BY THE LIGHT IN THE TREES-- part III

BY THE

LIGHT IN

THE TREESpart III

Haiku: In space between time You can find your faith by light in the trees

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By the light in the trees

Our church is built with stain glass branches, wild flower pews, beehive pulpits

and hymns that blow like music through the cold colored leaves in fall


The word G – O - D is spelled with letters that have not been written, described

by a faith that has not been spoken, and interpreted by a light that shines

through the birch and redwoods and oaks and madrones and pines and firs and

olive


We show our children a universe that is unfathomable and beautiful and alive

and moving-- which holds us in its immense web that connects us to a family of

all things


We tell them stories and play games in glowing shafts of radiance


We build cold memorials in ancient olive orchards, celebrations of life in old

theatres named after a bird on fire, beach glass alters in old mossy oaks,

driftwood shelters with holy bonfires on beaches, burning temples in the black

desert nights,


We sit quietly for hours with our small children and

look for blue glass on sunny seashore sands and make

up exotic stories how a magic tide brought them from

far away places


We show our children how to find fairy circles

around small mushroom towns, and how to find wild

orchards and make daisy chains to hang like garlands

over the secret door and place that blue glass as a

sacred offering for the fairy princess who lives behind

the curtain of light


We photograph our inspirations, water colors our

dreams, illustrate our hopes, sketch our self portraits


We sit quietly and tell someone how much

we love them


We walk sadly and tell someone how much

we miss them


We help someone, forgive someone, reach out to

someone, be true for someone who we have never

met and will never see again


A father stands proudly for his family and holds forth

to say life sometimes does not easily move on and yet

is filled with mystery we don’t understand and dear

one, have faith that the earth is still a safe place and

my arms are always there to catch you


A mother holds dearly a child to her chest and wraps

her arms around it with layers of colorful scarves and

knitted shawls and ancient love and holds forth to say

that even in this cold air your life will be warm and

bountiful and I will hold you and nurture you and

your children and your children’s children


The reflection of light is revealed by teaching our

youth how to build beautiful and sacred things


A community of beautiful people with tattoos and

piercings and bikes with no brakes and strumming

guitars and songs they write and skateboards they

ride and cans of paint and journals of notes and

sketches of ideas and torn jeans and smiles and hearts

who do not believe in a system that has a picture of

Sara Palin posing for a nation that confuses religion

and state with dogma and politics—but still feels the

glimmer of faith and connection to that mysterious

light shining into their live to be quietly, privately

dreamed about in the poetry they live


We can see divine intervention while we harvest honey


Our children will take their children to the church they build and listen to their

prayers at bedtime with stories of moonlight in the window


We feel the guiding spirit of a daughter

who is no longer on the temporal plane,

Shine down on a moonbeam,

Sets us down to rest

And quiets our mind

With a whisper of one small sacred truth

In the space between time

The mystery of light through the branches is real

If this is a meditation… the phrases, How well do

you remember? and Waters Rising produce an ache in

my chest with their huge loss and sorrow attached.

When I arrive at the phrase Light in the Trees, my

breath relaxes, my heart pauses, the knot in my

stomach unwinds and for a moment I feel a glimmer

of hope. As a meditation, I didn’t know why. It just

happened like that. I find solace in that. Writing these

entries is a journey for sure. There are no clichés in

grief this deep, but cliché as it sounds this is a journey

of discovery. Before I can write any of this I have to

discover what it means. It is not only discovering the

meaning of By the Light in the trees, or Surrender with a

Sigh, but discovering how to access a path to a deeper

understanding of those things. Phoebe could have

randomly chosen these titles for her art work, I could

have randomly had them inked into my arm-- there

are always easy logical explanations for why things

might be…. A journey is about seeing things for the

first time. I am learning the difference of the writer

who writes what he sees and the writer who writes

what he knows.

When I think of light in the trees my mind

immediately pictures the olive orchard where we held

our memorial for Phoebe. For me the olive orchard is

the perfect photograph of light in the trees. The

process of building a church; of expressing our faith

and reverence; of showing a devotion to a universe

that is huge with mystery: How phoebe’s girls club

stayed up late into the night stringing photographs,

tying garlands, even in the sadness laughing and

joyfully cutting and collecting; how family and friends

arrived in the warm morning and built alters, fire pits,

pews, tables for food and drink, how the boys played

guitar and jammed on the benches. I remember the

day of the ceremony. It had been warm for a month.

