Journal of Sacred Work

  Here are three choices for the next few minutes of your Monday. First, you can do what American society and Karen Carpenter’s song call you to do. You can let Monday get you down (especially if it’s raining where you’re reading this.)
   Second, you can email me and I’ll send you my thoughts on using Monday as a way to challenge "patterned thinking" – a way to test your cognitive thought process and how change can occur. But do you really want to go through a thinking exercise with all the other challenges facing you as a caregiver?
   The third choice is to join me for a couple of minutes in a meditation on the image of a special living thing: A Smoke Tree…

   The Japanese Garden at Cheekwood in Nashville is called Shomu-en which
means  "pine mist garden." The mist is created by the puffy heads of smoke trees planted between low hills in ways that evoke the fog so common in
this part of Tennessee.

   I have written once before about the gardens at Cheekwood because I think they are among the most restful places in the Southern United States. And it is peace, rest, serenity that I offer you, as a caregiver, today and every day.
   There is a sort of viewing pagoda set up at Cheekwood from which you can contemplate part of the garden including rows raked gravel, the curves of hills and, at Shomu-en, the Smoke Trees. The invitation is not to enter this part of the garden but simply to observe it – to let it inform your heart however it may.
   I’ve visited this place many times and often wonder at the rapid glimpses most people take at the garden. More than half the people, like most folks visiting a museum, take a glance at the scene before them then quickly move on. "Move on to where?" I ask myself. Was anything actually seen or experienced in those two or three seconds, or are most individuals that race past anxious to check off the latest sight so they can move on to the next one?
   This comment is not a judgment but a question and an observation. The song of the Japanese Garden is the same quiet music I offer to you. It cannot be heard on the run. It requires taking some deep breaths and attending to breathing and scent. It is the call to slow our pace, to engage all of our senses to the point where our the door to our very soul may drift open.

   There are countless magic sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes inside Shomu-en. Part of the pathway to the viewing platform travels through a bamboo forest. With the slightest breeze, the bamboo will sway like closed-eyed dancers moving their hips to rhythms only they can feel, conversing with light tapping sounds as they brush each others bodies.
   Shomu-en opens her soft arms to comfort all who come to her. It is a place that offers a rich opportunity to experience the sacred. A place that, today, you can visit throught these pictures and words without climbing in your car and driving there.

Shomu-en

Eyes closed, the scent of autumn coats the air.
   Many souls have traveled here.
   Many more will come.

The Bamboo have their own souls.
Their torsos clatter in breezes that
gyrate shadows, tease the sun into darting
& dodging for new angles to reach ground.

The fingers of Japanese Maple, dainty as Geisha’s
holding trays of tea, wait,
heads bowed to the autumn sun.

Smoke Trees model their colors,
their branches, their naked trunks,
for anyone or no one.

It is Monday for us. For them, it is
an autumn of light in their outdoor
home. These trees have their intelligence.

They know the secret of the pine mist.
They know not to hurry through the day.
They know the day cannot be hurried.

-Erie Chapman