It is a beautiful gift to wake and find oneself in the woods; among pines so tall that there is no one patch of full, unmuted sunshine to feel the sharpness of Father Sun’s rays. To sit on the porch and listen to the mingling of sounds: the birds various songs; the intermittent sound of traffic over and down the hill; the sad confused cries of a small child trying to grasp the world and somehow make sense of it all; all of this punctuated by the high piercing scream of a saw cutting through what surely once lived here giving shade.
I am in a mood. My heart, oozing down the steps is trying to catch it’s breath, lying there on the porch near the little sleeping dog, who is in a sense that very heart; walking and dancing and laughing on four legs. Very old now she sleeps hour after hour, slipping ever so slowly away.
It is the space between the trees that has my divided and shifting attention. It goes at first unnoticed. One tends to focus on things: on bark and limb of tree; a shingled roof collecting pine needles; the deciduous trees, pale and bright, among the pines; the Great Cedar whose truth is even more profound. They are the true elders in a sea of wisdom flowing over these hills; crests and troughs, waves who never break but slip silently into desert or diminish into mountain peak. The Cedar: their bark; holy flesh to our humanity. Their robes of wisdom they wish to open to us in gentle embrace. They have called me here to rest and breath in this sacred space between their kind. God is the sunlight filtering through the leaves and needles to the floor below. Every time I focus on the trees God slips by, unseen, right before my eyes. The Jays are Gods way of distracting me from the pure divinity I seek, lest I vanish into the woods and forsake all.
Don’t let the bark of the Mighty Cedar, thick and long, fool you, they are light and porous and think of us as beloved. Even in our insanity we are beloved to God and the trees.
Just as the tears that my heart cries are more healing than those that fall from my unseeing eyes, are the rain drops that fall not just once from the sky but kiss and roll gently from the Cedar’s delicate hand and bless with an added measure of grace.
I feel the heat now, filtering down from above, it does not reach the floor of pine needles but releases new scents of every kind and they are moving through the space, which is God. All of the forest scents mingle, released by the Sun’s heat and shifted by the currents moving gently through this sea of green.
I breathe in this holy sea like a natural born mermaid and look up to the surface which is the blue sky above. This sea of green in which I sometimes float and otherwise rest upon it’s floor is for now home. My heart breaks for all of the people who live in cities and slums and prisons and do not breathe in this holy green vibrant divine air. Just now a deer realizes she has some how inadvertently walked up upon a person sitting silently in her path, as she turns and walks delicately away, I send this blessing out into the world to all of those who live in cities and slums and prisons and have no way of experiencing this at this time. I unwrap the cloak of the Ancient Cedar and cast it wide like a net over the world, blessing everyone equally.

Shar Shk Buk X
Sunday June 7th. 2015
Pollock Pines, California