It’s Saturday, and I’m sitting on a bench on Stanford’s campus, surrounded by palm trees and ivy and massive stone buildings.  Memorial chapel is to my right and I hear the bell tower bong in the distance, water from a fountain cascading endlessly nearby.  Jet black squirrels bound across pavement; birds flit through morning routines.  What does this do to me, in me?

Since Robin sent me this link I’ve been thinking about land and space, about the ways these get inside of you, providing threads for the weave that is how you think about life and self and God, how you see yourself in relation to them.  The link is to a sermon that deals, in part, with the ways the natural world shaped its writer’s life.

I grew up in a desert in California, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.  We had two seasons there:  hot, and gray.  The grayness was fog that was a lid on our valley through winter.  Often it descended to the ground, making visibility no farther than the tullip tree on our front lawn.  While other regions have snow days, we had fog days–school delayed or cancelled because of the challenge fog posed for safe travel.  Seriously.

But summer was nearly the opposite.  From May through most of October temperatures hovered in the upper 90s, often staying near or surpassing 100 for long stretches.  It was dry heat, and fierce.  Bare feet were only for grass.  There were no clouds in the sky, save the accumulation of dust and exhaust and pollen and the various sprays the farmers used to work their fields. 

Which is one of the ironies, I think, of my early desert home: it was shockingly furtile.  One of the hugest exporters of produce in the world.  Nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, apples, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, grapes, cherries, tomatoes, melons, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines.  The list really does go on.  And it was furtile not because these things could grow on their own, could just spring up and stay there, happy.  This was a desert, after all.  It was because people worked night and day to make it so.  The irrigation system there alone inspires awe.  The human power it takes to plant and pick and prune that list is breathtaking, no matter how many machines are involved.  And the machines!  I went with some friends to a county fair one time and felt like I had been transplanted to another universe, walking through rows of metal giants engineered for every kind of farm need imaginable–a show for farmers, apparently, to elicit the lust unique to that trade.

So this rhythm, this hot and gray cycle with the relentless backdrop of turning desert into food:  this was the natural world that joined the shaping of me.

I think about all of this as I ponder my spirituality, and my early thoughts about God.  I think about how hot it felt to be under God’s gaze.  How wide open my life seemed to Him (my early God was male)–no mountains or hills or forests in which to hide.

I think about how hard I understood the Christian life to be.  How much work it took to learn about God and to nurture the fruits of God’s spirit. How His fruits didn’t come naturally, and required constant planfulness and attention, including practices that weren’t spontaneous to body or soul’s terrain.  But how diligence usually paid off.  How satisfying the rows of tended thoughts and prayers and plans and relationships could feel.  Mine was not an untamed heart.

And I think about the quietness I loved about the fog, the way I felt hugged by it.  How I liked to feel hidden inside of it, even as I worried about its effects on my bangs.  There is safety in fog, even with its danger.  Safety in feeling a cushion between oneself and the directness of an exacting God.  People get killed in the stuff–huge pile-ups along Highway 99–but there are trade offs, too.  Sometimes danger is worth a little quiet anonymity.

My heart has had seasons of growth since then, seasons of new lands and new threads added from those lands.  I lived in Oregon and now near San Francisco’s bay, and my heart is learning what it means to grow a little more wild.  To have flora and fauna natural to it flourish.  To think of God with the subtlety of gentle sunshine, like we have a lot of here; with the playfulness of our on and off breeze.  I don’t think early threads ever get unwoven, though, so I carry in me desert, too.  Always.  The promise of much fruit and the understanding that a lot of work may be involved in cultivating it.  I carry in me stark, open land that is a kind of inescapable honesty, and a yearning to be wrapped up in the danger-comfort of something soft and accepting and mysterious and quiet.

God isn’t my desert-God anymore, though, and I’m not sure how that happened, how the threads that were my early God became a garment that lays on the ground now, God clothed in other things, or sometimes all the way bare.  God seems a kind of mystery that resists the clothes I offer, that seems to be taking of my desert threads, and my wet, green Oregon threads, and the threads of my current space and weaving from them something I can’t yet recognize, and don’t feel in much of a hurry to be able to.

So I sit here wondering.  Or filled with wonder, maybe.  Breathing in these granite stones, this wide courtyard of interwoven brick, the expanse of air and sky above my head.  It’s getting inside of me.  It’s doing something.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 10:26 am and is filed under Psychology, Mindfulness, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.