I woke up this morning to a text from my nephew Dan, informing me of Wendell Berry’s death. Prolific poet, essayist and novelist, a farmer and conservationist from Kentucky, Berry was a significant inspiration in my life and my literary ministry. One of his many Sabbath poems gave me language that, for years, I recited in opening the guided writing sessions I led. Succinctly and poetically, he reminded us why we write and that, ultimately, what matters is not the writing but what it points toward — the beautiful, tangible, fragile world we live in and the love that joins us to it. He wrote, in his 1994 Sabbath poem VII (and I do recommend reading the full poem in the link!),

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
....
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves,
needing to be remembered.

But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
....
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.
              Wendell Berry

In his 92 years of living, Wendell Berry indeed did “all the rest.” He published over 50 books. He farmed his land in Kentucky, raised sheep and horses, eschewed technology, spoke out in favor of simplicity, farming and small community living; and his own life embodied those values.

My nephew Dan and I, both fans of Berry’s writing, visited the farmer poet at his Kentucky home one late autumn afternoon in 2012 — a meeting that could only be arranged by snail mail because Berry did not use computers, the internet or email. We chatted in the living room of his farmhouse, and then he offered us a tour of the farm, the three of us squeezing into the front seat of his pickup truck with his dog Maggie in the back. We fed the lambs and visited the barn where the sheep spent their nights, admired the fence gate Berry had recently fixed, saw the long-legged cabin where he wrote with pencil and paper, and from a distance, praised his horses, black and white, grazing in a nearby field. It was an experience of generous hospitality I will always treasure, including his admonishment to me when I accepted his offer to back up my car on the tricky sharp turn of his steep driveway to make room for his pickup to get out for our tour.

“A minister,” he said to me sternly and memorably, “should always know how to back up.” Poet listening to poet, I knew he wasn’t just talking about cars.

I’ll let my own poem about that visit say the rest:

Invitations
       For Wendell Berry
       in gratitude for an autumn visit

There are many ways 
to leave this world, 
you said but didn’t stop 
to count them, 
telling just one tale instead
of a widow-maker 
falling,
the hollowed out branch 
that broke and struck 
your head. Saved 
by your hardhat 
	again.

There are many ways to leave 
	this world, 
but the afternoon too clear 
to speak of leaving soon.
The walking sticks waiting 
by the door,
whittled and worn smooth, 
issue a different invitation.

There are many ways to enter 
this world too,
	some the same as leaving,
and this is where we dwell
on a November afternoon.
With halos settling 
on hilltops across the river 
and sunlight warm
on our heads here, 
we set out to feed the lambs.

The ewes’ unreadable stares 
follow our every move as we 
make our way down the drive,
and Maggie’s sprung joy 
takes one leap 
from truck bed into task,
herding the lambs 
on your command.

These are invitations made 
less by word than by hand: 
the way the pump handle fits the palm 
as the water’s cool song
pours over the open-lipped spout 
and the gate so finely hung, 
your hand just wants to open it 
	all day long.

Like the garden freshly tilled 
last year when the soil finally dried; 
though the season would be short,
you couldn’t keep from sowing it. 
And the house raised up 
on its long legs, so insulated 
you go to it,
even in winter’s chill. 
Inside, 
the logs are laid for fire,
the fresh page empty, 
waiting, willing – 
though the silence is complete 
and words never quite enough, 
you cannot help but fill it.

So each entering 
becomes a way of leaving,
and each going out
invites us in 
	again.
	Karen Hering 

Wendell Berry has now left this life, but his many gifts to us in words and example hang open like a well-made gate inviting us, once again and every day, to enter — this beautiful, tangible, fragile world and the love that draws us to it.

With gratitude and love,

Karen

I have long been afraid of fire. Ever since I tripped as a child and fell hands first into a campfire pit of red hot embers, my body has held the memory of that searing pain and the slow healing journey that followed. Thankfully, my love of light and warmth has drawn me to fire’s energy despite my fears and taught me how to safely engage it as an adult. Now, though, as the body of the earth is burning, I feel a different kind of fear and pain that reaches into the future with worry about whether the burning will ever stop and whether the healing will ever come.

Last month, as wildfires burned out of control in so many places consuming forests and communities, the air where I live in the upper Midwest grew heavy with acrid smoke; record-breaking temperatures and air quality numbers both soared. The AQI climbed well above 300 where I was and reached unfathomable readings of 900 in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. I wondered, as I prepared to attend a qigong retreat celebrating the Fire element, what does it even mean to honor the energies of fire in a world burning out of control? What are we now being asked to learn about fire, its gifts and its hazards, its powers and its smoke?

