Finding the contemplative rhythm of the forest
One of the novels I read in the last quarter of 2024, Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood, left a deep impression. Perhaps because it resonated with my story. And always that is what we want a story to do. No matter how strange its world, no matter how long ago or unfamiliar its setting… we want to encounter a creature who, in some heart-deep way, we recognise and feel seen by.
The protagonist is an atheist who goes to a small religious community for a retreat, burnt out from work as a eco-activist, burnt out from a failing relationship… And then she goes back and back… and stays. It’s an enclosed order of six largely ageing nuns and, despite not believing in God, despite not knowing what prayer is, she becomes part of the community.
The novel asks some profound questions about the role of activism and how we do no harm in an ailing world that constantly implicates us all. It confronts what it means to withdraw or even take time out to rest in such a world. Is it merely wilful hiding from reality? Is it refusal to see the suffering? Or is there something more profound at work?
It’s not didactic. There are no pat answers, but a story that we become involved in. At one point she remembers a friend who, when dying of cancer, had not been able to make room to see someone who wanted her forgiveness. The friend had no room for anything but truth — not even room for a ‘compassionate lie’. In the time left her, she wanted only what was essential.
What would life be like if we could live like this always? Thoreau also talked about living only what was essential. Of course, he had a safety net — a means of living simply in the woods, women who brought him food. For most of us the inessential invades life. It does it in the daily admin of living in a complex society, in commitments to work and to others, those we love and those we may find difficult… But we may still have some choices — not to people-please, not to commit to more than is humanly possible, not to take the whole world on our shoulders.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…
Thoreau wrote in Walden
Simplicity and depth. Whether we search for this in the thick of life or in retreat, the world finds us. In the novel, the nuns weather a plague of mice, the return of the body of one of their order, a visitor who leaves them all uneasy and questioning. But at core there is a profound thread exploring how we build and sustain rhythms that ground and hold us.
The protagonist muses on what Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace.
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
But one of the nuns tells the protagonist that her notion of prayer is juvenile. That she needs to stop thinking of prayer as a list of requests to God. That God is not the point anyway, but rather how we get out of our own way, how we admit ourselves into otherness, how we confront our judgements and ill-formed opinions.
Is this another way of saying we need to find ways to ‘front only the essential’?
When I was going through two years of confirmation classes, I was taught that worship is
the all-pervading recognition of the absolute worth of God.
Prayer was contemplating the absolute worth of this Other — the Thou to my I, as well as being thanksgiving and supplication. I journeyed from there to ministry, ordained at the first service of ordination of women while pregnant with my fourth child. And from there to a series of work-place assaults and a betrayal of faith by the hierarchy around me that left my physical wounds as nothing compared to the emotional and spiritual breakdown.
Afterwards. I could only describe my former faith as amnesia. It was a faith that had blazed bright since I was a three-year old entranced by a stained glass window that admitted me into otherness. And then it was impossible to reconstruct. I found myself saying with Mary Oliver that I don’t know what prayer is (The Summer Day) that I could not imagine where prayer went (I Happened to be Standing).
It was utterly disorienting. But I did know that spirituality and institutions did not have to be harnessed together (though this might be the path for some). I did know, like Oliver, that the wren’s song was holy. And I echoed her in knowing how to pay attention, how to feel blessed in the quietest moments, how to listen to the earth and the non-human world.
What had changed for me was the referent.
wonder
awe
gratitude
praise
hope
yearning
attention
These persist still.
Attention above all perhaps. ‘Attend’ and ‘tender’. I have spent a lot of time circling these words, these rhythms of being. I focussed on ‘tending’ as the thread of the last year —
what we tender/give
what it is to be tender
what we tend to/reach for
And that soft shift to ‘attend’ —
as I tend to the trees in the forest that surrounds me
as I tend to plants that whisper their healing to me and to those I work with as a herbalist
as I tend to hearts and bodies — mine and others and yours
as I tend to a house and loved ones as so many of us do.
What we tend to, what we turn towards defines our journey.
What we give our attention to, gives us away, contours our vision, sculpts the rhythm of days and lives.
And we come full circle to what is essential.
On the cusp of elderhood, I’m exploring what is essential, what I should be tending to as I try find a gentle, creative rhythm for a grounded life in a forest… listening and serving. It won’t change the world, but it might change something that might change something else… There is always alchemy, always a different story.