Taking Care of My Spiritual Self

      Over a cup of coffee at my favorite coffee shop, a let's-get-acquainted friend talked long about the importance of Buddhism in his life. Then he said, "What is your spiritual path?"

    A long pause.

    I hated to admit I didn't have a spiritual path, that I didn't even know what a "spiritual self" is. I shed the  Methodism of my childhood long ago. I flirted with Buddhism while a hippy, but it didn't stick, any more than Methodism had. When I was asked, years ago by a proselytizing evangelist if I were saved, the question struck me as ludicrous. Saved from what? From sin? None of us is saved from sin. We all sin.

    I do know what worship is, though—not necessarily religious, but a sense of reverence, extolment, praise. Worship is what I do—the feeling I have—when I stoop to admire a gentian; when I step under a treetop roof of bird twitters; when I ski through woods with snow-dots on dark trunks and a fire-blue sky patterned through snow-dipped tree tops. When I watch the mist come and go on Humpy Mountain. When the ringtail cat greets me on my back porch or a western tanager flashes red and gold through the woods. When the rain falls long and sweet. When a not-yet-risen sun silvers the long frost-laden tips of a pine tree. 

    Although I cringe when I am told to "have a blessed day," I also know what a blessing is. November blesses me with the brilliant bronze of the Oregon ash just off my deck. This morning I received the blessing of a snow-coat on Humpy. On a hot summer day, I enter the blessing of maple-shade as I walk by the creek. I feel blessed when I have the rare experience of seeing a wolverine in a meadow.

    I know baptism in a high-altitude, cold-water lake. I know ritual in the turn of the seasons. I know hymns in the birds, and the word of God in the bark of the fox. 

    Years ago my sister and brother-in-law came to visit me in my little hand-made house where I lived without electricity for so many years. Bruce was an ordained Methodist minister who taught religion in a Catholic high school in Atlanta. When he returned to Atlanta he told  his students, wanting to expand their idea of religion beyond Christianity, that I lived a religious life. Nature, he said, was my religion.

    I think he was right, but I didn't say as much to my friend at the coffee shop because to say it out loud sounded flippant, and I shied away from a longer explanation. I mumbled something inappropriate, changed the subject, and kept my spiritual self private.