But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Job 12: 7-8
Mary Rose O’Reilley was the guest speaker at Sacred Ground’s Eat, Pray, Give luncheon on May 12. She described in lyrical prose her recent four month experience in the wilderness, a journey into environmental spirituality.
Her small borrowed cabin was on an island on Puget Sound. She spent the winter months there—with the rain. At night she listened to the sounds of prey. The cabin’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto the “edge of the abyss”.
Like many seekers before her, she fled to the wilderness to pray. The isolation of her location, without car, television, or radio, and limited internet and phone service, was further from home than a Washington state address would imply.
A portion of her time included work at an intentional community that shared the island. She assisted in the clearing of invasive species. The seasonal rain, gray skies, and deep silence led to an experience “downward,” like going into the sea, where, in the deep, creatures live without sight and without light. An encounter with earth is an encounter with death, desolation, and recycled compost. All earth returns to earth.
Initially, she was nagged by questions that she had packed along for the journey. What to do about house and home? Answers were slow in coming and the ever-present questions nagged. She finally put them down.
Her initial panic, the jarring reality of the wild of the wilderness, gave way to a deep silence, a silence where there is lots of nothing. In retreat time we let go of the foreground of our lives. We know where we’ve been, we don’t know where we’re going. In that silent space, without doing something, eventually something shifts.
Mary Rose’s retreat experience was interrupted when her partner, Robin, brought his fiddle and came for a visit. The initial plans for a week’s stay expanded to a month, and then to six weeks. Like a she-bear awakened, Mary Rose met her intruder with a fierce protection for space and silence. She admitted that it is true that you can be a contemplative and a jerk.
Robin challenged Mary Rose’s ideas of who she was, what God wants, and what is next. Conflict that was easy enough to manage at home took on a new immediacy. Within their thirty-year relationship, Mary Rose had learned to speak out in conflicts that used to make her mute. Now she practiced quiet, not in the original muteness of the victim, but in the thoughtful wisdom that reins in that which need not be voiced. In such close confines, it was necessary to look underneath these wild feelings to see what was truly going on. No easy escape. And then surrender. The last two week’s of Robin’s stay were calm.
After Robin left, loneliness, archetypal loneliness, set in, existential loneliness that is an inescapable part of life; the loneliness from which we learn to breathe, expand and let go. The third stage of her retreat experience arrived, and with it, grace. She reminded us that one knows grace when it happens.
The universal religious experience is one of unconditional love. We have to find out what it is we are in love with. We slide in and out of two ways of being: we can look with the eyes of the mind, or we can look with the eyes of love. The latter transforms us. In that, love is a place where something can be born. How to see with the eyes of love and be grounded in the real? We need to embrace the world like a lover, moving in and out of contemplative space. We are created to be environed, to sense a ring around us, connected and protected.
The loneliness gave way to a sense of wild freedom. She became indifferent to the big decisions she had packed along. She felt entitled to pitiful stability. Modern life isolates us. Living amidst trees is like a child with elders, a secure knowing that deepens silence.
Speak to the earth and it will lead you. Ask the animals and they will teach you.
Mary Lou Logsdon guides people into the silence through Spiritual Direction and Retreat. She is located in the Twin Cities and can be reached at logsdon.marylou@gmail.com .










