AHO !

On the expectation that becoming will explain being.

Nature. It’s a savage beast.
A sudden orgiastic ground,
an incessant flux of sex and death,
a heaving, pulsing sound.

A soft plume of winter’s breath
hangs over broken strands of bone and brown,
poking through the thawing snow
of this sudden orgiastic ground.

Incessant flux of sex and death,
a phase of constant flow,
one last plume of winter’s breath,
then sound,
a low,
aho.

I began this morning with a tree and somehow ended up questioning the terms of existence. A fairly ordinary morning, then.

A tree takes carbon dioxide from the air and water through its roots. Sunlight supplies the energy with which it makes sugars and builds its body. Light, air and water becoming wood, leaf and fruit. There are other ingredients, of course. But stay with that for a moment. The solid thing before us has gathered so much of itself from what we can barely see.

Jesus, I thought. And then, quite literally, Jesus. The carpenter. The wood. The flourishing body and its fruit. The body hung upon dead timber. Bread and wine, themselves products of sunlight and cultivation, offered as flesh and blood. The correspondences arrived faster than I could examine them. For a moment, the material process and the religious story seemed to occupy the same space.

But a correspondence is not proof. The beauty of the connection does not establish its truth. I had felt something come together. What, exactly, had come together?

I often encourage people into nature. I speak of reverence, of relationship, of a world we have become dangerously distant from. I mean those things. But if I call nature a portal to the divine, what am I claiming? The thaw exposes bone as readily as it releases a flower. The ground receives both. If I am going to read the character of God from creation, I cannot keep choosing the bits that make me feel welcome.

It is a savage beast. I love it. I am also subject to it. Neither fact explains the other.

Perhaps I could bear the suffering more readily if I knew what it was for. We are told to grow, to heal, to become whole. Individuate. Discover the self beneath the selves we have assembled. I have spent years taking these invitations seriously. But suppose we do it. Suppose every one of us becomes sufficiently conscious, sufficiently integrated, sufficiently able to stand within our own life.

Then what?

There may be practical benefits. Less harm. More honesty. A little more room between an injury and our response. These matter. But we have no established reason to believe that becoming sufficiently developed will reveal why any of this had to happen. Becoming wiser about living is not the same as discovering why existence exists.

Love is usually offered here. To love and be loved. As though that settles the account. Yet love exposes us to the very world we are struggling to accept. I love my children. That does not mean I understand, or consent to, all that can happen to them. Their existence matters to me beyond anything I can explain. It does not make the arrangement clear.

So perhaps it is all just a process. Light, matter, chemistry, organisms making more organisms. Sex and death. An awareness arising somewhere within it, asking what the hell is going on.

But I catch myself at “just”. I have no more earned that dismissal than I have earned the certainty that everything is divine. Naming the ingredients does not settle what their existence means. Nor does my need for meaning establish that there is an answer waiting.

There is something almost offensive about arriving here after so much thought. No revelation. No useful little lesson to carry home. Even my demand that the morning produce something useful begins to look peculiar. Must every encounter with existence improve me? Am I allowed to look and fail to understand?

In the circles I have sat in, we pass a talking stick. When we have finished speaking, we say “aho”. The others repeat it, regardless of comprehension.

I think I would like it to be my final word.

I cannot tell you exactly what I would mean by it. There would be things I had loved and things I had never managed to understand. There would be questions still going, even as I stopped speaking. I would have had my turn with the stick.

Would I need to have understood it all before I could put it down?

Aho.

Background reading: NASA on photosynthesis.