My Coyote Teacher

I live in San Diego. I know, I’m lucky that way.

Yesterday as I was doing yoga on the back deck, my dog began to bark. The breeze through the Eucalyptus trees and the coos of mourning doves were instantly replaced by the most jarring alarm calls my dog knows how to make. My breath quickened and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I guess I’ll meditate later.

I peered over the back fence into the field of chaparral that slopes down to the lake in the distance. There he was, six feet from the gate – the biggest, healthiest coyote I’ve ever seen.

Coyotes are a part of life around here, as they are in many places. In the dawn’s early light they’re often seen trotting home after a night of foraging. We’re regularly awakened by their yipping, mewling, howling, and barking as they convene their mysterious meetings in these fields beneath the stars.

But this was different.

He was alone, walking slowly, deliberately through the mid-morning light. His coat was thick. He looked strong and at ease with the world. Something opened inside of me – a wordless knowing, a content-free awareness. Being beyond all categories was showing itself in the simplicity of this moment.

His slow-walk recalled the walking meditation of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen teacher who used to lead his students meditatively along the dirt paths around the monastery, aligning each step with a breath, moving silently, deliberately, lovingly through the garden. This was holy like that.

Then he stopped and stood in the shade of a tree, turning away from me. I stood too. We stayed like that for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I don’t know. Time skittered off its rails.

I felt his presence, his absolute aliveness, his unadorned being-ness, without a whiff of artifice or pretense – how unlike him we are, caught up in the never-ending pageant of trying to make a good impression and checking our look in the mirror. His naturalness started me. His shocking authenticity slapped me across the face.

What would it be like to be free from the never-ending plans, desires, and so-called needs that torment us? What would it be like to show up without apology, without explanation, without excuse? What would it be like to live always in harmony with current conditions, without the burden of endlessly wishing things were different than the way they are? What would it be like to be free of endless speculations, ornate plans, egoic ambitions, and the need to be special?

These were the questions my visitor elicited in me.

Then he turned and ambled off.

Great teachers don’t tell you what to think. They help you ask better questions. My coyote teacher inspired a whole series of bracing, transformative queries. Of course I want to stop short of anthropomorphizing that wild animal, and imposing all kinds of stories and qualities on him that are purely the fruit of my own fervid imagination. But this fact remains: coyotes have been living in these hills for 400,000 years. Our civilization is a blip on that time-line – here and gone. Yet in the timeless eternity of this now moment, when we meet one another in authenticity, we all enter the heaven that has no name; a condition of consciousness the great religions can only point to. This is the holiness ever-present that we miss solely by paying attention to the wrong things.

[This piece was originally published in my column "A to Zen" in the Nov/Dec 2021 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Fighting for Planet Earth

Nature is under attack, and all the regulatory defenses that once protected her are being dismantled. Human activity, especially in the industrialized, high-consumption cultures of the first world, has accelerated environmental destruction to historically unprecedented levels. We are in the fight for our lives, literally.

Instead of cataloging, yet again, this dystopian withering, let us turn our gaze to the good news. It doesn’t have to be this way. Since we can no longer rely on the gutted Environmental Protection Agency to protect us, we’ll have to fight for ourselves. But our activism must be grounded deep in the soul. We’re going to need spiritual guidance.

German mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) entered the monastic life at 14. For medieval women life in the monastery afforded a freedom unavailable to married women. Released from the constraints of child rearing and housekeeping, monastic women focused on study and contemplation. Hildegard became one of the leading intellectuals of her day (though her work was not recognized until centuries later). Her writings covered the gamut from theology to natural philosophy. But it’s her startling defense of the natural world that strikes us most today. For her, respecting nature was the same thing as respecting God. It was just that simple. “Every creature,” she wrote, “is a glittering, glistening mirror of Divinity. There is the music of Heaven in all things.”

Hildegard’s message was a startling departure from the other-worldly emphasis of Augustine’s Christianity of the 5^th century. For Augustine, the natural world was a fallen world mired in sin and insignificance – our true home was in heaven with God. Earth was simply to be endured. But for Hildegard, “everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.” This beautiful world was God’s best work, and our defense of it a sacred calling. But it isn’t easy. We often feel overwhelmed and defeated. Still, we can’t give up. “Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked,” she wrote, “remain brave and strong.”

It is not from alien invaders that the earth must be defended. Human activity has accelerated environmental degradation at an unprecedented rate. There aren’t two sides to this. Scientific consensus is 100%. Only one question remains – what are we going to do about it? For Hildegard, the answer is clear: “We shall awaken from our dullness,” she wrote, “and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”

The answer is love. Not personal love, but passionate universal love for the ground of being and all her manifest forms. “All living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance,” Hildegard wrote, “emerging from God like the rays of the sun.” The government isn’t going to save us – certainly not now. Only we can save ourselves. “Dare to declare who you are,” she wrote. “It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” And when you leap, know that “you are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God.” God and the world are one. We and the world are one. There is nothing but oneness. When we fight for the earth, we fight for ourselves.
[This piece was first published in my my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2020 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Wildflowers

After eight straight years of record-setting drought, the rain finally came to California. The Sierra Nevada Mountains are packed with snow, ensuring full rivers and lakes all summer long. The Giant Sequoias finally got the deep watering they so richly deserve. And the 40 million people who call California home can breathe a little easier after years of anxiety. Until next year anyway.

