Meditation Monday - Douglas Fir and the Mice

Over the weekend I had the joy of leading a small retreat at St Andrews House on the Hood Canal. It is a beautiful location, looking out over the water and surrounded by majestic firs and gardens full of herbs and dahlias.

The focus of the weekend was Walking in Wonder. God’s creation could not have put on a more magnificent display for us. On the first evening the Aurora Borealis delighted us with reds and greens and blue splashed across the sky. It was breathtaking. The following evening it was the reds and gold of the sunset that took our breath away and held us spellbound. We certainly got our daily doses of awe and wonder while we were there.

However it was the douglas fir cones I picked up on our awe and wonder walk that intrigued me the most. The cones are smaller than some, but what caught my attention was the “tails” that protruded out of the cone. Then one of the participants told the story of the douglas fir and the mouse and I was riveted.

Legend tells us that a long time ago there was a large fire in the forests of the west. Many animals ran around frantically trying to escape the flames. Tiny mice, not fast enough on their short legs to outrun the fire, tried to find shelter in various trees. The mice approached maples and junipers and many other trees asking for help but were continually denied, as the trees themselves were fighting for survival.  Finally they approached the large and mighty Douglas fir tree and asked if they could take shelter amongst its branches. The Douglas fir agreed to help the mice and allowed them to hide in its cones. They went in head first but their back end and tails still stuck out.  The mice survived the fire, and to this day, if you examine a Douglas fir cone you can see the tails of the mice sticking out of the scales of a cone. That is one cone I will never fail to identify.

Today is Indigenous Peoples Day in the US, and this seemed like a fitting story to tell as it probably has roots in the stories of the native peoples of North America. I love stories like this that have probably been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds if not thousands of years. They stir new seeds of wonder and delight within me, not just for the beauty of the pine cone, but for the whole forest from which it comes. This is what Robert McFarlane in his book Landmarks, would call re-wonderment of the world, something I highly recommended to the group I was facilitating and encourage all of us to do.

You may remember, that in his book, McFarlane gave a fascinating example of how we can change people’s attitudes so that they acquire a new view of our awe inspiring world. Evidently nn the Island of Lewis in Scotland there were plans to construct a large wind farm which would have destroyed the local windswept moorland, the natural environment which most people saw as useless. To re-wonder peoples’ impression of the land they gathered songs and poetry written about the moorland. They told stories about what happened there. They recovered its history and marked out new walking tracks and points of beauty - and the moorland was saved. 

In our current world, steeped in injustice of systemic racism, of war and violence and climate change, this is very much what we need. We don’t just need re-wonderment of the world but re-wonderment of our view of God and a re-wonderment of our impressions of the people we share the planet with too. All of us are made in the image of God and every creature has a spark of divine life within it. Recovering stories that connect us to the land, its history and its people grounds us in special ways and can be truly awe inspiring. That pine cone I brought home to add to my collection is not just a pine cone, it is the bearer of special story that connects this place and the people who lived in it to us today. Now that really is awe inspiring.

Listening to this and other stories I heard during my few days away freed my imagination to create poetry again, something I have not done for several weeks. I hope you enjoy this poem which I posted on instagram yesterday.