When I try to follow it as long as I can downstream, my schooling in river beauty and river wisdom leads me to this hope and prayer: let us then, like the salmon leaping against the current and over the ledge, leap finally beyond the metaphor and the simile when it comes to our embodied consciousness of nature.
It is an actual cloud of unknowing and an actual cloud of forgetting, and the chord it strikes for the day feels fitting for a contemplative, Lenten March mood.
What if we set spiritual goals this year to be in a more emotionally intelligent and attuned conversation with the earth? Might we hear the ice melting as tears—the weeping of creation?
The spiritual invitation of Advent and Christmas strikes me as precisely the opposite of “AI” or “hallucinate,” two words of the year for 2023. This season is all about paying attention, waiting, watching, listening. It is about bringing our fully embodied, fully incarnate sensory selves to be as present and intimate and awake as possible with the ever-astounding mystery and glory of being itself.
Watching the wild geese overhead in the “stick season” of November in northern Wisconsin, I’ve come to wonder if we might be able to say something like “Deep calls to deep in the honking of your geese?”