Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

For the Earth Forever Turning

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
December 2, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

 

The First Voice

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers,
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawks food and noble is the mountain,
         Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.

 

Response to the First Voice

“I will find my accounting where the Alder leaf quivers,” says Jeffers, great human voice who spoke so ardently and powerfully for the need for us to let nature into our lives and consciousness. Robinson Jeffers, fierce advocate for the power of rain, the regalness of the hawk, the loveliness of rivers. “I will find my accounting where the Alder leaf quivers,” and what does it say to us, this fading tool of life? This leaf that has worked so marvelously, so integrally with the whole body of the Alder tree? This leaf that was both banner and pennant, as well as voracious light eating factory of life. What does it say to us, now as Autumn/Winter, even here in Northern California, brings its dying and transformation?

That our accounting for our lives is inextricably woven into, and through, and out of the natural rhythms of the earth. Jeffers is keenly aware that the direct experience of those rhythms — that immediate tactile experience of the glories of the earth — is where our nobility resides.

We are entering Autumn/Winter, and we would do well not to lose contact with that change, not to miss allowing ourselves to fully participate in changes and transformations relevant to our own kind, humankind.

So often we are prone to complain about the passing of summer. We moan and whine, shivering with resistance at the very thought of winter winds and rain. We stand, then, in the error that was so profoundly and simply stated in the novel, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. We act as if we are the height of evolution — its very pinnacle and end — its crowning glory. Rather than that we are wholly inseparable from the basic elements and the basic dynamics of the earth process and the evolutionary process. Oh, we are glorious in our uniqueness, without a doubt — making a stupendously unique contribution (for we are the earth itself become conscious), no question — but we are forever inseparable from the earth who is our parent, as well as our very substance. When we rail at the change in seasons and weather, it is as if we are disputing with the very rhythms of our own bodies.

Yet at a deeper level, we know the kiss that Jeffers calls us to: “It is time for us to kiss the earth again,” he said “Kiss the earth now, or, in fact at any time, and you kiss change. Genevieve Taggard, a writer during the thirties, said, “Summer is delicately made. / While it is, it is ceasing.” And is that not true of all in the material world, and especially of living things. Kiss the earth now or any time and you kiss transformation, and paradoxically, you kiss the way that balance is made possible. The death of the leaf brings the birth of a deep passivity that brings the birth of the leaf. A balance is invoked in a manner that is fully vital and alive and that exists in large cycles — cycles we can only experience if we expand our sensibilities.

Everything living expresses a fundamental balance by the fact that it all exists in and as an enormous dynamic of movement and change. Life itself is an incredible on-going act of balance — that is, of constantly shifting and moving forces, diastolic and systolic pulses that are in a perpetual dance of accommodation, challenge, and response.

And just as the sun describes an arc of perpetual movement across our skies, just so have humans from ancient times marked its balance at the equinoxes. Where days and nights are marked by equality of light and dark. The release of summer and all its extroverted and verdant gifts, and the welcoming of Autumn/Winter with its gratuitous offering of inwardness — forms an enlivening balance that trumpets the drama of life as something that will not remain static — that continually plays one force against another, that continually sings with exchange, reciprocity, and a fundamental poise.

As a wise and fierce spokesperson for the earth, Jeffers calls us. Offering the vocal cords of his heart, his dedicated writing hand, his exquisite ear, he calls us back to the very earth which we ourselves are.

We would do well to listen. We would do well to enter the change that is unavoidably upon us with welcome spirits.

 

The Second Voice

Lord, it is time. The summer was very big.
Lay thy shadow on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.

Command the last fruits that they shall be full,
give them another two more southerly days,
press them on to fulfillment and drive
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who has no house now, will build him one no more.
Who is alone now, long will so remain,
will wake, read, write long letters
and will in the avenues to and fro
restlessly wander, when the leaves are blowing.

 

Response to the Second Voice

The ripeness of the summer is over. It’s gifts have entered our cells like honey, viscous and sweet, in its hexagonal wax homes — entered into the shadows of our inner depths. “Lay thy shadow on the sundials,” Rilke entreats the great power. The paradox is that the power to create shadows is the power of light. “Lay thy shadow on the sundials,” he is saying, and show us the true time, the time that with the energy of great winds will blow the summer, large in its brightness and effulgence, out of time, the time we now live.

