This is church—
Wandering outside in mid-morning sun, feet pressed to dry ground, feeling the warmth of compacted earth, brittle bits of tree needles. A hummingbird hovers over my head in vibrant vibration, while voices singing hymns carry through the small corridor of evergreen forest that separates my field from nearby Sunday morning summer gatherings.
For little less than two days, I have had home to myself, my body-home and my house and yard home. This feels like no less than a miracle, the kind of peace a mother can find in the quiet solitude of herself when she has an evening turned night turning early day because, children are wonders and light and nearly pure-animal, the energy moving through the young is wild and unruly and spontaneous and needing and it too, is a miracle, yet, there is a deep cellular drenching kind of nourishment in being alone for a time in the habitat that is usually overrun by the pack.
It is the actual choir I hear through the trees that has me considering my church attendance and what worship feels like. I’d best say it is my body holding form yet dissolving into and absorbing the pleasures of sensory living in a myriad of ways. It is feeling the warm winds wrap my hot skin, it is the fragrance of hay and salt and jasmine, it is the chalky last light of evening after the sun has sunk its fire below the horizon and the sky paints pastels of peach to the west and dusted blue to the east. It is watching the moon glide between sequoia branches, hearing the last shriek bird calls before night. It is sound sleep and waking without measuring time, tasting slowly, savoring fully. Church is my feminine nature. Worship is reverence expressed by receiving this holiness. Temple body, holy fire, awake and humming with love, I am filled with rivers of life when I can come back to this place of presence, meeting each moment as ritual, devotion to the openness.