Reverence

Reverence for the Natural World

“Reverence is contact with the essence of each thing and person and plant and bird and animal…Even if you cannot sense the interior, it is enough to know that the form, the shell, is merely an outer layer, and that underneath it the true power and essence…is present.”

                              Gary Zukav: The Seat of the Soul 

“I am the heat of your hearth on the cold winter nights, the friendly shade screening you from the summer sun, and my fruits are refreshing draughts quenching your thirst as you journey on.  I am the beam that holds your house, the board of your table, the bed on which you lie, the timber that builds your boat.  I am the handle of you hoe, the door of your homestead, the wood of your cradle, the shell of your coffin.  I am the bread of kindness and the floor of beauty.  You who pass by, listen to my prayer: do me no harm.”

                    Traditional Portuguese Prayer of the Forest

          I live in a neighborhood of old, oak trees.  When I moved here twenty years ago, sixteen lofty oaks grew in my yard alone.  On some streets, water oaks stand where they have stood for hundreds of years.  Four grown men, hand to hand, could not encircle their girth.  I call them the ‘grandmothers.’ They push up slabs of concrete sidewalks and cause huge humps to form in the asphalt of the roadway.  Now and then, in high winds, one of them will split down the middle and require an army of chain saws to clear them from the street.  I am losing an oak tree every-other year because our hot, dry summers make it easy for beetles to invade and destroy them.

          A decade ago, I journeyed with a group of women to the rainforest of Belize.  An American woman, a naturopathic physician who had studied with a traditional medicine man there, ran a clinic deep in the forest.  On the second day we were there, she led us through the forest to show us the plants she used for her medicines.  Her reverence for the natural world was palpable in the way she spoke of the medicinal properties of each plant and of her concern for the rainforests in her part of the world.

          J.J. Audubon once said, “A true conservationist knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”  I have replaced two of the oaks in my yard with maples.  I carefully watered them last year, making sure they got their roots firmly fixed.  They are planted for the grandchildren I don’t yet have, but know that someday I will.

                                        Keeping the faith,

                                        Jane