To Fall, Like Leaves, into Another Way
Dear Friends and Family,
These are troubling times, times of immense suffering and sorrow, times of chaos and uncertainty, times of angst, and for many, agony. Humanity is on our knees.
When I set out on this pilgrimage nearly a year ago, I did so to journey in solitude to stretch beyond the limits of my own pursuit of comfort and fall into the Deep within the deep of me, endeavoring to come to what is true. This is a lifelong journey, but my sense then and it is evermore so today that each of us in our own way is called to such depths if we are to become more fully human—because we are not yet fully human. This is the Great Work of our time.1
It is sacred work. It is work we are called to—together—and with heart. Some might say it is the work of letting ourselves fall into another way. Today’s reflections are an evocation of the promise at the end of that fall, a promise, I hope, that lends hope.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
To Fall, Like Leaves, into Another Way
This is what the things can teach us: || to fall, || patiently to trust our heaviness. || Even a bird has to do that || Before he can fly.2
For five days, I have paused by the shores of Lake Muriel in Ontario. I have walked little these shores. Mostly, I have watched wind shake the gold off Aspen trees. And I have wondered: What is wind? And where does it begin?
Do not give me the science behind movement in air. Do not tell me about vortexes and vertices of pressure. I want you to sink down into the spare womb of everything with me, and there, let the weight of you rest inside the something that is nothing before the first breath of wind, the yawning sound of sunyata.
The sound of sunyata is not nothing.3 Nor is it null, as in made void. It is the hour before dawn, hour of impenetrable light not yet. It is the sound of snow before snow falls, of leaves now fallen not yet soil, of soil before dispersions of seed. It is the sound of all that is just before . . . all that is. And it lives.
It lives in the depths of you and me. And we know it but not how we think knowing knows.
The first [way to know] is a conscious descent into the depths at the foundation within oneself. Here, one becomes more and more profound until one awakens within oneself to the primordial layer. . . .4
Leaves falling, leaves fallen, a blanket together they become, giving as they dry the hint of woodsy sweet, not yet the smell and soul of soil, not yet the fecund ground giving blush-pink fruit. It is not enough to see or even to place the hand upon them. To know what fallen leaves know and already must become is to bed down with them. It is to fall. . . .
. . . and to fall further still . . .
and become
anew
Is this not what the caterpillar does upon spinning a cocoon—fall from being to being again altogether anew? Even the wave before it leaps into particle form knows that to leap is to fall. And a thought, for it to be uttered, must somehow know behind the thought itself that to give word, it must fall into the emptiness that spans one nerve to the next.
Dimly visible, it cannot be named || And returns to that which is without substance. || This is called the shape that has no shape.5
The doe, one by one, who come in the hour after the wake of day, come as if apparition—not here then silently so, then not, their bodies lithe, their movement poised—poised as in fluid.
What is the form of fluid? Try to pick it up and hold it in your hands. See it fall through the fingers of you. Watch it wind its way down to lower ground. I have become like water.
And tomorrow I will leave, and all this will carry on. All these leaves, as they fall from limb to ground, what are they? What is a leaf if not the promise of leaving? And what is it to leave?
Some say that to leave is to leaven, to lift the weight of the density of time. Those same someones might say this is Love, that the words stitched together out of a seamless soundscape around lief gave leaf, leave, leaven, love.6 Surely in leaving, a leaf must fall and in falling, must let go of itself as it once was, and in letting go, must become a formless form of someone else. Is falling not love?
Do we not say that we fall in love? Is there anything at all more (w)holy sublime than falling in love?
What falls?
Descend into the depths of your own soul, descend as far as the roots, to the sources of feeling, will and intelligence—and you will know.7
Learn more about Beyond the Comfort Zone
I touched on this last month in A Step Not Yet Fully Taken. The idea of the Great Work of our time is not my own. I am beholden to the late visionary Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).
Rainier Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead, 2005), II, 16, p. 173.
Sunyata is Sanskrit for emptiness. “But the Buddhist idea of emptiness is not negation of all existence. All of existence does exist. . . . But the conditioned mind, the diluted mind, always conceives the entirety of existence in a false way. So we have to negate all the misconceived things entirely.” Samdhong Rinpoche, Michael Mendizza, Always Awakening: Buddha’s Realization Krishnamurti’s Insight (Solvang, CA: Mendizza & Associates, 2017), p. 37.
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), p. 129.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1963), p. 70.
C. T. Onions, Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 521.
Tomberg, Meditations, p. 129.
I've been reading again for the fourth or fifth time one of my all time favorite books, called "Learning to Fall", written by a man, Philip Simmons, who is dying from ALS, which he got diagnosed at age 35 and was given only a few years to live. He ended up living about 10 more years, and during that time wrote this book; a collection of essays written beautifully and poignantly and with great wisdom and humor. So, rather than expound on my thoughts of what "falling" means, I'm going to quote Philip as he expresses it beautifully. "Think of falling as a figure of speech. We fall on our faces, we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. In each of these falls, what do we fall away from? We fall from ego, we fall from our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our precious selves. We fall from ambition, we fall from grasping, we fall from reason. And what do we fall into? We fall into passion, into terror, into unreasoning joy. We fall into humility, into compassion, into emptiness, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves. We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures." He finishes with this: "We are all, all of us, falling. We are all, now this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water's surface shimmer. And so let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death (as he is), let us also fall toward life." Perhaps you can see from his words, why he speaks to me so well. Hopefully to you too Renée.
So beautiful, Renee! Thank you! I had the pleasure of visiting one of New Mexico's few waterfalls this weekend and as I watched it, I swear I could feel its longing. The water perpetually falling with outstretched arms, always reaching for its beloved. Your words here brought that image back to mind. And they also reminded me of a childhood memory (that I'd forgotten but is now very vivid). I was in school and we were being taught about gravity. Ignoring whatever else the teacher was saying, I had a full body flash of knowing that gravity is the way the earth shows she loves us. Maybe falling is all about entering that embrace.