In many cultures, fire is associated with passion, energy and transformation. In Chinese philosophy, it is the element dominant in summer, manifest in the sun, extended daylight, abundant growth and flourishing, creativity and productivity. It is old Yang energy, meant to be paired with Yin energy, and like all of the elements, it is designed to be balanced by its relationship to the other elements — both those that feed it and those that contain it.

In the ancient Greek and Roman empires, fire was regarded as a sacred resource protected by the goddesses Hestia and Vesta. Under their surveillance, the fires in the public hearth burned continuously as the heart of the community, only periodically extinguished ceremonially and then reignited in rituals of purification and renewal. Though sparks could be found or created in other places, only the sacred community fire was permitted to kindle the hearths of households and new villages, establishing as they did a heritage of heat and a lineage of light.

I wonder about the heritage and lineage of the wildfires burning in the north and across Europe now—fires sparked by lightning, by carelessness or chance, or by frictions never named. But the deeper story of what stokes them as they rage out of control is the extraction of fossil fuels and our human dependence on these fuels at all costs, tampering with the earth’s own checks and balances and creating whole new weather systems of fire clouds, stocked with lightning and almost no rain. So the ancient forests have now become matchsticks in fires blazing far beyond the hearth. Homes and whole communities and histories collapse into ash. And across the land, the wind spreads an expansive cloak of smoke, moving it to and fro as if trying to reach more of us with its warnings of the price of our choices.

In recent years, I’ve learned to read the air quality index maps in correlation with wind charts, looking for the high danger zones as well as where they’re moving. As a culture, maybe we are slowly learning to look beyond our immediate surroundings and circumstances to notice the sources of the danger and how fast and where they’re moving. I can only hope we’re learning this not only geographically but in time as well, tracing cause and effect as it winds its way to our own doorsteps, our own lifestyles, our own dependencies and denials. How do we open the door to the hard truth of our own complicity in all this without letting despair add another kind of unhealthy particulate matter to the air we’re breathing?

In my youth, after burning my hands, for years I was unable to light a match. It brought my fingertips too close to the flame at the head of the match. Still, on our family camping trips, I was the youngest and often first to rise in the morning. The nighttime chill still lingered, and I would want a fire to warm me. So I’d find a long green stick and gently stir the remains of the campfire from the night before.

Usually, buried beneath the charred logs and ashes, I’d find an ember still glowing. I’d offer it my breath, blown from puckered lips like a long airy kiss. I’d add dry pine needles and other tinder that soon would flare into flame. I’d tend this small, well-contained fire until it gave back heat and light, safely within a circle of stones, a gift carried forward from our family’s sharing of song and story the night before.

Fire is also an element that aids transformation, making way for new beginnings and sometimes new forms. Ask the alchemist and the blacksmith, the prairie and the altar, the potter and the baker: fire is an agent of change.

In our travels through the Black Hills this summer, I was moved to tears by the young ponderosa pines growing from the charred remains of old trees consumed by fire in years gone by. Sometimes new growth needs the space cleared by fire’s heated hand. What interests me today, is how we might engage fire’s energies of passion and creativity, of light and productivity in transforming ourselves, planting and nurturing new ways of being more attuned to the earth and each other.

As the air in the upper Midwest thickened with smoke last month, I arrived at the qigong retreat with many questions about the energies of fire. Given the air quality, we did not have a bonfire as planned for Saturday night. Instead, we danced in the meditation hall to a fire playlist created by our retreat leader. Not choreographed or synchronized, we each moved to the rhythms we heard. Joyfully, in that round room, we rose and twirled, flickered and leapt (at least the younger dancers leapt!). We grew warm and glowed with delight, dancing like human flames, ignited by the music, emitting no smoke. Just hope. Just light. Just warmth. Just love.

The sacred fire of the hearth is one that warms and nourishes without destroying, that traces back to the ancient flame and light of community, of love. We carry it within us, seen or unseen, as an ember much needed now. We’re asked to carefully tend it while containing it — but sharing it, too, with those whose hearth has grown cold. Even in a time when the world burns wildly out of control — maybe especially in such a time — we dare not extinguish this holy fire. Instead, we gently offer it our breath and then let ourselves be transformed by it as we dance our way into a future we cannot yet see or know.

Keep the sparks of that sacred fire alive, friends.

