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Within the woods of central Maryland there sits an unassuming chair. It’s huge, thick, and previous. It’s set as an alternative, with picket legs sinking into mud and grass and stone, overlooking a trickling spring. There’s no telling what number of dwelling creatures have settled in its picket body over the course of time: squirrels cracking nuts, birds scouting nesting websites, people pausing for moments of reflection.
I fell beneath the final class not so way back whereas on retreat—a day of silence and solitude—in those self same woods. I had been slowly, rigorously, meditatively choosing my method alongside the paths, having set out into the tough winter, forsaking the smoldering fireplace that so kindly warmed the rooms within the previous retreat heart cabin.
The panorama was brown, nonetheless, and useless. Tall timber towered excessive and barren; colorless leaves crunched beneath foot. After which this chair was simply sitting there, peacefully.
I approached with reverence, struck by this straightforward piece of furnishings stranded within the woods. Somebody had positioned it there, somebody who knew nothing of me or my ideas however who cared for the various someones like me who handed this manner all the identical.
I stood alongside that chair, finding out it. A poem got here to thoughts, a couple of stanzas tripping over each other, jumbled however significant all the identical. The poem was “Typically,” and the poet, David Whyte, writes about shifting rigorously by way of a forest and passing over dry leaves in silence and stillness and ultimately coming “to a spot whose solely process is to bother you.”
Whose solely process is to bother you.
I felt like I’d stepped into the poem, like I had crossed some hidden threshold between my very own life and that of the poet’s and that I used to be seeing backstage on the uncooked materials he’d used to craft his poem.
I walked in silence; the leaves have been dry. I stood alone in a forest that was unusual to me. And I knew what got here subsequent in that poem; I recite it on a regular basis. As a result of the place, Whyte claims, troubles with “questions which have patiently waited for you, questions that don’t have any proper to go away.”
I take into consideration this second not a lot as a result of I had some nice religious breakthrough or profound encounter with God whereas sitting in that chair—although definitely I sat for an extended whereas and prayed and God whispered in my being. Relatively, I take into consideration the air of holy context with which I arrived at that second and the way the phrases—jumbled although they have been—fairly out of the blue and decisively arrived in my thoughts, spilling out and over and into the true and tangible world round me.
I’m left questioning how a easy chair in a fairly unremarkable nook of the Maryland wilderness out of the blue assumed an aura of sacred profundity. Due to a easy poem I’ve learn on quite a few events, my stroll within the woods grew to become transcendent; I used to be extra able to encounter God. The straightforward act of being there was sufficient.
What energy phrases have! The flexibility to rework an odd second right into a sacred encounter—isn’t that what the Ignatian custom has insisted all alongside? By way of poems, prayer texts, mantras, and prose, the Spirit strikes and works right here, on this place, making ready us to come across extra deeply that very same Spirit at work in different places—locations we could have but to seek out however which we are going to know intimately after we do, locations through which we are going to then be all of the extra able to sink into the dwelling God.
Comfortable Nationwide Poetry Month.
Picture by Abdul Azeez Garbadeen on Unsplash.
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