David Best had told us the orchard is always warm

this time of year, but that afternoon a cold and a wind

had settled on the hill like something brought from a

far away land-- The same wind that blew out across

the Marin headlands a week earlier. My grief and

exhaustion not of a world that was meant to be

inhabited by us mortals. I walked through the

driftwood arch, under the olive canopy with the light

casting through the branches and witness this church

It is a father’s duty to stand in front of his

family and closest friends and to speak of what has

happened. My closest friend Steve who stood beside

me had given me a metal cup to strike. Pause. Strike.

Sound ringing out into the orchard-- I see my family,

Phoebe’s family, Phoebe’s closest friends and allies

waiting, huddling together with blankets, rugs,

sleeping bags, anything to keep our bones from

rattling in a cold that is hard to describe. The sound

descended and with a whisper vanished. I saw the

light in the trees. Perhaps in that moment I

understood it perfectly, perhaps I put on an awkward

pair of my dad’s shiny minister shoes, but the first

words I spoke were: “God is in these trees!” In the

vacuum of that moment I felt my voice leave my

mouth and fall at my feet-- Eyes staring at me,

waiting, wanting, to cold to move. A voice leaned

over and whispered if you want to heal in this

moment you have to have your words become real.

Tell a story. Speak from your heart.

A funny thing happened, for all the notes I had

scribbled, for all the passages I tried to remember, the

poetry I had collected, the stories I jotted down—this

little Phoebe story I had forgotten until that moment

emerged:

It was a rainy dark morning traveling along

highway 580 to visit my parents. We left before sunrise

and there were howling winds and torrents of rain. The

road suddenly became flooded. I loose control of the van

and we go spinning down the highway, around and around

and around, I see my world flash before my eyes, my babies

asleep in the back, until finally careening into the overpass

wall and stopping sideways in the middle of the freeway,

our lights shining into a dark void with blind cars and their

glaring lights coming down upon us in the dark rain.

We’re invisible. Cars swerving. Our crumpled van

dodging. We manage to limp off the freeway. Disoriented,

scared and confused I access the damage in the gas station

fluorescent light. I ask my four year old daughter. What do

we do? Should we go on? Phoebe looks me straight in the

eye. “You should go on Dad. We need to go on.” And in

the first morning light we drove south.

I saw people shift in their chairs, I saw a

moment of relief, the cold lifted a few degrees and

words started flowing, I remember talking to

phoebe’s friends who were sitting on a blanket in the

front, I remember people smiling at me, nodding

their heads to say-- it’s okay we’re listening, we’re

hearing you. I remember the light in the trees that

contained this moment. I don’t remember what else I

said but I clearly remember the difference between

those words falling from my mouth and words

flowing from my heart.

It was an insincere voice that uttered the three

letter word and it made the cold even worse. I

understood that something was in those trees, but I

do not have a word to describe it. The way I have

raised my family, the way I raised my daughters and

sons is to see that word hidden in the beauty in the

light of the trees. Phoebe is a gift that now shines

that light so much brighter. As a family our faith is to

walk in the mystery by the light of the trees; look for

blue glass in sea shore.

We build that church in the olive orchard by

the light of the trees. We build that church under the

graffiti of the Phoenix Theatre. At the Phoenix I’m on

stage singing Forever Young and there must be 800

people listening to these words. I see all these

wonderful, loving, giving, caring, compassionate

people cryining and singing with me. I see all my

friends, all phoebe’s friends, my family and their

families and out of this amazing community I can

only see a small handful that actually go to church,

actually have a faith that allows them to sit in a pew

on a Sunday and have that moment with their God.

The rest of us-- where do we go when we need deep

faith and solace? Loosing a daughter, a sister, a close

friend, an inspiration-- where do we go? You show

up, you bring food, your guitar, your poetry, your

hug, your tears, your smile, your love, your eyes,

your help, your offering, your ability to build and to

see and to create. You honor a spirit and you touch a

mystery. We meditate, We sit, We walk, We play

music, We write, We build alters....

I just wrote that paragraph and while getting

ready to decorate the Christmas tree. (More light in

the trees). Jordan found this book I made with

Phoebe when she was seven. It’s about discovering

the mystery in the forest on some hikes we used to

take. (Thank you for the reminder Phoebe). I think

I'll post it at the end of this.

