I spend time in the woods. A brief walk from my house. Ten acres of oak and maple too hilly to farm surrounded by a sea of corn. The woods is not the wilderness. The woods feels timeless but is not. The oldest trees are 90 years old. Acorns sprouted up through the sun-beat wasteland of a clear cut a hundred years ago. They’re all dying now from a fungal infestation.
I’ve chased purity my whole life. Geographically. Religiously. Intellectually. Denied the body. Became a glutton. Every time is the same. There is nothing pure in this world. This accumulated realization has brought me great relief. It enables me to set roots. Make a home. Wanderlust once consumed me. It vanished when I realized what I yearned for does not exist.
My faith wavers. I’m not sure I’ve ever had it. I pretend to have it. For the ones I love. I preach to my eight year old the importance of letting go. There is little in this world that we control. Encourage her to ask for help. Pray. Give God her worries. Praise Him. He is perfect. We are not. Nothing in this world is perfect. Yet it is.
“You’re making a German forest,” my brother in law told me as we walked through the manicured wood lot in early fall. I became obsessed with purity again and I didn’t realize it until I started writing this. For six months I manically cleaned the forest floor of all the dead fall by hand. It was a great battle that broke me more than once. I thought I’d won. Huge piles of branches, stumps and trunks to burn in winter. Trying to create something perfect and pure.
Rain has destroyed my plan for a late night fire. Without rain the sun loses its majesty. It becomes a tyrant. Chasing purity I become a tyrant. Piling the rotting stumps by hand in a ten-acre wood lot.
Nothing is pure in this world. Yet it is. I tell my daughter, “If we were having fun all the time, would that even be fun?” I’m in the woods now. Sitting in my truck writing this as it rains.
My faith wavers. I will not accept an agnostic state of mind. There’s nothing gray about me. I am black or I am white. On the trough of this wave I am a self-loathing atheist. On the crest of this wave is my spiritual experience. I’m hitting the ceiling, or, as William James said,
A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result. A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result […] The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
I continue to remind myself that as beauty is dependent on an imperfect world my momentary glimpses of a perfect God are dependent on my doubt and despair and how I react to this world’s chaos. I still pick up branches. More often I allow them to lie where they lie.
 |
|