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Connect to God’s creation listening for moment’s song

Ray Waddle  Guest columnist

Tennessean (newsmemory.com)

When the world situation gets me jittery, and the phone is abuzz with hustle and doom, I step outside to catch a breeze. Even there, it’s a struggle.

The heat this summer feels punitive, a wounded response to human excess from the natural world. Politics makes even the weather an ideological battleground.

Nevertheless, a few minutes outdoors is always calming. Land and sky seem to have a mind and heart of their own and are ready to share them.

I picked up a new book recently, just in time: 'Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth' by Randy Woodley, a Cherokee descendent, author, and wisdom-keeper.

Woodley’s common sense and gentle skepticism about modern habits are a refreshing departure from our tortured debates and methods of coping.

In these 100 short readings, his message is simple.

Our culture is on a destructive path, but we can change it. Indigenous wisdom is within reach … Speak from the heart. Balance work and rest. Laugh at yourself. Pray. Be generous and accountable. Watch and listen. People long for harmony, mutual respect, a feeling of awe. Deep inside, everyone wants 'Eloheh,' the Cherokee word for wholeness, peace, harmony.

'Begin working your way down the list and incorporating these Indigenous values into your own life,' writes Woodley, co-founder of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice in Oregon. 'Search for songs, ceremonies, and stories from your own ancestry. Look for friends who align with these values. Good medicine awaits us ...'

Woodley comes out of Christian experience. Living on the land alerts him daily to nature’s brute power but also sharpens his senses to the rain, sun, stars, red-tailed hawks, wind. Each tree, he notices, sings a different song as the wind blows through it. Each moment is unique.

'Savor the sacredness of these times. Allow them to flow freely.

Encourage people to share from their hearts.

We can’t control the outcome of any given situation but only respond to it. Let each moment sing its own song.'

I’m all for it. But it takes me time to get there, some detox time to root out the annoying second-hand opinions in my head, the aftershocks of living in the economy of anxiety.

The detox partly depends on being open to new images of daily experience. Woodley talks of becoming intimate with the land, treating the relationship like a courtship, a kind of marriage or partnership to cherish, not something superficial.

It’s peculiar that the current technological era considers itself superior to the ancestral past, he writes. Previous generations didn’t go around injuring 'the earth that feeds them and maintains their existence as a species.' If we’re so smart, why do we work against our own self-interest?

Despite our lethal contradictions, a connection to God’s creation can make the human community feel confident about the future. We can become adventurers together, learners, awakeners, deciding how to live out our spirituality each moment on the road to being better ancestors.

'After all, we have only today to be fully alive in this world – to be fully human,' Woodley writes. 'Our humanity is exercised one moment at a time, one day at a time. That includes today.'

Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean staffer.