A Tree Cannot Know Exile

Every home or any place called home needs a sacred tree. Doesn’t matter if it is sprawling or skinny, just so long as it belongs without any question.

Imagine what it must feel like when that place you call home, whether locally or across the world, is stripped of any or all trees that have been standing there holding hands for hundreds of years.

Once, when I lived for a few months in the beautiful Tuscan hills of Italy, I found my way every morning to a special writing place beneath one of three gigantic chestnut trees. Some locals said these trees were 500 years old! As we all know from grade school, to know a tree’s age you count its rings that are hidden from sight until the tree is felled. When the tree is no longer itself, its circles appear before our eyes. I ask you, would you rather look upward at the majestic beauty reaching skyward or cast your eyes downward to count the rings on the remaining stump?

One morning in the shadow of the Apennine Mountains, I made my usual trek up the path, writing pad in hand. I suddenly stopped and stood for what felt like an eternity. Those three trees were gone! When I could finally move, I walked up to one, then another, then a third massive, perfectly smooth stump and ran my hand over yesterday’s stronghold. Today, I could only cry: Who did this to you?

Villagers were furious and without knowing what they said in Italian, they clearly shared the same sentiment. Who? Why?

This sad story is playing out everywhere, Wherever you call home there undoubtedly has stood a fully grown tree long before you showed up, quietly in service, shading and cooling the earth while filtering the air, simultaneously. Too often, these very necessary and important friends of ours are the first to go when a developer rapes the land to build as many houses as possible in their place. A house is not a home. Soon after the massacre of acres and acres of grown and growing trees, the tiniest little saplings replace their elders only to face the same fate some day. The average lifespan of our tree friends is being systematically cut, even as we require more clean air to counteract global overheating. The tragedy that happened that fateful night in Italy when the utility company came through doing the henchman’s dirty work while everyone was asleep, is unforgivable. Shame is all that remains in those Sacred trees stead.

Twenty years is a short time in a tree’s life, but for me, those years that I have had the benefit of one tree friend in my field of vision day and night, has mattered to my way of connecting beyond the screened lanai. There are others that have come to matter to me, like the one I will soon revisit in Norwich, England. I pray the sprawling Cedar’s arms will be there where it belongs beside the man made Cathedral waiting for my return.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEUG1La2dtY

What makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage?

When I was a graduate student I chose the topic of Pilgrimage for my thesis. What I soon learned was how many others were as interested as I was in pilgrimage. It seems to capture the imagination. In hindsight, I see the many reasons it was of interest to me as a woman on the cusp of a changing life. It took many more years before I would embark on my own pilgrimage. I had one failed attempt when my long-planned pilgrimage was thwarted at the very last minute as I was about to board a plane: That connecting flight could not land in Boston in time for my international flight. It was over before it started. Another year would go by before I finally made that pilgrimage to the Anchorage of the medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich in England within months of the pandemic foreclosing all travel. Julian, herself, lived during the Black Death plagues of the fourteenth century. She had a near-death experience in which she saw sixteen visions. She survived three long days that forever changed her life. Writing about those visions became her life's work. An anchorage was just the place for a writer given that there was no exit! When she entered at the age of fifty she knew that she would spend the rest of her life living in that 12 x 12 room attached to the small parish church with three windows but no door! How did she do it? What was it like to live there? Could I? Could you? Seeking those answers comes as a "pilgrim call" to leave home to go to the place where one woman lived and died and has never been forgotten. She is now affectionately known to twenty-first century pilgrims as Lady Julian or Mother Julian.

In three weeks, I will be leading a small group of women on a pilgrimage to Julian's Anchorage. The writing that she left behind resulted in Julian becoming the first known woman to have written a book in English. A quite extraordinary feat for a woman in 1373 in direct defiance of the Roman Church who killed "heretics" for having a Bible in English rather than Latin. In spite of that, she wrote two separate versions which have survived for over six centuries. The first was known as the short text, or Showings; twenty years later while living in the Anchorage, she wrote her well-known Revelations of Divine Love. Both books are still in print in 2024! Her handwritten words were transcribed for posterity by some nuns and are now part of the rare manuscripts archives in the British Library. These writings fared better than the Anchorage and St. Julian's Church having been bombed to the ground during World War II. They were rebuilt and reopened in 1953 thanks to some nuns who did not want Julian's life story to be forgotten. Clearly, the nuns in the middle ages and those in the twentieth century were forward thinking in a way that has made it possible for the Anchorage to have become a pilgrimage destination. Many a pilgrim travels far and wide with Julian's most well known words "All Shall be well" on their lips and in their hearts. Our own pilgrimage will coincide with Julian's feast days, May 8 and 13, celebrated by both the Anglican and Catholic Church.

The Guardian Editorial* in the past week spoke to the ever-growing number of people who set out on pilgrimage each year and continues to increase exponentially. What is behind this global phenomenon reaching across geographic, demographic, and ideological beliefs? The answer may be in the word itself:

WHAT IS A PILGRIMAGE?

For as long as humans have walked, they have walked to get closer to their gods.

