by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

A little over a year ago, I had the great privilege of spending five weeks in a little cottage in a rice paddy on the island of Bali, which is part of Indonesia, in southeast Asia. On the second floor of the cottage was a little balcony that looked out over the rice paddies and the path to the main road and the closest village. There were houses here and there. I looked on the papaya tree, large fruit hanging, ready to be picked. I watched as villagers walked by, the women carrying all kinds of heavy loads on their heads from large buckets of dirt to logs to the other daily needs of their lives. The place was alive with sounds. I watched the ducks as they moved along looking for food. And much of the time, even with the sounds, a great quiet seemed to be all that was there. Bali is a tropical place, so you don’t move as fast there as they do in many places. If you do, a light-skinned American guy like myself will sweat even more than usual.

The first few days there, I was eager to get out and see things, to visit other parts of the island, to visit the stores in town, to visit all the temples and watch the processions to those temples. Those were all wonderful experiences, but the longer I was there, the lower a priority the trips outside the cottage seemed to hold. More and more I came to like just sitting in my chair up in that balcony, looking out over the rice paddies and watching the life of this place move by, slowly, from early morning until the sun went down.

There was a quality to this time that I could not remember experiencing since I was a child. That quality of time standing still and time having no beginning and no ending—it was just there to be in. There was something about the energy of this place and these people, who were very much a part of this place. I found myself, not so much concerned with what I would be doing that afternoon or the next day but very content to be in the moment I was in.

That time and that place seems like it is now a distant memory. It did not take long to be back in this culture to get caught up in the busyness that defines our lives and the getting from this place to this place quality of our days. But since returning I’ve noticed something different in my life. I’m more likely to just sit and spend time in my chair on my back porch at home. The view is a little different, and not certainly as exotic. There are other houses in each direction that aren’t very far away. There are all kinds of noises from the street and from neighbors, especially this time of year. But I love looking out on the yard. I love seeing how things are growing. I love seeing children and adults pass by.

There’s a bunch of bamboo in the back of my garden that sways gently in the wind. As the sun is setting, it lights up the bamboo like no other time of the day. At night, when things are really quiet, I can hear the bamboo moving gently in the breeze. In the morning I love to watch as the light graces it for the first time. There’s the Malaysian pine tree, a gift from a few Christmases ago, nearly felled in the ice storm in January, having its own growth spurt, prompting me to wonder if it will be too big for the corner of the garden it inhabits. There’s the fig tree that was the first thing planted there, a gift from people in the congregation, now a good-sized tree full of little green figs that will mature in a few months. There it is with its big, beautiful, Eden-like leaves.

Some mornings I look out over my little parcel of land and I find myself pondering just what has happened in this place over time. And having been in this place for a few years now, I’ve learned some things. There is a history to this place and I know only a small part of that story. I imagine it before there were property lines, when native people lived here, when this was a wild place. When all kinds of life were here that now cannot be supported by city life. I imagine as it was carved up for settlers at the turn of the last century, as German and Russian immigrants came to live here and later as it was red-lined for African Americans, as it has seen the ups and downs of economic prosperity. How it has seen one generation follow another generation to live in this place.

Some of that history is told in the things that I’ve dug up in the back yard. The small bottles used for medicine, I expect. The tiles that say Villeroy Boch Mettlach, a famous European china company. Someone, I expect, sold it for their living and the tiles were part of the deal. In the walls of the house were some medals. A photo of people long forgotten. I know that people have lived in this place, there has been sorrow and pain, joy and gladness here.

As I sit out on my back porch, I sometimes think about the fact that this place has been around a lot longer than I have and will be here much longer that I will be around, no matter how long I might live there. And that leads me to ponder even a further mystery: that owning this little piece of ground is a little paradoxical. Yes, I own paper that says I own it, but what does that really mean? It is not just about having it but also about caring for it and protecting it. It is about caring for it as it has cared for others living on it and how it cares for me.

What then is my relationship with this place? Yes, I own it, but it really isn’t mine. I expect I’ll be one of many owners who will make changes and be in this place, but in the end the place will be there. I am just a caretaker.

