Cracked Open

An invitation to experience the divine. I think I'll accept.

Dec 29, 2024

“It is a serious thing, just to be alive.”

- Mary Oliver

There was a time this fall when I thought I might lose both Farmer and Dad in short order. I was terrified. I’m not good at living with discomfort, nor am I agile at staying present. I ate chocolate to sooth myself and generated anxiety by worrying about the future.

But as Farmer’s days were waning, I became more and more present to him, and when he left, my heart cracked open from all the love I felt for him. It was a gift from him, an experience (maybe a divine one) that I would never have had but for him. It opened a little portal for me to step through, to move ahead with my spiritual journey, which had been stagnant for some time. I wrote about this a bit last week; I called it a renewed spiritual longing. But now I think it is more like a calling, a curiosity, an invitation to go deeper. A very positive thing.

Oddly, my Dad gave me a little book for Christmas that is almost like a manual for taking those next steps. It’s a book he’s been reading with his church group. I find it amazing that at a time like this, my father is sharing with me a sort of spiritual sustenance.

Dad, feeling much better after his cardioversion this fall, gave me this inspiring book for Christmas.

The book isn’t really a manual, but because it speaks in the voices of poets and naturalists, from Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver to John Muir and Maya Angelou, it seems custom-made for me. The book is called Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries, by Bruce Epperly.

I know almost nothing about mysticism. I am hoping my friend Polly, an interfaith minister and I believe most likely a mystic herself, will be able to help me understand it better.

In Epperly’s words, “Mystics are individuals who experience God in a lively and life-transforming manner. They are people who experience the Holy moving through their lives and then share that experience with others.”

In choosing the 13 mystics for his book (Black Elk, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Howard Thurman, and Madeleine L’Engle are some of the others), Epperly shows how these particular individuals turned their experience of the divine in all living things into words and beliefs that promoted equality, that showed the interdependence of man and nature and all Earth’s creatures.

Mary Oliver knew God is as present in the lazy contemplation of a grasshopper as in a cathedral or mosque.

“These mystics saw Divinity in the world of the flesh,” Epperly writes. “Mary Oliver knew God is as present in the lazy contemplation of a grasshopper as in a cathedral or mosque. The Earth is sacred and commands our respect and honor apart from human exploitation, as Black Elk and John Muir affirmed.”

Like Oliver, “Muir was a Nature mystic who experienced God in streams, woodlands, skies and vistas, more than in church sanctuaries and basilicas. His cathedral was Nature, not the brick-and-mortar creations of human artifice,” Epperly explains.

Is it possible that the life of a dog is a gift from the divine? I think so. And, I think, so did Mary Oliver, who devoted an entire collection of poems to dogs:

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.
- Mary Oliver, from Dog Songs: Poems

I felt the hand of the divine in a long walk I took today with my husband, my sister, and her dog. The bike path, once the railroad track into Lewes (Dad’s hometown), navigates marshes claimed by Phragmites and swampy forests of pine and wild holly. It runs by horse farms and skirts a mobile home park, with its welcoming display of yard art meant to entertain the walker.

I hung back from my husband and sister at one point and just watched them walking side by side ahead of me. I thought about how contented I was in this moment – to be present with the people I love most, in a geography that runs through my blood. I looked up and saw the wild geese – hundreds and hundreds of them honking high above, flying in formation – and thought of the Wendell Berry poem, The Wild Geese.