While what happened during Insurgent Imagination Days would likely have applications directly to the work participants do in their outer lives (teaching, writing, making music, being a civically active human), the underlying purpose was personal, individual: to practice tethering ourselves willingly to the here and now—the place where we stand, the moment we are in. What participants attempted, reflected upon, and shared was all in service to developing the kind of awareness so necessary to navigating the challenge of being human in the larger context of our lives: in this particular country and moment in time. That kind of focus takes practice, and being in nature offers a great way to practice. On June 7, the aim was to experience writing as a way to kindle creative capacity, cultivate well being, and uncover connections to the more-than-human world. On June 8, we were tuning in to nature as inspiration for original songs, with nature (especially birds, it turned out) as a collaborator. Each day’s small group of participants varied in age from 35 to 65 and in vocation from attorney to poet. Participants engaged with nature and with each other to nurture regenerative, relational vision in these challenging times of human disconnect, upheaval, and dissembling.
In our culminating activity, we worked in pairs to create a collaborative piece to share, represented in words, and based on our experiences during the morning’s activities. Below are excerpts from the pair-sharing dialogue along with the pieces we created.
Amy: We were bouncing lots of ideas, trying to figure out how to create a deliverable. We realized that it was the tulip poplar leaf that brought us together today. The word devotional came up, but we decided to create a poetry psalmic meditation piece. The leaf was one that we both had seen during our separate individual times earlier today, quite interestingly. When Laura saw it, it was lying upside down, and Laura had turned it over. When I came back from my time in that place, I saw it and picked it up. We free associated a meditation on the tulip poplar leaf.”
Judy: “So is the notion that your collaborative piece be a a meditation/psalm/devotional based on a particular interest of yours?”
Laura: “We’ve shared an interest in green spirituality for years.”
Amy: “Laura introduced me to the idea of green spirituality, and you [Judy] and Laura have helped nurture me on that path, and that brought us to ‘The Grace of the Tulip Poplar.'”
Laura: “I also had this teachable moment, on the porch out there, because Amy didn’t know what tree this belongs to [laughter]. And every time I do these activities with Judy I have to practice not naming things, not ID-ing things, which is my go-to. I did well with the window into the soundscape [this is a reference to an earlier activity], but then I just had to write down the list of birds. When Amy told me about the leaf, well, first I had to get over my surprise that she’d picked up the same leaf that I’d flipped over on the trail; then she didn’t know what it was, then I got to teach her, so I asked, ‘Well, what shape does this look like?’”
Judy: “And did you [Amy] get that?”
Amy: “On my second guess. At first I said it looked like a lion’s face. But then I saw the tulip.”
Laura: “So I had the gratification of that teachable moment, also, teaching someone to ID something in nature, which I just love probably more than anything.”
Amy: “And I love it when Laura helps me with that. Laura gives me those teachable moments”
Judy: “We were mostly talking about how being present and having to use writing as a contemplative exercise is very particular. You have to talk about that thing—not trees in general but this one tree in this one place. And so it’s a good break from our tendency to generalize and categorize, things that lead us into less particular observations, or rather, experiences. We did talk about how you’re not really an observer because everybody’s in it.”
Steve: “Particularity brings to my mind the metaphor of tunneling — by concentrating attention on the shared or communal particular, we make connections deep within our experience. Thomas Merton wrote a poem (‘Hagia Sophia’) about this sort of tunneled connection: ‘There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness. / This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom.’ Writing as a contemplative practice tunnels into the hidden wholeness connecting all visible particular things. By opting to read the lines of what we’d written based on a spontaneously shuffled order, the piece is able to break on every particular reading to whatever acausal connections might be present in that moment.”
Michael: “We had delightful conversations about what we’d done this morning, individually. And we had some conversations about what would the deliverable look like. And we kind of resonated, as maybe all of us have in a certain way, with the notion of prayer, meditation, liturgy. I think Laura-Gray was talking about the notion of the lines in the trees and the lines of songbirds like liturgical lines. We both found we came out of an episcopal orientation and upbringing, so…
Laura-Gray: “We thought about terms like litany, prayer, and actually litany is a prayer; it’s also what we talk about in poems, like list poems; it’s a list, but it’s litany, so it encompasses the mundane to the sacred. So we decided we would write a litany. As a litany, what we did was kept passing the notebook back and forth; and Michael would write a line, then I’d write a line, not necessarily one after the other. They kind of were all over the place. Michael started in the middle of the page, and then I was, at the same time, writing a list of all the birds that I heard. There were ones that I knew but wasn’t sure, and my phone was inside. So I won’t read all of that part; at the end it’s just ‘wood thrush wood thrush wood thrush and Judy singing’ [which was the signal that time was up for the activity]. It was very much back and forth, but I think the coherency of one voice reading it would be better.”
Michael: “And actually the way we can read it collaboratively is I’ll read the first half and pass it to you to read the other? And one other thing we talked about, and what I was thinking of when you [Judy] brought us here with the first question “why am I here?” how we connected, how we belong [reference to the day’s first individual activity prompt], my thinking was ‘What do we leave behind? What do we share?’ So that’s why I feel our liturgy is something to leave behind.
Judy: “There was a thing I had planned for the closure part of the program today that I decided not to put in, and you all got to it anyway! And that was the notion of the sacred and the mystical, of how being in nature and being present allows us access to that, the portal. It’s naturally within us, but we don’t give it air very frequently. But the one way that it is brought out is through practices that allow us to remember a basic truth: that we are connected to this planet, to each other and everything and being. That is the value of what we’re doing here. I think it matters a lot right now that we prioritize that kind of understanding about ourselves for the sake of the work that we need to do and for the sake of our own precious, particular selves. We are just in this particular world for a particular little bit of time. Let’s not over plan, over expect, overwhelm ourselves.”