The autumnal time heralds that time when we must stand together or be lost. The winter is coming just beyond the last leaf fall. Autumn is the extravagant, blazing announcement of that need. The fall season announces itself with transparency. Foliage is lost and the fullness of the summer is cut to the bone, the branch, the twig. Things become more visible in their essence. The call to relationship is more passionate, because less garmented. There is a greater fragility — and we are driven both to affiliate, to connect, to bind more thoroughly into relationship — and, as well, to sink downward and inward, to ride the slant of the declining sun into our interiors where light is cherished and held in the combs of our psyches.

It reminds me of a great responsive reading by George E. Odell. Please find it in your hymnals. It is number 468. Let us read it responsively together. I will start.

We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted.

We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.

We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation, and need to be recalled to our best selves again.

We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose, and cannot do it alone.

We need one another in the hour of success, when we look for someone to share our triumphs.

We need one another in the hour of defeat, when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.

We need one another when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.

All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.

The rise of Autumn, on a gentle fading of light and great winds calls us with both an inner and an outer need. In need of others we reach out, to feed the inner desire to keep our wholeness in tact. In need of inwardness itself, we move closer to our interiors by staying in touch with the outer, muted falling of light, with the great cycle of the earth, that driven beyond the full pulp of summer, lays a net of transparency upon the earth’s ever-obedient, deciduous plant life.

Again, balance asserts itself. Our outer needs. Our inner needs. Affirmed by the processes of the earth. We move psychically in a dance that keeps us whole.

Let us take time now, to enter into a period of meditation. Let us use the combined spirit of our one strong body. Gathered here in the struggle and the power, let us listen to the music within.

 

Meditation

Relax. Allow your inner voices to quiet.
There may be something important for you to hear
about the coming of Winter,
about this special time of year.
Then, again, you may hear only quiet;
that is good, too.

 

The Third Voice

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

 

Response to the Third Voice

“Only music keeps us here, / each by all the other held.”

Berry is listening deeply. He has a vision of circles, circles as dance, a dance of years in circles. But it is the music that keeps us here, for collectively we hold the music alive in dance, and we hold each other to each other in the dance. And the dance is sustained by music.

If he were talking about an actual dance performed together in some open space, on some wide expanse of floor — say, like this Hall — the talk about music would fit and certainly make sense. But he is talking about life, and our living of it in great circles and cycles. So what is this music he speaks of, this music that “keeps” us here?

I suggest, first, it is the great noise of our bodies: the sigh of exhalation, the throbbing of our hearts, the spontaneous grunts and snorts and moans, the crack and creak of joints, the lyric flow of voice in speech and song, the snapping of our eyelids, the sound of skin upon skin. And, he is also talking about the noise of the earth: of the winds whistling Autumn/Winter into place; of the silence of snow falling; of the roar of pines as the air rushes through a stand of them, their ten million needle shafts singing with sound; of the splash and drip of waters; the thunder of the sea; the stupendous crack of lightning. All that is the music that keeps us held in the depths of this life. All that is the background, the underground, the subtle over-riding music that sings us into being.

And more, there is something more that calls us toward and into music. It is a responsiveness of heart, spontaneous, immediate, undeniable. Our hearts, our passion, our feelings, love music. The enlivening of our bodies, through a loving of sound, and especially of sound enrhythmed; patterned; brought into lively, connective, “meaningful” relationships. The responsiveness of our hearts is a music itself — and it responds to through our emotions, surely the greatest symphony, the liveliest jazz, the hardest driving heavy metal, the sweetest vocal solo of any music on earth.

And more, there is something more that calls us toward and into music, that holds us in life. There is something very, very deep in us that IS music. There is a vibration, sympathetic, in us that responds to a good drum — deep, resonant, going from toes up to head — that responds to the piercing melancholy of the cello — that rises with flare and fire to the shout of brass. We do that not only through the corporeal resonance of our flesh and bone — we do that through our spirits. We know the goodness of music, because we are good ourselves.

