“I don’t have to have faith, I have experience,” said Joseph Campbell, the brilliant mythologist and author of several books on the world’s great religions. It’s a sentence that rings in my head every time I am allowed the experience of mystery, when I am shown something that matches what I’ve been told. That’s when the message really takes purchase for me.

Back in creative writing classes, and in subsequent advice from good writers I’ve known or read, the rule, over and over and over again, is SHOW, DON’T TELL. Don’t just tell readers it’s cold outside, show them a breath fogging the air. Show them red cheeks and a jacket collar turned up against the cutting wind. Paint a winter scene with ice straining to break bare branches, and snow banked up along a fence row.

As another year piles on to the already big pile, I think about a line from a letter that Paul wrote to the Romans. “From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth…” And even though he mailed his letter a couple of thousand years ago, it’s still now. So, from the beginning to now includes this very present moment.

The groaning continues, the pangs of creation are still being felt, and the cosmos is being born in every instant. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr speaks of the “Divine Radiance at the Beginning Big Bang and the Divine Allure drawing us into a positive future.”

Then me and my little dog Bobby go out for a stroll down in the piney woods at Weeks Bay, and nature, that good teacher, shows me what the saints and mystics are wont to tell me. Up from the rotting pine stump of some once-upon-a-time tall pine tree, now fallen and disappearing into the sandy loam, a strong tree that swayed in Gulf breezes, and shivered jade needles, silvery in the sunshine—up from its decaying form sprouts three spry seedlings. And I can almost overhear them giggling and cutting up with each other.

Paul told it pretty, I must say, when he called this world and the heavens groaning in one great act of giving birth. But I gotta say the three little trees were a more powerful note to me than his eloquent letter. I snapped the picture, grateful for having been shown, right in front of my face, how what’s past is ever becoming the here-and-now, and leaning into the ever-shall-be.

May 2020, this another new year, be for you the best one yet!

 

 

 

All along the whole of the Gulf of Mexico’s coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola, we’ve got live oaks. They are plentiful and squat the land, low and broad, with their gnarly twisted trunks and furrowed bark like the hide of some ancient thunderous beast.

They grow easily and the grandfathers and grandmothers of the live oaks spread their canopies wider than houses. Many of them have trunks the size of whole rooms. They are the Druidic royalty of of the backwood landscape and even guard bronze plaques in Southern city parks.

They are regal in their bearing, these live oak trees, and the rough-barked limbs of the mightiest of them droop under their own weight, and dip close to the ground at two-thirds their hundred-foot reach. And the ends of those branches turn up toward the sky like the palms of some conjuring sorcerer, bedecked in sleeves of green resurrection ferns that get crispy brown and look dead until some rain comes.*

Walking down by Weeks Bay with my little dog, taking a brisk jaunt on a chilly afternoon a week from Christmas, I spy on a live oak’s branches the bright red lichen that so often decorates their burly arms. And I’m reminded of Helen’s comment on a recent post: “The red lichen growing next to resurrection fern is the best dressing of this season.”

And the live oak itself, through all the changing seasons, and even centuries for some of them, retains its leaves in green evidence of enduring life. Like the living words of the Gospel message that still holds on through seasons of upheaval and confusion.

Helen’s right. The red and the green—crucifixion and resurrection, the plot and storied final pages of our teacher Jesus, that opened with a heralded birth still celebrated two thousand years later. The season’s blessing to us all.

 

98

Stout and sure live oak
sailing ships’ stems ribs futtocks—
mangers and crosses

 

*The words in the first three paragraphs here are after those on pages of my novel, The Widow and the Tree. Signed first editions of the book are available at Page & Palette Bookstore in lovely downtown Fairhope, Alabama.