Last week I took refuge from the frigid temperatures by going to the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul to hear a concert hosted by the Schubert Club. These Thursday events held at noon in the large, open space there seems as safe an opportunity as I can imagine to soothe a wintry heart. All folks are masked so it is impossible to see the beauty of their faces but the spirit of people in the presence of live music has the ability to remind us that we are still community, hungering for the sounds and silences that have had the power to lift the heart and heal the soul since the beginning of time. 

This particular program contained two song cycles performed by a string quartet and the beautiful soprano of Maria Jette. In her description of the songs we were about to hear she talked of how the composer, Robert Schumann, was given to ‘weltschmerze’, something she described as a feeling of melancholy, world-weariness, even pain for the world. The masked faces around the majestic space seemed to all nod in a collective ‘ahh, yes’. Jette was the only unmasked person in the room and so her face mirrored our own pandemic knowing. Weltschmerze…sometimes a different language can say just what needs to be said. We are all in a certain state of weltschmerze.

I am not sure if this German phrase is what caused me to begin to push back at the melancholy of it all but I began to think of the ways in which it is possible to lift one’s self above the world-weariness if only for a moment here and there. In a  bag I had been keeping in the basement were paper white bulbs I had intended to do something with. So, I brought them out and began to create a way for them to grow and bloom. Not today but in some future that will come. Around the bulbs I placed some shells I collected on the beach a few weeks ago when the Sun was beating down and the sound of the ocean was filling my ears and nostrils. And then I placed the butterfly that I found last June on the pavement of a parking lot. The winged one was already no longer living when I found it but still has the ability to thrust its beauty into the world. Before I knew it I had created a shrine to whatever is the opposite of weltschmerze.

Then a few days later, the world lost the beloved Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. The wisdom and presence that he inspired seems the very antidote to weltschmerze. His teachings are a very call to see the gifts of every moment…even those wracked by a virus that does not want to leave us. Even in these times he can call us embrace whatever is happening in the world and to see it for what it is. 

“Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I see myself as a flower.
Breathing out, I feel flesh.

Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain.
Breathing out, I feel solid.

Breathing in, I see myself as still water.
Breathing out, I reflect things as they are.

Breathing in, I see myself as space.
Breathing out, I feel free.”

Winter days are threatening ongoing cold. There are shrines to be built to remind us of what endures. Deep breaths, my friends…deep breaths.

“Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.” 
~ Rumi

One of the great gifts of travel is that you not only see things that are not on your usual daily menu but that you also have the opportunity to open your mind’s eye to new ways of seeing the world and all that inhabit it. I was privileged this past week to take a little break from the snow, white landscapes of my ordinary days and walk greener, more colorful paths in Florida. The ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ of colorful blooming flowers and birds whose flight patterns are unfamiliar to me were joined by two encounters with the banyan tree…something certainly not seen on my daily walks in Minnesota. And what a tree it is! There is a sense of dripping bark as the limbs and trunks melt into one another forming shapes that are both artistic and prehistoric.

It is under the banyan tree that the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment. And, really, who wouldn’t be transported to some higher plane sitting at the base of such a magnificent work of Creation. Words that are often attributed to Mother Teresa but which were probably spoken by one of her workers of the Sisters of Mercy say: “In the East,
especially in India, I find that people are more content to just be, to just sit around under a banyan treefor half a day chatting to each other. We Westerners would probably call that wasting time. But there is value to it. Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love. The success of love is in the loving
it is not in the result of loving.” 

We don’t often think of trees teaching about love or if we do we might be reluctant to say it aloud. But, in looking at this amazing work of nature there is so much to notice. The connections are so clear, how one limb leans into another, relying on its neighbors for support and strength. The trunks appear to be mirroring the roots I imagine are below the ground giving it the nourishment it needs for growing and flourishing toward the sky. The recognition of the importance of intertwining, that no one limb could stand alone. And then there is the beauty…the sheer beauty…of being held together in bark and wood and vulnerability and majesty. Isn’t this what we hope love is? Support. Strength. Deep roots. Heavenly reaching. Vulnerability. Nourishment. Growth. Connection, blessed connection. Beauty, even, perhaps, a little majesty.

I feel blessed to have come into the presence of these banyan teachers and pray that their wisdom has seeped into my own limbs, my own trunk. And I also pray that I can see the lessons the trees I see in my own backyard have to teach with new eyes and how they might propel me toward great loving. 

A little less than 48 hours ago, the calendar turned to a new number. Whether this is something to be heralded or dreaded depends on your perspective I suppose. It is safe to say that the last year, the last two years, have had challenges we never imagined, ones with which we are still reckoning.  And so, to turn a new page can carry much…anticipation, fear, excitement, hope, so many emotions.

On December 31st, in preparing for a very quiet dinner to mark the ending of one year and the beginning of the next, I went searching my bookshelves for some words that might hold the evening and speak to the threshold on which we stood. Practically reaching out to me was a copy of the book Prayers for a Thousand Years, a collection of poems, prayers and writings for the new millennium. Remember that time? Talk about anticipation and standing in the ‘what next?’ of the uncertainty of what the next 100…1000… years might bring! Would all the technology we had come to depend upon be able to flip to the next page of the internal calendar that guided it? We filled our bathtubs with water. I can’t remember why we did that.  The words collected for this book contained these by writer Ursula LeGuin. They seemed to fit the evening of this particular new year so I shared them at my dining room table.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
walk mindfully, well-loved one,
walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us, 
be always coming home.

LeGuin’s writing is always filled with rich metaphor and so each reader will make sense of this in their own way. The part that reached out and tugged at my heart were the last ones. “Well-loved one”…a moniker to carry each of us into the certain uncertainty of 2022. If we can live in the knowledge that we are ‘well-loved’, we can, I believe, live this new year with a deep knowing that together we can weather whatever the year brings. Reaching out to offer love to others… who are equally loved though they may not always know it… holds the power to bring us to a place we have yet to imagine, a new beginning. This great love extends to the two-legged, the four-legged, those with wings and fins, those that crawl and slither and to the soil on which we all co-exist. 

“Return with us, return to us, be always coming home.” Here’s to a new year, one that has never been before and will never be again. May we hold it gently and walk into it with compassion and care and a great love in which we are ‘always coming home.’