So … I would say we are held in this life by the very goodness of the world, and all its wondrous phenomena — which also means, therefore, by our own goodness. It is why we return. Why we take the journey through the vast cycles. It is all simply too good to miss.

But Berry ends the poem this way, “And then we turn aside, alone, / out of the sunlight gone // into the darker circles of return.” Which is where we are all going now, whether we like it or not: through Autumn, and further, into winter dark.

Yet it is all gift, is it not? Whether the warm openness of summer, or the close-wrapped inwardness of the descending Winter. We are keyed to bear all of it into some kind of fruition of the spirit. A harvest of life, a harvest of our own human richness.

A harvest of our spirits, that stream directly from the fulsome energy and power of this vast and living Earth. A harvest, indeed.

 

The Fourth Voice

Earth mother, star mother,
You who are called by
     a thousand names,
May all remember
     we are cells in your body
     and dance together.
You are the grain
     and the loaf
That sustains us each day,
And as you are patient
     with your struggles to learn
So shall we be patient
     with ourselves and each other.
We are radiant light
     and sacred dark
      — the balance —
You are the embrace that heartens
And the freedom beyond fear.
Within you we are born
     we grow, live, and die —
You bring us around the circle
     to rebirth,
Within us you dance
Forever.

 

Response to the Fourth Voice

“We are radiant light / and sacred dark / — the balance — / You are the embrace that heartens / And the freedom beyond fear.”

How these words of Starhawk, Wiccan priestess, lift up the depths into view. We are, in our very beings, in the incredible and subtle intricacy of our psychology — we are the balance. It is born and borne in us. (That is, It comes to birth and is carried in us.) Denying the sacred balance in the magnificent natural dynamism of the earth processes is paralleled — no, even more integrally than paralleled — is fully reflected — in our denial of our own subtlety, our own ecological matedness with the earth, our own oneness with creation. The greatest tragedy of recorded human history, it seems to me, has been the creation of a psychic dualism which has promulgated the false idea that we are separate from the earth and the cosmos.

Starhawk calls us home once again to a circle of rebirth that is both fully natural, and which also challenges the ethos of our cultural heritage. She calls us radiant light and sacred dark. She sees the pattern that connects, as Joseph Campbell prophesied to us — the pattern that connects our fragmentation that it may be, once again, in balance: our original nature.

She does something else — something that is very difficult for many of us UUs. She personalizes the cosmos. She uses the personal pronoun, “she.” There is a kind of theism there that is reverent and enormously sensitive. She carries reverence for life into a direct relationship. For our times, it is difficult to avoid the relevance of such a bold maneuver.

The deeper issue of You, of Thou, in our lives with the earth, the cosmos, and with one another, is a topic for another Sermon. Today I want only to reveal a little of what Starhawk sees as the foundation for what holds, supports, sustains the balance that we are — both the radiant light and the sacred dark. “You,” she says, “are the embrace that heartens / And the freedom beyond fear.”

The darkening of Autumn/Winter is, then, an enfolding. We are embraced by what the earth “does.” It is not a visitation of disaster — it is an embrace. And that embrace brings freedom. How? By taking us to a way of being beyond fear. “Be not afraid.” The great Christian message, mentioned fully thirty or forty times in the Second Testament — more than any other statement. “Be not afraid.”

“Be not afraid.” Because we are born within the embrace of the earth, the very substance of the earth and the incredible, mysterious force of life. “Within us you dance / Forever,” Starhawk sings.

Here is a message to hang our hearts and minds on — -our very lives on. The movement of the sun describes an arc of power that resides in our own selves — not just because we perceive it, not just because our amazingly sensitive perceptive functions register its existence and movement — but because it follows the same patterns out of which we ourselves are created. How marvelous! How wonderful!

Let us rise, then, as our physical abilities and spirits allow and share the joy of that reality, and the great and good gifts of the earth, by singing Hymn #163, For The Earth Forever Turning.

 

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

 

Reflection: Seasons by Dave Weber