            But it’s the way the rains came that really made a difference. A long series of storms kept the water falling for much of January and February. Not only were the wildflower seeds lying dormant in the chaparral germinated, but the young plants received a steady rain growing deep roots, wide foliage, and setting a record number of blooms. When those buds began to unfurl in mid-March the foothills of the Golden State burst into flame – the good kind – golden poppies, lavender lupine, yellow mustard, deep blue ceanothus, and a thousand other varieties scattered by region and elevation. Then came the butterflies.

            Clouds of migrating Painted Ladies drifted over the many-hued landscape like fluttering prayer flags. It’s as if the flowers had taken flight.

            But flowers and butterflies aren’t meant to last. None of us are. We are all passing through, and the ephemeral nature of all embodied forms is once again brought home to us with bold alacrity. The flower fields of March and April rise up from the ashes of last season’s fires, and in a blink of an eye return to the dust from which they emerged.

            It is in our nature to look for meaning – to search the signs and symbols of the natural world for wisdom, wisdom that we can apply in our faltering, fumbling lives. Nature is a language to be read with the faculty of intuition, or so the Romantic poets claim. It is not facts and theories that flowers and birdsongs give us, but a just-as-certain resonance that defies conceptualization. Feeling in your heart the golden light of a California poppy field lifts you over all contradiction and paradox leaving you aloft in a knowing beyond the mind and its pedestrian definitions.

            This is what draws us into nature: freedom from the tyranny of our own thoughts. We think and think and think, thinking that this next thought will set us free. But it never works. Thought only leads to more thought. Meandering out into a flowering field frees us from the wearisome charade that life is a problem to be solved, rather than a reality to be experienced.

            Walking through the woods, or the desert, or the hills, or along the beach returns us to our bodies, and our bodies return us to our original relationship with the earth, our sacred Mother from which we and all forms arise and to which we return. Feeling her power and presence rise up through the soles of our feet and move through us like a wave realigns the scattered and fragmented bits of our psyche into an integrated whole – we’re too present now to drift into abstraction, too enthralled to argue. This beauty, this light, this scent, this sight, anchors us in something real – not lost in tired thoughts-about-things, but fully awake to things-in-themselves. This, finally, is the grounding reality we’ve been longing for.

            Over-thinking is killing us. Instead, just be. In his longest lesson, The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus used the imagery of nature to lead us back toward groundedness. “Do not worry about your life,” he said. “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you? Seek first his kingdom…and all these things will be given to you as well.”

            And what is it to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Christians and other wisdom seekers have been wondering what to make of that for two thousand years. For many in his audience, the familiar Jewish phrase “the Kingdom of Heaven” meant a literal political kingdom – the reestablishment of the free nation of Israel and the end of Roman occupation. But many believe Jesus was pointing to something beyond nationalism. For him the phrase became a poetic metaphor for God-consciousness, a mind-body state of illumined realization characterized by peaceful loving kindness. And where are we to find this kingdom? “The kingdom of Heaven is within you,” Jesus tells us. And in the Gospel of Thomas he says, “The father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” Turns out we have a perception problem, not a proximity problem. The kingdom of heaven is here and now. Only we are not.

            This is what the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart meant when he said that “God is always home – it is we who have gone out for a walk.” Entering the kingdom of heaven is not about going out there – it’s about going in here. And contemplating the beauty of nature’s fleeting forms draws us deeper and deeper into the eternity of the present moment, where all of the doors swing open. “What you look for has come,” Jesus said, “only you do not know it.”

            With this in mind, it seems clear that we need to drop the idea of the search for truth and exchange it for a process in which we simply slow down, stop searching, and realize what we already are. And one of the best ways to do this is to leave your four walls and walk out into a field beneath a wide open sky.

            In the beauty of a wildflower field, beside a seasonal creek, the puzzles, conflicts, and tortured logic of the discursive mind all unravel leaving in their place a soft, beautiful openness, a melodic indeterminacy, a timeless awareness beyond thoughts and forms. Enlightenment, awakening, nirvana, or the Kingdom of Heaven are not destinations, they are where we already are. As the twentieth century spiritual teacher Krishnamurti put it, “True spiritual practice springs from, not toward, enlightenment. Our practice does not lead to unity consciousness – it is unity consciousness.” When we meditate, pray, or walk with vulnerability, purpose, and open-heartedness the truth and presence that we already are wells up through the cracks between our thoughts and reveals itself as our essence, like wildflowers leaping from the dry earth in the spring rain.