Introduction
Firstly, I need you to know that this work is not about trying to sell you anything; nor trying to convince you to adopt my world view. I’m not seeking to educate or inform you. I’m not promoting a book nor trying to boost my online profile.
There are no points to be proven here, nor opinions to defend. None of what follows is correct, nor is it incorrect. It’s just the view from where I stand, coupled with a process of receiving and transmitting that opened up to me from a pernickety old oak tree that I’ve come to know so well.
These views are possibly shared by many quiet people, but they’re seldom given air space in this fast-moving, over-stimulated, under-observed, extroverted, highly commercialised, human-centred world.
The work is not about blame nor judgement. I’m not trying to place myself in a position of authority about anything. We just want to share this work with you.
So you don’t need to become indignant, competitive, or feel superior or inadequate. There’s no need to argue with others or with me or with yourself about any of what follows. And you’re not being asked to agree or disagree. No one is being cancelled here.
So please relax and read with soft focus – with a mind that doesn’t have to grasp anything and doesn’t need to interpret or form opinions around what’s being presented.
Try to listen without a goal, without intensity or effort. If you miss something first time around you might pick it up on a later read. You don’t have to remember anything. There won’t be an exam.
What matters to me and to that wild old tree at the lake shore, is that you’re here now, taking the time and the care to read this work and to enter into this silent discussion with us.
On behalf of both of us, thank you so very much.
We will feel that our endeavour has been of value if you, as the reader-part of this meditation, can find something here to bring forward into your own life, in your own way. We’ve no doubt that some of you are already walking the revelationary road. Some people I know have been revelationaries for nature all their lives.
So try to slowly feel your way into the work with an open heart, as you might listen to the wind running through a meadow.
Written language ages. Some words seem to pick up emotional weight along the way. The effect of this emotional baggage is often that we charge off in another direction from the actual work – throwing up all sorts of side issues and problems.
Other words may just lose their sharpness of definition, as society changes around them over time.
So for these reasons I’m writing The word : followed by the very simplest definition I can find on Google. (Sometimes I add brackets after the definition – you’ll know that is my addition, and not from Google.)
By slowly reading the simple definition a couple of times, within the body of the work, it might help you to refresh the meaning of that word for yourself and help you to more easily find what is being pointed to by the use of that word.
So now that you know what the work is not and about the inclusion of definitions, let me try to tell you the motivation for undertaking this work…..
At one of his last public appearances, Seamus Heaney spoke about the trauma of the banking and property crash and the reduction of Irishness to an enormous financial debt.
He says ‘..when we think of things from the past, we often use the expression ‘handed down’ – ‘handed down’ instead of the more abstract ‘inherited.’ ‘Inherited’ is slightly legalistic whereas ‘handed down’ presupposes the physical hand over of a gift.
It might be said that if we have inherited a debt, we have also been ‘handed down’ a treasury.’
So in this work we’re attempting to hand down to those that come after, some kind of map that might hold fast at this time of falsehoods and trickery, untruths and shallow vanities.
This is a time when the economy has taken priority over core human values and people have become mere consumers. It’s the era when the Earth’s systems are collapsing and when human hearts are full of sorrow and fear.
The way we each live our daily lives IS the map we hand down to those who follow. The back-up for the maps we’re making is not stored in a data-bank but is stored in Nature – the land, the soils, the flora and fauna, the micro-organisms, the mountains, the streams, lakes and rivers. And especially in elderly trees.
Our actions and habitual ways of living, our daily tasks and activities, our mundane daily lives, lived from moment to moment – these are the invisible cartographers that determine how the future will be played out.
The last few hundred years have been the time of the great disconnect from Nature. So people are only half-people, barely alive, existing in a world of turmoil, rushing despair and fleeting excitements – making, by their daily habits, lifeless maps that lead to division and destruction. The human family is functioning in isolation from the rest of Nature, and so with fake maps and no compass, hell-bent on annihilation.
With simple observation, it’s not hard to see that the young people of today have inherited a massive environmental debt.
The natural world is retreating – having been driven to the edge of existence by the foolish men in charge and the financial incentives from a system of governance that is a makey-upey thing and not fit for purpose.
So we’ve made this work in order to stand beside the young generations of today and tomorrow – the ones that will face the problems our system has created.
We’re suggesting here that we ourselves, person by person, tree by tree, regardless of age, political affiliations, religious beliefs, nationality – holds the capacity to turn that environmental debt into an environmental treasury worth handing down to those that follow. We believe that within that debt lies the possibility for full restoration of that treasury, with all the implications that the winning of such a goal might achieve for humanity, as well as for all those beings of the natural world.
What follows are some views that don’t seem to have been explored yet, towards that crucial goal, with Nature standing at the very core of it.
Nature
: all the animals, plants and other things in the world that are not made by people, and all the events and processes that are not caused by people. (So people themselves, as animals, fall under that heading ‘Nature.’)
We hope this work – Revelationaries for Nature – might help you, the reader-side of the work, to make a map with your own life that leads you, and those that follow, back to wholeness and unity with the world – out of the current man-made mess and into the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Photo: Elderly trees offering revelations, wise counsel and kinship to anyone who takes the time to listen.
County Leitrim. Photo by Jan Alexander