A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov: “Variation on a Theme by Rilke”

It’s morning. More to the point, it’s Monday morning, the day I‘d set aside to write my weekly Reflection on the Sophia blog.

My mind is empty of inspiration, crowded out by feelings that hover dangerously near helplessness and despair as we continue a planetary rush towards destruction. This past week brought record breaking heat into the 40’s Celsius across the US and Europe. The Acropolis in Greece was closed to tourists, people were urged to avoid the burning hot sands of Spain’s beaches, while in Rome, visitors were dousing their heads in the famous fountains…. In South Korea floods from unprecedented rainfalls were washing out bridges, cars were caught in tunnels, their passengers drowning in the sweep of water. Nearly every report included someone commenting that these events are our new reality on Planet Earth.

As I sat in prayer this morning, wordlessly pleading to Sophia, Mother Wisdom, for inspiration, a few lines from a long-forgotten poem rose in me. “A certain day became a presence…” With no other guidance on offer, I set about locating that poem, written by the British poet Denise Levertov. I lifted the heavy 1063-page volume from my bookshelf, turned to the index of first lines… and there it was, just as you see it at the top of this page…

However, as is often the case with such gifts from Sophia, the work had just begun…

I invite you, as i did, to revisit the poem, to enter into it imaginally, feeling yourself breathing the air as Levertov describes it, air that is a sky of light, (not a curtain of smoke!).

A being is descending towards you from the height of noon… this being bends towards you, strikes you on the shoulder with the flat hilt of a sword, making you a knight like one of Arthur’s noble company….

granting you both “honor and a task”.

And you become the “bell awakened”

… you hear your “whole self saying and singing what it knew,”

what it now knows…”I can”

What follows for you now?

What do you already know about your role?

What does “I can” open in your imagination?

What would a “Change of Consciousness” mean for you?

Last week, I wrote of Thomas Berry, the brilliant, inspired, ecotheologian who, in the last decades of his long life, wrote of the causes of the looming planetary disasters, adding that our current efforts at curbing fossil fuels along with recycling, re-purposing, and simplifying our material lives…are inadequate to stem the tide of destruction. Berry insisted that what we needed most was “a change of consciousness”.

Today I begin my task with Berry’s advice, searching my memory for people I’ve heard about, read about, or known, who, while pursuing a “change of consciousness” for themselves are opening a new path for others. The first memory that arises is of the Japanese scientist-researcher who explores the effect of thoughts and words on water. His photographs of the water crystals show stunning beauty as a result of being exposed to loving thoughts and words. Exposure to dark, ugly thoughts and words results in misshapen, ugly crystal formation.

Dr. Emoto reminds us that as our human bodies are composed mostly of water, we too can be affected by the words and thoughts we allow to influence us.

From water, my thoughts move to plants, to researchers exploring the intelligence of plants. My friend Corinne facilitates workshops on plants, sharing her understanding that plants want to assist us in our task of healing life on the planet. With a sensitive hearing device, Corinne shows me how to listen to the distinctive music created by individual plants.

And this opens another memory. Efforts to purify huge bodies of water like the Thames River in England and other European rivers as well as rivers in watersheds in North America, choked off by dams, have surprised planners and scientists by significantly reducing the time estimated for the task. One person involved in the clean- up of a river that flows from BC to Washington State said it was as though the river itself was assisting in the task.

That reminds me of my friend Mary, who for over two decades spent her summers helping to purify the lake water at our summer place, polluted by the remains of logs once transported through its water system.

” How do you know what to do?” I ask her. It seems to me an impossible task.

“I ask the water,” Mary replies.

I think of Suzanne Simard, a Canadian researcher and Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry. Combining exhaustive research and a lifetime of careful observation of the BC forests, Suzanne uses an intuitive understanding to embrace the living intelligence of trees. In her book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Penguin Publishers, Canada 2022) Suzanne describes “the wood-wide web”, an astonishing underground network linking trees of different species with nurture, medicine and information. A photo in her book shows a Sitka Spruce Mother Tree on Haida Gwaii in BC. The caption reads: “The Hemlock saplings in its understory are regenerating on decomposing nurse logs, which protect the new regeneration from predators, pathogens and drought.” When logging companies destroy old growth trees, they also destroy the information stored in the trees’ roots, which would have been capable of passing on centuries of experience dealing with climate catastrophes.

By the time I complete my day’s work exploring what a new consciousness might involve, I begin to glimpse the magnitude as well as the simplicity of what Thomas Berry is advising. Like his much-admired spiritual forebearer, the Jesuit Priest and Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry understands that a divine presence permeates all that lives.

By means of all created things, without exception,

the divine assails us, penetrates us and molds us.

We imagined it as distant and inaccessible,

whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

(Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours, edited by Kathleen Deignan and Libby Osgood, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2022

How would this new consciousness affect the ecological crisis that assails us?

We only save what we love,

and we only love that which we recognize as sacred.