Our Friends: Sacred Counsel

Hello to you my friends who read and share this blog,

I hope you are living a life filled with kindness, in both the giving and the receiving. The most important lesson I keep hearing from Our Friends and others is to be love. Kindness is love. I have control over my ability to be kind, with myself and with others. In my practice, I send kindness, and ask for protection and help, to those I am concerned about, not only those I love and agree with but especially to those I do not personally know and may very strongly disagree with. I hope whatever your practice, you are finding the nourishment so precious to your soul.

I am beginning to evolve this blog. I’ll begin sharing in a variety of ways rather than primarily posts from Our Friends. What has always seemed most important to me about this gift is integrating it. I don’t say I have done so with total success. I have made as many mistakes in my life as anyone makes, but that is because it is my life, and always, ultimately, the choices are mine to make, with or without guidance from this communion I call Our Friends. 

I hope to include you more fully in the many ways I have been blessed by this communion. This is the integration. I will still share quotes and talks from Our Friends. I will also share my own stories, writing, poetry, and art. My focus will be on sharing communion experiences, as well as other mystical experiences, I’ve had. I will also share stories that give context to my life with this communion, things that are important to the whole picture. 

My hope is to offer you an integrated, probably complex, and truthful picture of what it is like to be someone who carries this sort of gift through life. I believe this is a gift just as artistic talent, mathematical skill, musical ability, or athleticism is a gift. We all have our gifts, and no one is better or “more evolved” than anyone else because of any gift they possess. I believe this profoundly.

I hope to tell my story in such a way that you will see it as a human story. Perhaps unique. Aren’t we all? But I hope you will see it within the context of a very human life. I believe every human life includes a profound longing for and answers from the source of all Creation, the source of all Blessing, the One who lives in us and among us at all moments. Perhaps in sharing my stories, you will recognize some of your own? 

I would love to hear from you if you have questions or comments, if there are places you would like to hear more. There is so much to share that I am likely to leave holes. My posts will be a sort of stream of consciousness sharing, though there is a book in progress that will organize it all more artistically and clearly (One hopes!). Please let me hear from you. Your notes are a source of joy and encouragement for me.  

If you want to be sure you will see each post (I am not a power post-er, so have no fear that your inbox will be deluged), please go to my site www.innerteacher.net and sign up to follow the blog. Then each new post will come to your inbox automatically. It also helps me to know that people are interested.

With love, Stephanie

And below, my first share….

Cedar

This is a story of ice, cedar and blessings. It takes place in western Washington, a place ruled by trees and rain; it is ruled by trees because of rain. Douglas Fir, with its dark green spiky needles and tree trunk-size limbs, soar 150’ into the sky; Western Red Cedar, with its soft and broad lacy light-green “hands” and gently swaying limbs, Madrona who live near the water with their ever-shedding bark that reveals wine-red skin beneath. We lived in the country, with these as well as pine, cottonwood, maples trees.

I must detour for a moment to tell you that I was desperately ill at this time. I had been told I probably wouldn’t live. I was enduring many losses: my job, career, graduate school, and my nature pastimes of hiking, backpacking, canoeing, kayaking. If you know what it is to lack the energy to talk, when breathing is sometimes exhausting, when lifting your chest for the next breath requires all your focus and energy, then you know how sick I was.  With the help of my beloved, I went from bed to the couch and back to bed each day.

From my place on the couch, I looked out a large plate glass window to a row of young cedars, whose gently swaying company in wind and rain became precious to me. In their beautiful presence, I felt accompanied in my long days alone. Above the cedars were the telephone and electric trunk lines that ran up our road and fed our rural area. Looking up and beyond them, across the road, was a thick stand of Douglas Fir reaching high in the sky as they competed for precious sunlight. Through another window, I looked out across our driveway to our old pine tree and beyond it an ancient cottonwood grew in a deep bog near the road. It was surrounded by a large family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

We had an ice storm. Now, western Washington does not do ice. Two inches of rain on the road is nothing. With ice we have no skill. I looked out the window to see arrowed prisms shooting to earth, clinging to everything they hit, sheeting telephone and electric lines, trees, leaves, with a mirrored transparency that threw light like sparks. I watched in awe-filled horror — having grown up in New England and knowing the terrible danger — as ice lay itself down, layer by layer, to an inch and a half think around the power lines.

Then things began snapping. Over the next several hours the weight of the ice proved too much for just about everything. The power lines broke with sparks and sizzle. Then the phone line. Our tall, elegant, ancient cottonwood’s thin, graceful limbs snapped like matchsticks. The fir trees dropped limbs the size of trees with a crack like lightening and a shake like an earthquake. That night we awakened to a resounding crash as the house shook. Our beautiful “flowering pine,” with its antique rose that had climbed to its top, turned around and grown back down, so when it bloomed its pale pink blossoms, smelling like apples, burst right at eye level — friends would marvel and my sweetheart would say “Yes, it’s our flowering pine. Very, very rare” — was lost. It’s shallow root ball was sucked from the ground by the weight of the ice in its branches; it lay destroyed in our driveway, just missing our car.

And the cedars? How did my beloved cedars do?

Well, this is the heart of my story.

As the hours past and the whip cracks and jarring crashes of trees tearing apart shook my house, I lay fascinated by the cedars. They took the ice to their bodies like a blanket or a lover, surrendering themselves to layer upon layer of ice as they simply, gently, and oh so quietly, bowed down, until they were no longer the graceful swaying green dancers I consorted with daily, but had become cones of white ice pointing to earth and sky.

And there they stayed, still and waiting. I felt their presence, so patient and accepting, cocooned in their center beneath the ice, like a monk in deep meditation, perfectly aware yet perfectly still.

It took four or five dazzling days of sun to melt all this ice. We lived inside a kaleidoscope world, light thrown from 10 billion prisms in constant motion. It was glorious and humbling as we lived with only a wood stove and strove for warmth and food.

I waited, as a child to unwrap a gift, for the cedars’ ice to melt. Were they ok, my lovely friends?

As the ice slowly melted and the weight lessened, the cedars simply rose, as though on springs. When it was done, they had lost only a lacy leaf here and there. They stood again as pure and whole and beautiful as ever, while around them the results of rigidity stood in devastation.

Trees can’t help how they’re made, and maybe neither can we. But we have choice. When I looked at the cedar’s rebirth, I saw my own path as well. I could not control what was happening in my bone marrow, but I could bow down, and in that surrender, that quiet, deep inner cocoon, I could listen carefully, oh so carefully, and wait. So when the ice of illness melted, whatever came, I would rise again ready to meet the sun and wind with my heart lifted and whole.

I have never forgotten this lesson. I carry it with infinite gratitude to cedar. It has served and saved me again and again. I share it with you now as a blessing from the trees.

Stephanie K. Nead

2017