Karen

Travel is a great way to break open old patterns of perception, thinking and assumptions. Last month, I experienced this again in the Badlands, looking out on a foreign landscape that my Midwestern eyes saw as beautiful but barren. Accustomed to the greenery of the fields and forests sprawling across my homelands, I was awestruck by the dusty palette and the carved, expansive topography of the Badlands. It unfastened something inside me as the vast spaces before me were mirrored in my heart.

As rocks go, the Badlands are not very old — just 75 million years (compared to parts of the Rocky Mountains dating back 2 billion years). First formed as sediment and volcanic ash deposited in layers by ancient seas and rivers; then carved out by water and wind exposing not only a map of time charted in the layers but also a fossil record of now-extinct beings living there through its many changes. Mosasaurs and nimravid, oreodonts and brontotheres. I became a little dizzy thinking about how the striped landscape was a form of time travel, a revelatory view into the past.

And, then, at the next vista, I was astonished to see green again. The dry canyons were met at the top by a mixed-grass prairie spread out flat like a verdant blanket someone had pulled up just to the edge of the rocks.

Now the foreign landscape was capped by grasslands I recognized from home. The strange and the familiar bumped into each other like a geographical yin-yang writ large in the land. I began to think of the canyons as a reminder of how much bedrock and story sits beneath the surface of what we know as home. How much unseen history lies beneath our feet, wherever we are. How every place and every day rests on a past that includes both flourishing and famine, slow erosion and catastrophic interruptions, stories known and unknown, all laid down in layers and sometimes worn away or etched with fossils silently reminding us we are not the first nor likely will we be the last.

So much of the seismic change we are now living through worldwide is the result of old habits, perspectives and ways of being layered beneath this day, seen or unseen. The lies of unsustainable consumption and inequities are now eroding before our eyes, and the bedrock assumptions on which our lifestyles have been built are increasingly exposed as barren and faulty.

But the erosion of the Badlands is not just a matter of history. Like most change, it continues every day. Although the ancient rivers and seas no longer run through the canyons, wind and rain wear down this striking landscape at a rate of one inch per year, a rapid disappearance in the life of a rock. This means if I take a photo today of a rock formation as tall as I am, the rock will be reduced to nothing in 64 years. Every photo I took of the Badlands last month is a snapshot in time as fleeting as a human life.

On the way back, as we neared home, we drove through lush fields of corn and beets, of soybeans and wheat, and I wondered about what lies beneath them — in time and place. What fossil stories have been buried? Which are being excavated and told anew so that we might finally learn their wisdom? Which have been honored all along by those whose voices have been ignored or stifled, and how might those voices be amplified now? How do I go forward, day after day, honoring the layers in time and story, seen and unseen beneath my feet?

“Live in the layers, not on the litter,” comes the advice from Stanley Kunitz’ poem, “The Layers.” We are never done changing, he reminds us. We will do well to reconcile our hearts to their inevitable losses while cherishing every precious stone along the way.

I returned home with just one stone as my single keepsake from the trip. Not a stone from the Badlands, or the Black Hills, or the Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park. It is a stone I picked up on our last day of travel, retrieving it as we walked across the headwaters of the Mississippi River that, farther south, flows through the Twin Cities I call home. It now sits on my desk as a quiet reminder of the bedrock always supporting our weight wherever we are and always, at various rates, wearing away, forever being changed by water and wind and time itself, while it too changes the landscape of home and beyond.

Wishing you all well in this and every season of continuing change.

Karen

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One of the joys of living near the upper reaches of the Mississippi River is that every spring and fall we are treated to the fleeting presence of American White Pelicans passing through as they migrate thousands of miles to and from their northern breeding grounds. One of the largest birds in North America, they stand about four feet tall, have a magnificent nine-foot wingspan and can weigh up to 20 pounds. It is no small thing for them to take flight. Migrating in flocks, they gain loft by circling on warm air currents and the sight of these white birds with ink-black wingtips spiraling overhead is like watching an Escher drawing in motion, white and black appearing and disappearing, folding into one another in a marvelously synchronized movement sometimes called wheeling or kettling.

The awe I experience when watching a flock of these pelicans circling overhead opens my heart and mind to understand that often a long journey requires letting go of straight-line thinking and ending my search for the shortest, most direct route from here to there. Indeed, how could I even name the coordinates for a route between here and there when I don’t actually know what or where “there” is? When navigating the extreme and diverse changes we are living in today, it can be helpful to note that we can’t really know what our destination is.

As we conclude this series focused on “Compassionate Wayfinding: orienting ourselves toward kindness in times of chaos,” this month we are exploring how to choose a direction as we move into the unknown. And, knowing this will not be a straight path, we ask, how do we stay oriented as we turn and circle our way through terrain we have never visited before?

