Your true name.
And mine.
“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come.” ~ Terry Tempest Williams
I wake many mornings to two distinct and comforting sounds.
Sustained flute-like whistles from a pair of varied thrushes calling across the wetlands. And the soft swish of our patio sliding door being opened by my husband—quietly as possible, because he’s trying not to awaken me—as he creeps out at first light to rescue worms and slugs in danger of drought or deluge.
The sound is too poignant to resist. Often I will stumble sleepily out of bed to watch him stealthily survey the area in a gauze of grey light. He’s collecting small wriggling creatures in danger of dehydration or drowning, tucking them back into the safe soil of our garden.
As I observe my mate’s kind determination in action, it summons to mind the child he once was as depicted in a vintage photograph, holding a duckling in small hands. The image captures how—and with such solemnity—he is subtly steering away from a curious peer as if to say: “I’m just not sure you will be gentle enough.”
Despite life’s inevitable painful plot twists (and there were many), he has maintained within himself this watchful wonder of the living world. A quality that defines his essence.
"We are all presented with the same evidence and hear the same call for mercy and justice." ~ Dr. Will Tuttle
I’m thirsty for this kind of trueness.
Yet it feels like it’s on the wane—as if it wasn’t already challenging enough to maintain (or even attain)—in the modern mob of competing narratives and voices jostling for our attention and deference.
Finding what is true can feel a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack (an apt adage that has grown on me).
This only increases my yearning for time spent in the presence of wild places and the primordial precepts they preserve. Wintering tundra swans still reliably swoop down in an aerial collage of white wings over waterways in basalt-columned coulees and fossil-filled loess fields of Washington State’s ancient Channeled Scablands.
Just as wildebeests, zebras, and gazelles convene in a stunning spectacle across timeless migration routes across Sub-Saharan Africa.
I am in perpetual awe (and need) of this aeonian authenticity.
On my daily urban Habitrails in the Pacific Northwest I think often of East Africa’s iconic tree of life, that bold and burly baobab, who presents repeatedly in my dreams. Ancient and anchored, it’s clear she has something to impart. Reminiscent of an elephant in color, roughened texture, and magnific size—yet wider and taller than even the mightiest male “tuskers”—this stocky succulent can live to be many thousands of years old.
Comprised of 80% water, these long-lived leviathans quench the thirst of many in the dry season when drought withers away everything green. A constellation of birds and mammals, elephants included, seek the baobab’s sheltering shade in those scorching stretches; stripping her bark or chewing her branches and fruit to access precious water stored within.
Yet even the towering tree of life is part of a greater whole; she does not stand rooted in solitude. Just as essential to her complex ecosystem are sunlight and soil, as well as the fruit bats and moths who pollinate her night-blooming flowers.
Luxuriant red ochre offers dust bathing and sunscreen for a variety of plumage and sun-soaked skins of so many species. Sprigs of African blue basil calm digestive woes, and the delicious longed-for acacia, knobthorn and red bushwillow fill countless beautiful bellies.
Wherever you look, Mother Nature’s inherent laws of inclusion and intrinsic multiplicity are ceaseless and irrepressible—jolting juxtapositions of drought and drink, mooring and motion, silence and sound, predator and prey melding ever into one.
“There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself . . . that is the only true guide that you will ever have.” ~ Howard Thurman
In such a time of confounding complexity, I’m sure it’s why Thurman’s sagacity above transfixes me. For starters, his eye-opening observation that there is something within us that “waits and listens.”
I was floored to discover that “slow” is defined in the dictionary as a derogatory “pace that is less than usual, desirable, or expected.” “Fast” on the other hand is equated with both agility and accomplishment—something to be sought.
No wonder it feels so hard to find the patience and quietude to wait and listen. Even our language resources reflect an inheritance of distorted biases pushing us to do otherwise.
But a sprinting cheetah knows in her bones what Merriam-Webster and our fast-paced human culture does not: speed alone—exciting and necessary as it can be—will not sustain us.
In the exclusionary preference of fast over slow—among the countless other singular attachments and aversions too many dutifully, yet thoughtlessly, maintain—it’s no wonder some of us have lost our aptitude for authenticity.
Which is why I adore how Thurman goes on to edify that genuineness is the only guide we’ll ever have about how to live the one and only life we are each gifted. A pressing query so many of us have on our minds at this calamitous moment.
Perhaps it has never been more important to unearth, and rebirth, what is real. Ask each other’s true names, and purpose, and help one another search for them if they are castaways in the cacophony.
What calls to me, and to you, from the Holocene’s chasm of urgency may look and be quite different.
But that we are all needed cannot be refuted.
And this seems to be Thurman’s salient point. Cheetah or sloth, mighty baobab or brief blue basil. You and me.
Each of us, uniquely talented and divergently destined.
Yet it is only in the sum of our fully-functioning multidimensional parts we will find our way to the mutual truth of our oneness.
“Oh to live in a world where lives were not exterminated by other lives. Oh to work for that world. Oh to be fueled by all the energies to keep working for that world. And keep working. And keep.” ~ Padraig O’Tuama
Lovely! the urge towards tenderness in your husband is very moving. I wonder whether this IS "the sound of the genuine" as Howard Thurman says. And that this tenderness, the sweet center that knows life and the exquisite nature of aliveness, belonging, and interconnection becomes disrupted, coopted, and sidetracked by modern culture. The noticing of the definitions of "slow" and "fast" carry judgment even by the 'trusted' dictionary, is remarkable. One must keep the eyes open to see these shades of culture and how they affect our roots.
Finding what is true, ah yes. As you do, looking to the language of the trees, and wild places will most certainly lead you there. Slow, listen, come into the embrace of the natural world to which we all belong. Know that we all matter. This is what I am sensing in your post and will carry with me today. Thank you!
Absolutely beautiful. Wow. Thank you for this and for a peek into your mornings!