The Sound of Water on Stone ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
August 21, 2022
Last winter, in preparing to set forth on my recent sabbatical, I set a number of goals for myself. This can be risky: I wasn’t confident that I would succeed in achieving most or even any of them. I worried that I would return to you feeling that I had failed, feeling disappointed. But I started by discerning what I most needed, and I tried to carefully craft responses to those needs, without completely overwhelming myself.
My chief goal was to deepen my spiritual life, and my practices, and to be able to lean on those to create more emotional and mental space in my life. This goal worried me the most; it was not concrete, it could not really be measured or seen the way that garden work could be, or the project to reclaim the flat surfaces in my home office. And truth be told, since I have returned it’s the goal I most worry about being able to sustain. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Early on, back in May, possibly around Week Two, I was talking to a colleague who had just returned from her own sabbatical. “I’m not feeling the spaciousness that I hoped for,” I told her. She thought about that for a bit. “It’ll come,” she said.
It’ll come.
But in reviewing and assessing how I was spending my days, I came to an important realization. Spaciousness wasn’t going to simply arrive in my life all by itself. I had to go out and find it. I had to make it happen.
Spaciousness, of course, in this context means a sense of having room – room in our daily lives, room to inhale and fill our lungs with enough air, room to rest when we need to, room to explore what our spirits most need on a particular day, room in our hearts. And in this world we live in, in this era, it can be remarkably hard to find spaciousness, whether we are working for a living or not. The goal of our culture seems to be busyness all the time, to race from one activity to the next, one idea to the next, one podcast to the next. It can feel as though we are scrambling to keep up.
I realized that I wouldn’t feel the spaciousness I was craving, and curious about, until I actively sought it; pursued it. Thus began weeks of contemplative reading and practice, time with a spiritual director, explorations of what could help my heart open. My experiments ranged from Qi Gong to contemplative photography. And yes, spaciousness emerged.
I had to actively pursue it, make space for it. Spaciousness waits for us to allow it to appear – it’s a little bit shy. It will take a back seat. And so, to make room, to seek space in our lives and souls, we have to become intentional about it.
It feels a little paradoxical – shouldn’t spaciousness emerge when we’re relaxed and not striving for it?
On our third day in Portland, Oregon, during our UUA General Assembly, several of us headed out to the Japanese Garden on the outskirts of the city. After air travel and 2022’s crowded airports and planes stuffed to the gills with unmasked travelers, after full days of programming: lectures and worship services, we stepped away. This very act of intentionally seeking a place of beauty is a metaphor for how we need to actively pursue spaciousness; after all, the garden wasn’t going to come to us.
We entered another world. A world of intention, and peace, designed to encourage the visitor to move slowly, to savor, to listen and look, to breathe. It was “the Zen garden of a million surprises,” a friend wrote recently. Certainly it was peaceful; the sounds of the city left far behind us. There were the sounds of water trickling over stones, birdsong, breezes, the quiet murmur of voices. It was peaceful, but it was so much more than that. And it was beautiful, but it was so much more than that, too. It was a place of invitation, where we were welcome to slow down and allow every element to enter our consciousness. As we walked we noticed more and more: how carefully even low groundcovering plants were chosen to coordinate with the stones in the paths – plants with tiny leaves placed along sections of path paved with tiny river rocks. How the moss was weeded, so that the texture was unmarred, uniform. How the moss could then capture light and shadow, and drew the eye both straight down, and also ahead to slopes and curves. We noticed areas of meticulously raked sand that captured the light, and then drew our eye toward the trees and shrubs planted around the edge. We didn’t realize at the time that we were experiencing the ‘hide and reveal’ design that Karl told us about in our first reading. Garden elements and vistas were sometimes hidden from view, and then exposed. Sometimes we were offered a bright blank canvas of white sand, to rest the senses, which then drew us forward to the texture created by leaves, branches, color, and shadows. We spotted a small shrub or two planted at the base of a larger one, trained to almost cover it. We weren’t sure in the moment whether it was intentional; but clearly it was.
The Japanese garden requested our participation. The more carefully we looked, the more we saw. “The Zen garden of a million surprises,” wrote my friend, “but you could only see them if you bent and twisted and looked every which way.” The tiny azalea shrub planted within a larger shrub could only be seen if you bent and looked. Spaciousness here was not a passive receiving of beauty and peace; it was an active joining in, looking and bending, a response to the care and intention with which the garden was designed.
One revelation in particular caused me to stop and simply stand still in surprise: hearing that every stone in the waterways throughout the garden was placed in its exact position by the designer because he was seeking a particular sound. Even the sound of water on stone was intentional.
We were so at peace in the garden. We felt receptive, fully alive, able to see and feel the effort and intention behind the design to create the space we needed to access emotion, awe, and wonder. “A Zen garden of a million surprises.”
The memory of the Japanese garden brought into focus for me the need for intention in order to create spaciousness. It has helped me to understand it in a visceral way; deep within. As I remember how I felt in that space I can feel the emotion welling up inside of me; the sense of being present, fully present, in a space that was created not just to be beautiful, but created as a gift to help me, and millions of others like me, to locate that sense of spaciousness that we crave and need so badly. Yes, it was beautiful. But it represented so much more than superficial beauty; it was an offering – an invitation to connect, to feel, to open the eyes of our hearts.
Now, nothing is perfect. And so, near the end of our visit, our peace was marred by the sound of a chainsaw. Gardeners were active throughout the garden while we were there, carefully nipping a leaf here or pruning a small branch there, but clearly there was a larger project that required the intrusiveness of a power tool.
And such is life. We can find moments of spaciousness, those chances to breathe deeply, to contemplate, to be aware and grateful, and then the loud whine and rattle of a chainsaw will intrude. And here again the commitment, the intention, has to be present, in order to move away from the commotion. The disruption in our lives is inevitable. What is our response?
It’s one thing to set out with intention – to design a garden, to plan a sabbatical, all the thousands of human endeavors. But the design is only the beginning; the perfect placement of the stones so that the water will make the right sounds, the positioning of trees and shrubs and moss to play hide and seek with us. Or in my case, the planning of the carefully chosen reading list, the meaningful spiritual practice. But as we saw in our visit to the Japanese garden, the intention must be carried on through daily maintenance – gardeners with clippers gently pruning small shrubs, weeding moss. And sometimes carrying out our intentions requires more drastic action, a bigger intervention: a chainsaw perhaps, or a silent retreat.
And so, my friends, my question for myself in returning here, resuming my ministry among you, was how I was going to maintain my sense of spaciousness, once the daily realities came crowding back in with that loud whirring of a chainsaw. Of course, it’s early days yet, and I won’t know for a long time how successful I’m being. But I can keep the images from the Japanese garden in my mind’s eye, and in my heart, and know that the answer lies within the care with which we create our spiritual environments. The answer is in commitment, in intention, and in practice. Spaciousness does not offer itself to us without our desire, our action, and our commitment.
I leave you with the words from our opening hymn:
Seek the essence, hold the essence, let the essence carry me.
Let me flower, help me flower, watch me flower, carry me.
In the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit giving power,
I will find true harmony.
May you seek and hold that essence, that power, and that spirit, and may harmony accompany your days.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