You may know the acronym VUCA, increasingly used to describe the state of world today as Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous. Two years ago, the futurist Jamais Cascio coined another acronym to name the more extreme unraveling now underway. He introduced the acronym BANI, meaning Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. How might we navigate in conditions like that?

Wayfinding in the midst of incomprehensible change and in the absence of a destination requires a reliable point of reference. In orienteering, this is True North, the fixed geographical position of the north pole, and Magnetic North, which drifts over time as the earth’s molten core changes. An explorer finds their way through unknown terrain by correlating maps, which are based on True North, with compass readings, which are guided by Magnetic North.

We, thresholders, moving through the uncertainties of a troubled time, can begin by orienting ourselves toward compassion as our True North — compassion for ourselves and the suffering we experience in the chaos; and compassion for others, also bewildered by the confusion and volatility of our shared world. As we determine our next steps into the unknown, we can ask ourselves, Is this direction compassionate toward myself and others? Does it make way for more kindness to move in the world? Then, because change is constant and compassion continuously widens our awareness, we build in feedback loops that tell us whether the direction we have chosen for our first steps is still the right one for our next steps, or if we might need a course correction to stay aligned with kindness as we continue on.

In seminary, I learned about the Praxis Spiral as a model for theological reflection in one’s personal life or in groups rooting social action in their faith and values. Based on Ignatian spirituality teachings, the spiral includes at least four different movements or stages that form a full circle: Experience; Analysis; Reflection; and Response/Action. Each time we complete these four stages, we start over in a new experience shaped by our action. When we analyze and reflect on that new experience, we are again rounding the circle which becomes a spiral as we learn and grow.

Just as the American pelicans spiral to gain loft, we can use the Praxis Spiral to gain understanding and perspective as we choose our direction and next steps into and through these brittle, anxious and incomprehensible times. And in each stage of the spiral, we can find guidance by orienting ourselves, our analysis, reflections and actions toward compassion.

A field of sunflowers in full bloom will follow the sun throughout the day from east to west, continually facing the light to collect more sunlight and grow taller and stronger. It is also true that during the darkness of night, sunflowers slowly reorient themselves back toward the east, preparing to receive the first rays of sunlight that reach over the horizon at dawn.

Think of compassion as the light that not only illuminates where we are in the midst of great change, but also supports our needs and growth as we make our way through the chaos. Orienting ourselves toward the light of kindness can guide us, even in the middle of the night or when compassion is not visibly present, if we keep faithfully turning to face the direction where the light will first return.

What are the sources of kindness and light that might orient you in this time of change? How does it feel when you are facing that light?

Online Conversation about Compassionate Wayfinding

If you would like to explore these questions and ideas online with other thresholders, please consider joining the last of our three-part conversation titled: “Compassionate Wayfinding: orienting ourselves toward kindness in times of chaos.”

We’ll meet next Thursday, April 30, to consider how to choose a direction when stepping into the unknown and how we adjust that direction, turning and even circling as we move on.

These one-hour conversations are lightly facilitated, beginning with an embodied practice and a focus question and then opening time for listening to and learning from one another. They are invitations to share the truths of our own heart and to hear the truths shared by others. Compassion is our practice and our guide.

Participation is a benefit for paid subscribers to Threshold Times, who will find a registration link at the bottom of this email. If you wish to join the conversation, but a paid subscription is not for you at this time, reply to this email asking to participate.

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Lately I’ve noticed, when moving about in the Cities, how the events of the past few months linger in the places where they happened. Certainly it’s true at the sites where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed, both still preserved as memorials where community members gather to remember, to grieve and to connect. It’s also true at the many places where we have experienced an abduction or any confrontation with the militarized forces of I.C.E. The teargas may have lifted and the whistles no longer scream, but the emotional ghosts of what happened in that place remain.

Similarly, I find traces of remembered kindness and care — on the streets lined with immigrant-owned businesses and on school corners where for months volunteers with whistles have patrolled, on the lookout for I.C.E agents (and many still do, because I.C.E. is still active here). On the frozen lakes where ice luminaries spelled out shining messages of hope and defiance. On the grounds of the Capitol, at the federal I.C.E. headquarters, and on countless city streets, where tens of thousands of people have braved cold weather to call for justice, for peace, for liberation, often sharing food, warm drinks, handwarmers and hugs. And in the largest church sanctuaries and in the streets outside, where the Singing Resistance has shown up by the thousands with songs of nonviolent resistance, love and compassion.