We just came back from our Christmas in Elk.

Drew and Jack, Henry, Jordan and Max and Pam and

me. A rainy afternoon spent at glass beach collecting

artifacts. The kids now twenty, eighteen and

seventeen still call me from long distances exclaiming:

Dad/Dave, blue glass!!! Still the little kids remembering

the stories we told about it. I can’t tell you how that

makes me feel. “We can put it on the alter for Phoebe.”

Collecting gifts from tide pools.

The other night we’re sitting around the

Christmas tree, I don’t remember what we are

talking about, but Max declares I don’t believe in God.

I get a jolt and feel a moment of yes you do take that

back…. But say calmly as not to sound parental and

get the kids defensive. “You do or you don’t, but you

certainly believe in the mystery you feel when you

take your long hikes in the hills, play music with your

bandmates, you believe in a mystery that you share

at sunset on the hill with your friends all standing

quiet looking out towards the ocean…. Maybe you

should say something like I don’t believe in the word

God for me it’s a bigger mystery that can’t be

explained by one word.” Surprisingly he doesn’t

argue and just nods his head and says yeah maybe.

When I was young my father was a Methodist

minister who built a church and grew a congregation

from a small handful to two thousand. I was a young

boy in this world—being told to say quiet as dad

wrote his sermons, dragged to Sunday boring school,

fidgeting for hours in boring church, potluck boring

dinners, old ladies with blue boring hair and men with

shiny boring shoes, but all this dreary church life

dissolved in an instant when I discovered the secret

entrance to the off limits construction zone of the new

church he was building. I found a labyrinth of secret

passages, I watched dirt get excavated and change to

steel and wood, steel and wood change to slabs of

concrete, slabs of concrete grow to gargantuan

proportions. I would sneak off, hide from the Sunday

throng and go through the locked door, past the off

limits signs and then I played in the mud, I played in

the dark, I played in the lost areas of the building and

created elaborate stories and games, showed my

friends the markings left by ancient civilizations and

the patterns laid down by futuristic beings in the

forbidden passages of the Garden Grove catacombs

For me the best memory of church was the

building of a church. The memory of the day I

walked in after seeing the stain glass installed marks

by first breath taking moment of witnessing how

artifact is so much larger than life. The sound of an

organ the size of a wall the first memory of music the

filled your body more than your ears. I easily

remember dad writing sermons around Beatles songs,

borrowing my Sgt Peppers album to do a sermon

around-- Day in the Life. I remember that people

laughed in his sermons. I remember standing in line

while people filed past us and my mom whispering

the names of people dad couldn’t remember. I

remember my dad sitting on the pot, bellowing out

his sermon from typed pages laid out on the

bathroom floor. I remember the church but not the

religion.

Suddenly I see this all about building churches

for our family and community. Not big ornate

structures with a steeple and open the doors and see

all the people, but of things of sticks and stones and

blue glass and abalone shells and flowers and

garlands, and trees and mountain tops and cliffs

overlooking the sea and beaches and fires and secrete

alters in nooks and crannies.

So for me it’s the building part not the church

part: My dad’s concrete church and also the adobe

chapel in Mexico still a huge memory as a kid hiding

in the goat caves and stacking adobe blocks and

lighting a candle at night. Getting married in the

merry go round with Drew and then on the beach

with Pam with me and the boys collecting driftwood

in the morning and making a circle and the Jordan

and Phoebe coming down later with flowers to make

a path and hang them from a gate we made

The Yurt on the hill and the hut on the plateau,

Spirit Rock, All our driftwood houses, Rock labyrinths

on hill tops, hand made dams and stacked rocks in

rivers, amazing camp sites at 10,000 feet, playing

music in front of a fire, Jack building at burning man,

drew making a gallery for a community or artists,

Pam creating books of family heritage…. This list is

endless. Even 4 friends going to Spider Murphy’s and

getting a tattoo of Phoebe’s artwork is building a

church.

If I mention to the kids right now asleep in

their beds-- lets go to the beach and build a house out

of driftwood and make a fire they will drop

everything to go. And when we do we always see

amazing things along the way. There are always

stories to tell, photos to take, memories to hold.

There is always-- the light in the trees.

BY THE LIGHT IN THE TREES-- part III

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