After a time of travel, attending summer gatherings, festivals and meetings, celebrating a wedding anniversary, a family birthday, and Thanksgiving, I return to the solitude of my life by the lake. My closest companions are the trees surrounding my home. Their welcome holds a silence that is ecstatic, leaves of autumn gold and vermilion quivering with the slightest breeze.

Surrounded by beauty that is too much to take in, I feel disoriented by the absence of verbal expression. In my mailbox, I find what I’m longing for: a gift of words in a book edited by Gail Worcelo, Shamanic Journey into Earth’s Wisdom (NewPerennials Publishing, Vermont, 2024)

Without taking time to unpack, I dive into the cosmovision of Thomas Berry.

Reflecting on Berry’s words in Dream of the Earth (1988), Worcelo writes, “a return must be made to our deeper knowing, to the very genetic coding found within our deepest spontaneities arising from our roots in a 13.7- billion-year story of the universe.”(4) Berry teaches that these spontaneities come to us through visionary experiences, not only in dreams, “but also through those intuitive, transrational processes that occur when we awaken to those numinous powers ever present in the world about us.”(6)

While the afternoon warmth lasts, I visit the lake. I sit on a log at the edge of the shore, gazing at the water. As though a hundred gentle breaths were blowing across the surface, small hills of water are lifting and falling, lifting and falling. In silent communion, I invite a word to come from this living beauty at my feet, expecting the message will be some version of the advice I often hear, to be self-giving, to pour myself out for others….

Yet that is not what rises in me. Instead, I hear one clear word. If it were not so gentle, I’d call it a command. “Receive”.

Startled, I look again at the surface. Are those ripples laughter at my surprise? This watery being of loveliness only asks me to receive her gift…. I gaze in wonder.

I begin walking back to my home, past trees still radiant in October sunlight. From each I hear the same message: “Receive, receive, receive….”

It will take another day before I make the connection. The advice offered to me when I asked Andrew Harvey how I was to share with others the hope I hold for the planet. “No words! Love them. Burnish your light.”

Now the lake and trees are showing me how to do this.

Reading further into the book, I begin to grasp that a shamanic journey is a process of deep listening to the wisdom of life around us. Who can teach me how to listen more deeply? I look to a poet who has shared the wisdom of her own shamanic journeys.

Beside the Lake, A Note to Self by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

If you watch the heron as it stalks
amongst the tall green reeds, then pauses,
and in its pausing disappears, then you understand
something of the power of stillness.

And if you sit still long enough
to see the head of the snapping turtle
rise between the lily pads,
then you glean something of the rewards
that come with sitting still.

but if you sit expecting such rewards,
then perhaps sit longer and watch the cattails
as they waver and still, sway and still and still,
and feel how the urge in you to say something rises
and softens and softens until there is nothing to say

until that kind of stillness becomes
the greatest reward, until you feel
stillness hold you the way the lake
holds the lily pad, the way silence holds a song,
the way gratitude holds everything.

Thomas Merton knew how to listen to trees. I delve through my library, withdraw the book I seek: Writings on Nature: Thomas Merton:When the Trees Say Nothing, edited by Kathleen Deignan (Sorin Books, Notre Dame, IN 2002)

Deignan writes that Merton “sat in stillness and loved the wind in the forest and listened for a good long while to God”. There in the woods, he experienced himself at the center of the universe where at any moment the gate of heaven would open wide and he would perceive the undying heavenliness in the real nature of things. “Paradise is all around,” he heard the dawn deacon say: all we need do is enter in. (Deignan, 38)

And there was more for Merton in this paradise, as Deignan writes:

On each threshold of the encircling paradise awaited Sophia, “the mother of all,” the diffuse shining of God in creation. Merton understood her to be the personification of divinity, at once hidden and manifest in all things. She was the eros that throbbed through countless creatures that mated, bore, and nurtured the infinity of cells in the body of God in their shape-shifting dynamics of praise. Her beauty and magnetism drew all beings into life as communion, as thanksgiving, as festival, as glory. As the very love that unites the cosmos, Merton proclaimed Sophia “the Bride, the Feast, and the Wedding.” It was she whom he espoused in her forest pavilion. In her embrace he experienced overpowering peace and delight, and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world became his great love. Thus he learned the secret of intimate communion “sent from the depths of the divine fecundity.” (39)