Of course, this is not unique to the Twin Cities where I live, nor to this time that has recently made my homeland so famous. This geology of stories — both the terrifying and the benevolent — is the true bedrock beneath every place, whether we notice and name it or not. Both nostalgia and trauma can be evoked by this layered history, as the stories we know in our bodies and the stories known to the land itself call out to us when we draw near to the places where they occurred.

Place matters. And history matters to place. And our part in that history matters, too.

Wayfinding — the art of orienteering, especially through unfamiliar surroundings — must begin by asking where we are, as we did last month in the reflection “You Are Here.” But it also requires navigating time and the history that both makes a place what it is and makes us who we are.

The series, “Compassionate Wayfinding: orienting ourselves toward kindness in times of chaos,” continues this month as we ask, Who are we and who are we becoming? It is the practice of taking time to map ourselves – our stories, our relationships, our gifts, our needs, and our longings. In my book, Trusting Change, I wrote about three stages of living through change — the no longer; the pause; and the not yet. This month, as we ask who we are and who we are becoming in the midst of change, we are in the stage of pausing. Each of us compassionately exploring our own heart and identity, especially as it is changed by the times we are in and by the stage of life we are in. An earlier Threshold Times reflection, “When You Are Your Own Other,” takes a deeper dive into this question.

Why take time for personal reflection when the world is on fire and desperately needs our attention? Because we cannot change the world if we don’t know our place in it. Because we cannot get to where we hope to go unless we start by knowing where we are — and how and who we are in the place where we begin. Or as Grace Lee Boggs put it, “Transform yourself to transform the world.”

For each of us, as we navigate this uncharted time of chaos, uncertainty and trouble, compassionately understanding who we are and the stories that have shaped us and the place where we are is key to finding our way forward.

A continuing conversation

If you would like to join an online conversation about these questions, our series titled “Compassionate Wayfinding: orienting ourselves toward kindness in times of chaos” continues on March 26, focusing on who we are and who we are becoming. It will conclude on April 30 as we consider how to take our next steps into the unknown.

The one-hour conversations are lightly facilitated, beginning with an embodied practice and a focus question and then opening time for listening to and learning from one another. They are invitations to share the truths of our own heart and to hear the truths shared by others. Compassion is our practice and our guide.

Participation is a benefit for paid subscribers to Threshold Times, who will find a registration link at the bottom of this email. If you wish to join the conversation, but a paid subscription is not for you at this time, reply to this email asking to participate.

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I recently went cross country skiing in a place I hadn’t skied before and, studying the map at the trailhead, discovered the entire trail we intended to take was made invisible, either by fingers tracing it or by the sun fading its ink away or maybe both. So we set out to discover it as we went, one step, one glide at a time.

We are now living in a time when the routes we might wish to take are either worn away or faded. It might feel like no one has ever charted the way through times this chaotic, cruel and dangerous before, but the quickest review of geography and history tells us otherwise. What can guide us now — and what has guided our ancestors before — when maps no longer serve, is compassion. Opening our hearts to the suffering we are experiencing and to the suffering of others as a compass of kindness that orients us to the place where we are and the kin with whom we share it.

This morning I drafted these words, still rough around the edges, exploring the place where I am today.

You Are Here

The star
marking the place
where you are,
rubbed away
on the map 
before you.

So many hands
across so many days
have traced it
to name
what the feet 
already know.

Here,
from the place 
where you stand,
winding paths reach out 
like veins across the land
circulating possibilities.

You touch
your finger
to the place
where you are,
read its worn texture
like braille.

You turn away.
Survey
your surroundings.
Feel the sun on your face
and the wind
carrying scents of spring
not yet underfoot.
You are here,
now. Your heart
takes the first steps.

If you would like to join an online exploration of engaging kindness as a compass in chaotic times, please consider the three-part conversation starting tomorrow titled: “Compassionate Wayfinding: orienting ourselves toward kindness in times of chaos.”

We’ll begin tomorrow night, February 26, by considering where we are now — each of us naming or describing our location on the metaphorical map of our times, and sharing our practices and challenges in using kindness as our compass. Next month, on March 26, we’ll ask who we are and who we are becoming. And on April 30, we’ll consider what might be our next step into the unknown.

These one-hour conversations are lightly facilitated, beginning with an embodied practice and a focus question and then opening time for listening to and learning from one another. They are invitations to share the truths of our own heart and to hear the truths shared by others. Compassion is our practice and our guide.

Participation is a benefit for paid subscribers to Threshold Times, who will find a registration link at the bottom of this email. If you wish to join the conversation, but a paid subscription is not for you at this time, reply to this email asking to participate.

Read more