Rise to This As a Spiritual Challenge
Disruption is an opportunity to cultivate the discipline of openness
Several years ago, I participated in a conference on spirituality and sustainable agriculture at Harvard Divinity School. One of the speakers, an undergraduate student named Sarah Williams, told us a story about how she’d been assigned to shadow a farmer near her university in Washington state. Williams explained that the farmer practiced biodynamic farming, and also happened to be Native American.
When she showed up at the farm for the first time, the farmer greeted her and then led her to a large tree standing on its own, somewhat away from the farm buildings. “Your work this semester,” the farmer told her, “is to sit with this tree.” She was dumbfounded: “But what am I supposed to do?” The farmer replied, “You are supposed to sit with the tree.”
For several hours each week for the rest of the semester, Williams sat with her tree. When she began in January, there wasn’t much to see at first, at least to her eye. Against the sky, the sturdy trunk stood tall and silent, the bare branches occasionally whipping in the wind. When it rained, she watched the water run down the bark and into the ground.
As she watched the water disappear, however, she realized that she could only see half of her…
