”

Note: I saw The Boy and the Heron this week, and I was riveted. For anyone fascinated by myth and archetype, and beautiful animation, this film is rich and nourishing.

A friend who has a seminary education brought me a whole shelf of spiritual reading, and thoughtfully gave me an introduction to each book. From that stack, I have started J. Philip Newell’s The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality. I have a whole year’s worth of reading already!

More on spiritual resources and Celtic spirituality next week, along with what I learned from attempting to write my spiritual bio. What are you learning? Hit the comment button below, or drop me an email and share.

Blessings of the first month of this new year to you and yours!