The Greeks made these quests, as did the Israelites, the Mayans, and the Chinese. Jesus hailed these journeys, along with the Buddha and the Prophet Mohammad. These wanderings have been around forever. Pilgrims made them in the eons before writing was invented. Believers made them in the millennia during which the great civilizations were built. Seekers follow them today.

Six stages characterize every pilgrimage:

1. The Call: The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, that summons expresses a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.

2. The Separation: Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.

3. The Journey: The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain of the journey itself. In India, pilgrims approach the holy sites barefoot. In Iraq, they flagellate themselves. In Tibet, the more difficult the trip the most merit the pilgrim acquires. In almost every place, the travelers develop blisters, hunger, and diarrhea. This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

4. The Contemplation: Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation.

5. The Encounter: After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin membrane in the universe and return to the Garden of Origin, where humans lived in concert with the Creator.

6. The Completion and Return: At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world.

from: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/sacredjourneys/content/pilgrimage/

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/14/the-guardian-view-on-pilgrimage-a-21st-century-spiritual-exercise?CMP=share_btn_url

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4giQML7kMl4

Music Saved My Life.

Music educators take note!

I vividly recall the day that Mr. Filiatro, sporting a green bow tie appeared out of nowhere, or so it seemed to my eleven-year-old senses. He took off his suit coat placed it on the back of a chair, rolled up his white shirt sleeves, then set up his music stand in the school cafeteria. He passed out sheet music for “Oliver” which if you recall was the story of the orphan boy who dared to say: “More please, Sir.” Then, he lifted his baton and said: “Ladies, let’s sing."

Mr. Filiatro had no idea he was to become my savior. I have often wished that I had had the presence of mind, the maturity, and the understanding to tell him so. If only I had understood then the impact that he would have on my entire life going forward, I would have "climbed every mountain" to sing his praises. Forte!

God knows I could belt it out! My father had encouraged me and I had loved so much our time together at the piano which he had bought brand new for his three daughters so we could take lessons when he had never been given that chance. He knew music by heart and shared it unabashedly around the house singing all the musical theatre scores that he performed in community groups. I sang with him, as did my sisters, and we were something like the Von Trapps though not in the highlands but in the lowlands of a rural town. “Nothing could be finer,” to my ears.

In the first grade my sister and I, wearing beautiful handmade taffeta dresses (sewn by our seamstress mother), took the stage to sing: “Snow, snow, snow. Happy snow, snow, snow. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Snow, snow, snow.” Then we swished away behind the heavy, red velvet curtain as enthusiastic parents applauded. Those three minutes of my young life mattered in a big way.

On weekends my father was prone to working in the yard while I, always nearby to wherever he was, sang with him from the swing: “Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh what a beautiful day. I have a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way.” One song after another, we sang our duets: “If you were a picture, I'd hang you on the wall, sit back where I could see you, never move at all ...'Cause that’s how much I love you, baby.” One day, Daddy came home with sheet music for the song: "MOTHER". He secretly gave it to his three girls and asked us to learn it for Mother’s Day. Somehow without my mother’s knowledge (I doubt that) we did so, surprising her that May with my older sister at the piano while we sang. “M is for the million things she gave me.” She applauded and my Dad called for an encore. We obliged. Such was life. Until it wasn’t.

On a cold and frigid February night the music stopped when my father’s heart stopped beating. From then on, the piano sat silent except when I would hear the clink of a note or two at the brush of my mother’s feather duster. Silence does not always come in a welcome way. Silence does not always indicate harmony. Silence as we know, can be deafening. But, it was not so much silence, as absence. There would be three very long years living, so to speak, without the sound of music . If I sang at all, it was alone: A wailing song in the woods behind that little house.

So, when the day came in the school cafeteria, I knew exactly how that young orphaned boy, Oliver, felt when I sang those words: "Where is love? Does it fall from skies above? Is it underneath the willow tree that I’ve been dreaming of?” It had been a long, very long intermission between the acts of my young life. The second act opened when Mr. Filiatro brought his unassuming self with that precious gift of music back where it and I belonged, together, as one. Mister Filiatro had come just at the right time, in the nick of time. Time did heal. Music saved me.

This past Sunday, at long last, a moment presented itself for a an overdue thank you. I stood on the stage with the musicians of the string quartet* for whom I had served as Board President. They were honoring me, but I felt myself honoring Mr. Filiatro, my father, Edward Vincent, and Music itself. Unbeknownst to me, as I turned to thank everyone for sharing "Music Among Friends" I was holding in an unopened box the gift of a ticking clock: Time. Music is all about keeping time in a way that measures not just the beats of the notes, but the beats of our hearts. Music is a mysterious, magical, gift from the unseen realm that if left unheard leaves a hole in one's heart. I asked a composer friend how it can be that he hears a few sounds/ jots them onto a page as notes/ then when read and played by a musician or singer / another hears what began in his own mind? His response was: "the paper is superfluous"! Let that sink in the way that music itself sinks into every heart that hears her sound.

*flchambermusic.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miFo-2odEZM