Saturday, December 31, 2022

Inviting the Kami

On a bright, warm afternoon yesterday, last week's polar vortex behind us, a Rose of Sharon needed attention. It was my way of looking forward in hope to the burgeoning of a new year. 

In winter, when the leaves have fallen, you can see branch structures you only guessed at in summer. But you can only estimate what will happen when the earth warms again--what remaining bud will take up the challenge in answer to your pruning.  My friend Erika's instinct is vastly better than mine, but even a consummate expert can only prompt a tree or shrub to respond. You're inviting a living thing into a partnership. 


It's not the only way to prune. You can, instead, try to wrestle a hedge into geometric submission. It will look just about the same in winter as in high summer, just grey and thin instead of green and dense. You can create a garden that unilaterally imposes your own will on the landscape. 


At one end of the continuum, the vast and elegant sterility of Versailles. At (or near) the other, the tea gardens of Kyōto, where every tree, every stone, and the garden as a whole, is a You to which the gardener responds--a divinity, a kami, owed veneration and respect, a Presence that makes a reciprocal claim on its caregiver.


The care of the soul isn't all that different. The repressions of orthodox religious strictures  prune inner life down to held-in-advance notions of human experience that shear away everything outside their preconceived lines. Some strains of Christianity might well be near the head of the line on this score, but before you name it as the singular culprit, maybe talk to some queer Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and/or Hindus about their struggles to get free of the homophobia they've experienced from within their traditions of origin, and about the internalized toll it can take.


There's another way of shaping the soul--with careful attention to and respect for what's already there. Waiting patiently until the branch structure reveals itself in season. Inviting it to become more itself, to become more fully what it has always been, or has been growing towards. And there is no aspect of our inner life of which this is more true than of our erotic desires, and how we choose to express them.


On this eve of a new year, ask yourself not what you want to impose upon yourself, but rather what is arising from within you, waiting to burst out in leaf and flower in its own time, in ways you can imagine, but which you cannot entirely predict or control.






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