The Creek in Fall

My Habitat

By the dictionary’s definition, habitat is the natural home of an organism—its native environment. One’s surroundings strongly influences one’s health, productivity, and creativity. In turn, our actions impact our habitat. If we collectively take care of our environment it will be healthy and will nurture us.

I am blessed to live in a productive habitat, situated in a rural corner of the northern Shenandoah Valley (because of the direction of flow of the Shenandoah River, it’s also the lower end of the valley). Our region is officially designated as the Appalachian oak forest. Here at the hermitage we are fully surrounded by this forest—many hundreds of acres of woodlands, sprinkled here and there with small farms. Since the farms do not break up the woods, the forest provides a contiguous habitat for wildlife, so their health is satisfactory. It’s also a reasonably stable ecoregion, not too strained, and as yet uncrowded by human development.

These woods are dominated by oaks, which are accompanied by several other large trees such as white pine, hemlock, sycamore, poplar, and maple. Common understory trees are dogwood, cherry, and redbud.

If you had walked these hills a hundred years ago, you’d have seen a rather different mix of trees. Elm and chestnut were common then; but imported blights killed them off. A hundred years hence a different mix will again likely prevail. Current threats to some of these trees are the gypsy moth (mostly the oaks), the wooly adelgid (hemlocks), and dogwood anthracnose. Acid rain, global warming, manmade chemicals escaping into the environment, invasive species, and human development add to the habitat threats. It’s daunting to contemplate the collective impact of these changes. We are collectively not taking care of our environment.

Yet locally, we are blessed by the fact that our habitat is still reasonably fit—especially when compared with many stressed parts of the planet. Despite the local ominous signs of habitat transformation, I live in an area that is beautiful and far more healthy than that provided for too many people and animals. I remind myself daily of our good fortune and I wonder what I can do to help my habitat. No substantial answers come to me, except to try to understand my local surrounding and meld with it as much as possible. And certainly enjoy the gift I’ve been given.

The World in a Drop

Precious Silence

There is a dark side to creativity, however. When our ego enters the picture or our desire for power grabs us, things can go awry. Creativity may then, for example, feed runaway and harmful technology. Language can also go to the dark side of creativity. When language becomes propaganda, it spreads fear; inducing people to succumb to domination and control.

Our modern culture is overflowing with words and noise; they distract us. The ancients were better at welcoming silence. They opened to it, actively sought it; whereas modern people tend to fear it. We contemporary folks have also detached from nature and its creative calmness. Instead of opening to the wisdom of nature’s silence, we attempt to control it, to bend it to our noisy will.

We can, however, open ourselves to the creativity of the silence, as the sages once did (and many still do). How can we do that? One way: simply put attention to the void. Seek and enter the silence. That means finding the time to turn away from the modern fast lane. Entering the silence opens us up to our—and the universe’s—creativity. We can attend to the void by not hurrying; by sitting with the silence and awaiting its wisdom and inspiration. Creative thoughts literally pop into our heads when we enter the void. They don’t necessarily come from us, and they’re not owned by us—in a sense they’re already in the void, waiting to be received. Our inner space is that void. We share it with all beings.

It’s paradoxical that we can become creative by doing nothing; that we can mature and heal—through inaction. It’s the way of the Tao, taught us by Taoism. Two partial verses from the Tao Te Ching say it beautifully:

Therefore, the Master
Acts without doing anything
And teaches without saying anything.

And

Practice not-doing
And everything will fall into place.

Although words can be special, the silence between words is precious. Can I allow that silence to be? Can I respectfully and reverentially enter it? We become free in that space between words—free to open, to soften; free to connect to our natural instincts. We can catch our mental breath. Through meditation we seek to exist for a short time in a space that is without thoughts, words, concepts. It’s not easy. When we can do it, we find that we have a direct contact with the void—that precious silence.

[Note: These last two postings were inspired by The Blackwinged Night:
Creativity in Nature and Mind, by F. David Peat, 2000.]

Heavenly Conjunction--Moon, Jupiter, and Venus on December 1

Precious Silence—Part 1

We’ve all heard expressions like “Silence is golden.” And we’ve been exposed to the guidance that listening to others is a gift. (Thoreau: "The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.")

We cannot really listen when we are talking. There’s something special about halting the flow of our chatter and opening our ears and other senses to our world. I believe that silence is beyond golden—it’s precious.

A fascinating attribute of silence is that creativity flows from it. It’s fascinating, partly because it’s also a paradox: something comes from nothing. Out of the void of silence emerges imaginative and original things. (Maybe in a future posting I will explore the parallel between this point and an insight that quantum mechanics brings us: subatomic particles—real things—do slip in and out of existence.)

Creativity is the act of bringing something into existence—something that never existed before. It’s a kind of artistic imagination. It’s bringing the new and unexpected into being—from which change and evolution stem. Creativity is also a renewing process that spawns vitality and innovation. It fosters freshness and helps break the dreary rut we may find ourselves in. Creativity is even a form of healing—in the sense that it is intelligence, which leads to regeneration and healing. Our body, our immune system, must be open to our environment, and this kind of intelligence fosters health and healing.

Language also can be creative. It connects us to others. We relate to each other by symbols, creating a common world in our heads. The cosmos is creative. It is unpredictable, unexpected, and constantly evolving. New qualities are continually emerging—things that could not have been conceived of before.

Creativity is often confused with novelty—but it’s very different; it’s far deeper. Novelty is, by definition, something new, but it’s usually something assembled from existing things. It’s just a rearrangement of stuff that’s already around, into something different. It’s often a repetitive process that can eventually lead to a rut—a copy-cat, frenetic existence that lacks true creativity. It can feed fashions and fads, that become addictive and encourage our grasping for the unattainable, as we try to feed an insatiable hunger. When we fall prey to novelty, we become numb and dull. We close ourselves off to our world—hewing to the fad, becoming rigid and dogmatic.

Continued next time…

Bird Leaves