What’s in a Name?

Mano reminder: Ask more. Ask more often. Ask more specifically.

As my heart warms . . . breathing deepens, brain relaxes, spine straightens to align harmoniously with the flow of earth and cosmos. We all, I am sure, have these soft interludes, when we slide out of our logical brain and make way for magic. We fall in love, with other people but also with our dogs, our sports heroes, our music, our work, our gardens. We find ourselves longing to return to some beloved activity over and over again: fishing, hiking, sailing, walking in the rain. All sorts of passions take us by surprise and cause our hearts to lurch and then surrender. Balancing left-brain linear with right-brain intuitive— logical thinking with magical thinking—brings joy, creativity, laughter.

Does it matter how we name these qualitative (versus quantitative) resonances? My friend relates them, simply, to a love of life. When this blog was in its early months, she encouraged us “to invite people to be open to experiencing and being deeply touched by nature, and to present this invitation in different ways.” She observed that “when we cultivate relationship we find our own names. If ‘gnome’ doesn’t work, another word will.” Barbara says that when she first became aware of the spirits within nature she kept asking, “Who are you? What is your name?” One day the answer came: “Your teacher I am. Your teacher I will be. What name you call me matters not to me.”

But then the question comes to me: How graciously do I, do we, accept the names others choose? And how free do I leave them to share with me their spaces of the heart? What I find myself wishing for these days is a softening of mind-borders, with the acknowledgment of the emotional state—this “in love” state—being something I look for in the other, and recognize as something I know, no matter what this person is calling it or even how well hidden it is. It’s like in the novel (and movie), A Man Called Ove, when a band of neighbors gathers around the curmudgeon Ove, because, often enough, they catch glimpses of great kindness and decency beneath his gruffness.

I would also appreciate people giving gnomes and nature spirits the benefit of the doubt. Rudolf Steiner cautions against “unfounded disbelief,” and I always think it would be great if people did the exercises and experiments in the right-brained world before declaring them invalid and beyond proof. How could it hurt to talk to a tree or thank a rose for its beauty, particularly if one could manage to do it objectively, with a true spirit of inquiry and without a judgment blocking the energy?

Sometimes the bridge to understanding is just a matter of pursuing a conversation with patience and good will. I have a friend from high school—a former college coach—who reads this blog regularly and has made gallant attempts to understand what’s going on here. His “normal” self, however, occasionally worries about what he sees as my relentless pursuit of “something that does not exist.” He has called it weird and goofy, this cultivation of connection with unseen beings, but I think what really bothered him was his lack of certainty that I actually believed in this other world. When I assured him that I do, and that my spiritual strivings are way at the top of my life’s pursuits, he was ok with all of it and pleased that we could keep on being friends across all divides. Me too! Those are critical parts of the dialogue, really: trust and open hearts. And I regard the dialogue around differences as an important one.

Barbara says that she doesn’t pursue a conversation about her involvement with nature and the elementals if she doesn’t sense receptivity from the other. She intuitively knows when to offer an opening and doesn’t go further if the invitation remains unacknowledged. For example, a local contractor recently working in her house had a discernably nice energy. After observing that he had lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 20 years, she ventured to ask, “Have you ever experienced the elementals or angels in nature, or had special experiences?” He said that his first wife had been interested in those things, that they had done sweat lodges. He missed that world, he acknowledged.

Barbara continues: “When people immerse themselves in nature, they are in the realm of elementals and angels, with or without knowing it. The name you assign doesn’t matter; and church teaching has nothing to do with that special feeling of being in nature. I believe that everyone inwardly yearns for a feeling expression that’s not mental and that wakes them up to the things they love to do. Once while chatting with a friend as we sat on the ground at the base of a redwood tree, just as I felt the special feeling that comes from being in the forest, my friend said, ‘Barbara, I just saw the most amazing thing. That redwood tree just overshadowed you with a blessing.’ ”

Mano is always urging us to build relationships, at first just by speaking to the trees and flowers, saying hello and expressing appreciation. “What name you call me doesn’t matter to me; what’s important is for people to become aware of what happens in nature,” he says. Indeed, Barbara emphasizes, we couldn’t breathe, we couldn’t live, if it weren’t for nature. When we make a conscious connection and “keep coming back” to enhance it, we show our willingness to participate in the grand scheme of life. “When I step outside and pay attention, I feel the freshness of the air and am embraced in love and well-being. Then I stop and acknowledge that and just breathe it in, embracing Mother Nature’s darshan, her holy blessing. The wind brushing against my face is the blessing of the air element; all the elements are there.”