But that seems to fly in the face of how, in this culture, we see ourselves in relation to the earth and how we live in these times. There are so many ways that we are given the illusion of control. We are in a society where we have cars and trucks and airplanes to get us to where we want to go. Just a few generations ago, people coming to this place would have had to get here by rough rivers, over mountains, all at great risk. We have highways and vehicles that cut through all that, we control it. We have dams that harness the power of rivers, and bridges to span vast waterways.

And it doesn’t matter where we are, we can create just about anything we want to create. Want to go to Paris or New York? Why go all the way there… all you need to do is go to Las Vegas these days, you can get all kinds of things recreated just by being there. But can you really be in New York in Las Vegas? No, not really, just the illusion. But there are consequences in creating these illusions, consequences for ourselves and for the nature we share. It is too easy to think that in creating the illusions that we create, do we also delude ourselves of the consequences of our actions? How is it that what we see, or don’t see, affects the world that we are in?

The writer Wendell Berry talks about our relationship to the land and how we have come to think of it as tamed. He talks of how we’ve transformed wilderness into scenery, how we want to make nature a statistic. The height of a mountain is compared to the height of a skyscraper. Trying to quantify the feeling that comes from the view from a mountain is not possible, and yet we want to do that. Berry says: “We are invited to ‘see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain,’ as if our political boundaries had been drawn in red on the third morning of Creation.”

And in this, nature and the planet we live on gets reduced to another statistic. In our culture, we get scheduled, we take nature in pieces; we schedule it for a long weekend in July and another one in August. We parcel it out. It is one more thing that we consume in our culture. We go to snow, or surf or rainforest, without too much effort we are there, can experience and then leave it again. It becomes something we enjoy, something we have, and one more thing that we consume and move on to the next thing. We sometimes forget about the responsibility that comes with being in a place and making changes to that place and what all of that means.

In this, place is reduced to something much smaller. We lose a sense of awe of the grandeur of a place. We forget that so much really can’t be quantified. We forget the power that a place has, both for beauty, but also in the ways that the natural world can do its work. If we can just keep creating places that look like Disneyland, we really don’t need to feel much responsibility for them. After all, they’re not really real. But of course, real places are real.

In Bali I was most struck with just how beautiful everything is and how artistically everything is done. Everyone in Bali is an artist and that shows up in just about everything that they do. The way their homes are arranged, the way they make their processions to the temple. The way they dress, particularly for special occasions. They live their lives in spaces of beauty that they create and all of this makes for a very beautiful setting for just about everything that they do. They respect the island and the temples there. They make the places where they live living temples. You also learn that they have been doing these things for generations for the patterns for being together and how they have been in this place.

But over time, with new innovations, things have changed. Along the pathway I would look out over, I also quickly saw all the garbage that is floating in the irrigation ditches around the cottage where I was. All of a sudden I learn that plastic is a relatively new phenomenon there. For generations they have been used to disposing of waste in this way. When everything was biodegradable it worked out. Things were brought back to the earth. But the introduction of a new element changed that and now as you walk by these places you are quickly reminded of the effect of this innovation.

That was not easy to see in a paradisiacal place like Bali. Paradise is not supposed to have streams full of plastic and other garbage. But it was also good for me to see the garbage there and know that paradise just isn’t something that happens and magically remains that way. That my visiting there itself means there are consequences for that place. That one action is part of another and that I need to be aware of how everything that I do, from visiting such a place to being grateful for being there and being aware of my actions, how it all fits together. How I’m part of how all of this fits together.

Bali is a place that is easy to romanticize. It is so beautiful that it hardly seems real. And in that lies the danger.

I very much wish I would have had the opportunity to visit a place like Bali at a time when plastic was not an option there and there was no need to throw it into the irrigation ditch. But I know that that time is past and what we have now is the present. Wherever we find ourselves, we are called to know that place and to know where we come from.

Being present in the places we inhabit is a way to be in our present life. To find those places in the places we live and to get to know them. To know where we are planted. To know that we are not somewhere else but here. We have been in places in the past and they define us, and the places we are at present will shape us as well.

