Wooed into Devotion

Resurrecting our innate devotion to our beloved Earth

If only we truly knew that we have devotion in our hearts equal to that of a single flower, would our lives be different? Each flower carries millions and millions of years of single-hearted devotion to Life. Life that is synonymous with our mothering Earth.

The first flowers I saw this morning were chicory opening to the sun in my garden—bright faces of blue on their six-foot-tall stems that last night only looked like weedy sticks I wanted to cut down. This morning though, they are radiant. By the time the sun is hot and high in the sky, however, they will be faded, folded and gone. Devotion comes forth most sweetly for them when it is teased out by the first light, rather than demanded by the bright sun. No one can ever expect or demand our devotion, and truly receive it.

Later, as I am taking a morning walk in the woods, I ponder how devotion, awe and wonder are inexplicably intertwined for me. The morning sunlight filters through the forest trees, illuminating a world out of time, or at least, a slower time, an overlapping time, a different time. In this magical world my breath slows, my shoulders relax, and my longings begin to settle deep into the heart of this forest community. I can feel the forest beings offering an open invitation for me to join their daily devotions to each other. To absorb how they feed and sustain each other. That is the essence of their devotion they tell me.

Here in the valleys between the hills beside the streams, traced by the meandering paths that I walk on, the birds are chirping, and the jewelweed plants are in such abundance here that the deer can’t possibly ravage them as they have in my garden. There is a recent windfallen tree across the path, not yet cut away, evidence of a recent storm. On this midsummer solstice day, the flowers are few under the shade of the fully leafed-out forest. The spring flowers have come and gone, and the fall flowers have yet to start their race for the waning sun of autumn. Here at the solstice the forest feels ripe. The greenness feels strong and collaborative, feeding on the sunlight, sharing the energy created between all the beings here on a huge feast table.

Devotion at its best is so very simple—the desire for life and more life. Something this forest knows implicitly. For me, devotion to God, Great Mother, All That Is, to the Mothers of All Life—or whatever name you call the guiding force of all Creation—is unequivocally one and the same as my devotion to the flowers, and to all of nature. They are part of the innumerable facets of All Life that is composed of them, of the dirt, and of the Earth.

____________________________

The stream flows as always through these woods. Sometimes a gentle meander, like today. Sometime a torrent. The devotion of the valley to the stream and the stream to the valley intrigues me. Today these waters take their time to slide softly over each rock, barely moving, relaxing into the lowest pools of the stream bed. After a storm though, great volumes of water race through this valley—a cleansing, a flushing, pulling what’s no longer wanted away with their rushing waters. Are both equally full of devotion—the gentle meander, and the violent flushing? It is so much harder to recognize devotion amongst violent, rapid change. When we experience changes we are not prepared for, or change that harms, we experience great heartache and fear. It is almost impossible to feel the Earth’s devotion to us at these times because the Earth operates on such a larger and longer scale than we can perceive. It helps me to go back to the forest’s message of how they feed and sustain each other, with both life and death.

As I walk back up the path out of the forest, I stop where the trout lilies bloom each spring and now sleep for the remainder of the year. This patch of trout lilies, about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, is tucked between stream and trail, gathering their strength for their next flowering. This devotional community has been blooming together for at least a hundred years and perhaps much longer, even though their time above the dirt lasts barely more than a month each year. I am so used to seeing the world around me in terms of my own lifespan—my own human ways of relating to the world—that when those limitations are shifted, not only does my understanding of life expand exponentially, but so does my devotion.

In those moments when our devotion to the Earth, to the flowers, matches their infinite devotion to us, these are the moments that explode with mystical devotion, filling our hearts with the beauty and love that the great mystics talk about. Yet it is the constant steady drip of small devotions that sustain us, and it is our attention to our awe and wonder that feeds them to us. The twinkle in a child’s eyes, the wide-open heart of our beloved pets, a bird’s song at dawn, or the wide-open unabashed desire of a flower—all these and much more—sustain us, feed our devotion, and keep us connected to the promises of Life.