In these times, because of this and other inventions, we don’t get as many opportunities to see nature in action. We can, perhaps, take nature for granted. But then an ice storm or a flood or a volcano comes along and we are reminded of just how much we don’t know about the systems we live in. We learn that we’re not immune from nature. Indeed, we learn again that we can’t do much about it. We’ve learned that it can do much to interfere with our lives. Perhaps this flies in the face of some assumptions we've come to have. And that is good—to be surprised by nature.

It is easy in our lives to want to pass something off for the next generation to deal with. That is too often what happens and part of what I grieve about what we have at present. I think part of what I love about living in this part of the world, the Northwest, is the knowing that this awareness is present. People here have a deep love and respect for where we are and also know that it is not something that can be taken for granted. That is why the environmental movement is so important here.

In being in such a place as this, we see how our stories become part of the story of this place and how what we do will affect what is handed to another generation. All of life is a process and everything that happens in a place affects how that place will be in the future. As humans, with the resources we have claimed for ourselves, to use for good or for ill, we have done much to use up the resources of the earth. What we create can have all kinds of consequences.

Wendell Berry says: “We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation if full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover a sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence.”

As I sit in my little backyard, I’m humbled by its beauty. Looking around, I am reminded of all the things I have done to this place, all the changes that I have made. I am filled with thanksgiving for this place. And I’m aware that I haven’t really had that big of a role to play in all of it. And I also realize all the things that I can’t control.

Looking around I see what I have planted and what has taken root. It is a very different place then when I came there, but it is also reminder that what I plant is only going to take root if it is the right thing for the right place. It is a reminder that if it has the right kind of soil, gets the right amount of sun, gets what it needs, then it might grow. At the end of last summer I went to a dahlia show and ordered a bunch of tubers. I faithfully planted them this spring, I followed the directions, but I have to say that the dahlias that have come up have looked kind of small next to the dinner platter ones I remember from the show. Things are not always the way I plan for them to be.

I’m reminded that in the end, it seems to simply come down to mystery. There is a place in the garden where things just don’t want to grow, and it seems like it is something largely out of my control. And that, of course, is a lesson in life that each one of us works at, in our own way, most of the time.

That awareness of mystery calls us to a place of humility and respect in our relationship with the natural world. And that is so contrary to much of how we live in these times. We need to be in touch with this relationship these days, that we might be sustained and that we might sustain the natural world.

Thoreau says, “The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself.”

We need to be in the place where we are. We live in times when humility, when respect for this interdependent existence we share is not so fashionable. We see the results of our lack of stewardship all over the place. We see the results of our lack of respect for all living beings around the world. We learn that violence and greed only perpetuate more violence and greed.

There is much we can learn from the earth. There is much we can learn by striving to be in right relationship. The world is full of broken relationships. We have not been good stewards of our world and we are now able to see the results of that lack of stewardship. Valuing the places where we are, valuing the other living beings we are with, knowing that we have come from this place, all of this is the beginning.

It may be our backyards, it may be the park we visit. It may be the magnificent wilderness we find ourselves in this summer. Away from the city, alone somewhere that it seems has hardly been touched by people. It may be the relationships we nurture and all that we have to learn from every relationship we find ourselves in.

We come to know again that we are of a place and that that place is also of us. It gives us strength, it gives us hope, it gives us ground to stand upon. It is the awareness that we are part of this magnificent creation, that it is holy, that we are holy.

As we are able to tell the story of our place and know this place, we take a step toward sustaining ourselves in this creation. Annie Dillard says: “When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.”

We are living in times that are not easy. We hear day after day of the violence we are perpetuating in the world. We hear day after day of the ways that we are harming the earth. These are not times when we stand alone, but stand very much with the awareness that our actions affect so many other living things. They are times that call for holy fire, that spark of awareness of how we have been given a gift of this blue green planet earth. And we are aware of how that magnificent earth needs us.

We need the earth and the earth needs us. May all that we do spark that fire. That we might live in this place for a long, long time. Knowing, in faith, that we will find ourselves in the place just right. That by turning, turning, we’ll come round right. Amen.

Prayer

Great spirit, help us imagine a world free of violence, free of fear, free of destruction. Help us to know how we are agents of this world. How the decisions we make affect the planet on all life it sustains. Guide us, humbly, to live in the world. Amen.

Benediction

Be in this world, good people. Walk gently, love the earth, love your own life and all life around you. 

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.