The Grammar of Now
/Its hard to believe we are 106 days into 2025 already, with Easter upon us and Spring in full bloom here in Georgia. On a personal level, I have started off the year fairly well, ditching a few forms of social media that were not serving me, spending more time with my kids, reading more books, working out, going to bed earlier, etc. On a societal level, things are feeling quite a bit bleaker. While we thankfully got back to the promise our democracy offers of a peaceful transfer of power in January, we unfortunately did not come through inauguration day unscathed. Violence sprung forth by pen, as a wave of executive orders signed by President Trump launched his radical agenda and set in motion an assault on democracy (particularly targeting the most vulnerable) by him and his oligarch allies. While I am certainly struggling through political exhaustion and the threat of ever-creeping apathy, our new reality as a country has at the same time woken something up inside my heart that has been dormant for quite some time… an ache to speak about the earth and justice on a spiritual and theological level again. So if you would, allow a poor old dirt farmer to start this article of mine out by talking about going on a jog through my neighborhood.
Its 3 miles, to be exact. A hilly run through and around our little community. It takes me about 1 mile to get out to the main road, where I begin my ascent up the hill to the local high school. Thats the half way point. I then re-enter the neighborhood and eventually emerge from a side street with about a half mile shot back to my front door. Its a short but beautiful route, and one I often do during the warmer months of the year. It was on this particular winter run though, that I noticed for the first time the smell coming off of the trees as I ran up the hill towards the high school. Even in the dead of winter, the smell was incredibly sweet and intoxicating. In the midst of sweating heavily, with my heart pounding and music blasting in my air pods, I was briefly overcome with peace. A wild peace. A peace of the trees. Call me crazy, but I am here to tell you that on that short stretch of road, overcome by the smell of those trees, I was laying down (while running), in a state of total peace and harmony, communing with the Divine. I have thought about that moment many times in the last few weeks, wondering what I would do differently if I found myself there again. If I could transport myself back to that very moment, I’d like to believe that this time I would slow down, stop, and center myself. That I would take the time to notice and identify what type of tree it was. That I would activate my other senses and turn their attention to its pull. That I would see it. That I would touch it. And if truly unencumbered, free of self-conscience and social norms, I dare say that my hearts desire would be to lay down right then and there on that busy road in the middle of the day, and take a nap under their branches. I would sink even deeper into the divine love and care that those trees had to offer.
There is a larger conversation afoot about the break-neck nature of life in 2025. A way of life that offers the opportunity at any moment to be anywhere else other than where we actually are. A way of life that treats the rest of the universe as merely a backdrop to the human experience. A way of life that abuses, exploits, and commodifies nature, to the detriment of us all. As you will see, I am certainly chiming in to that conversation with my two cents today. But more and more I find that what really compels me, and what is at the heart of this for me, is how exactly it is that those trees reached out and penetrated the armor of my distraction, my alternative motivation, my dulled senses, and somehow snatched me up into their loving arms anyway. Whats that all about? How is that possible?
Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, Photo by Thomas Andy Branson
I was recently put onto the writings of Nan Shepard (1893-1981). She was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet best known for her literary masterpiece, The Living Mountain, a book about her experiences walking the hills of the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the eastern highlands of Scotland. I believe it is voices like Shepards that point us in the right direction regarding what nature has to teach us. Shepard spent much of her life in that mountain range, and explains how the early years of entering them were filled with lust and pride: “I was not interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect upon me”, she says. But as she continued to enter them time and again over the years, it became less about conquering them and more about being with them. Eating and sleeping in their midst. Knowing them deeply and intimately. “Haste can do nothing with these hills”, she writes. Shepard eventually calls this way of knowing “living in the present tense”, or “the grammar of now”.
The Grammar of Now.
I love that. I think that with this idea, Nan was lending her beautiful and prophetic voice to an important lesson. A lesson pointing us towards a more Divine way of being. The first aspect of the lesson is a harsh one. Its one that I have hesitated to speak aloud for some time out of fear, imposter syndrome, and the sentiment that I am not the right person to speak out on theological grounds. But I’ve been realizing more lately that my voice is just that, my own. Nothing more. Nothing less. And the more I wait for some external sign or validation, the more neutered my mind and soul become.
The ecological and moral crisis that we find ourselves in — climate change, the rapid loss of biodiversity, and the systemic dehumanization of marginalized peoples, highlights a real need to realign our spiritual priorities. Scripture has long been understood to be the primary (and by many the only) method in which we are to access the Divine. Sadly, given how mainstream western Christianity has used the authority of Scripture as a tool to justify colonialism, exploitation, racism, gender inequality, and many other serious forms of oppression, it begs the question:
Should scripture, filtered through a society shaped by patriarchy, be the sole gateway to the untainted essence of God’s truth?
I believe the answer to this is no. I want to be clear that I am not rejecting the divine inspiration of Scripture, nor am I denying that the way of Christ persists within scripture, in spite of empirical influence. I am, however, convinced that we are in one of those moments in human history where a divine shift must take place in order to weather this self-inflicted crisis. This shift will require of us a radical openness, a true posture of humility, and deep courage. It is a shift away from the lukewarm waters of of dogma, doctrine, and certainty, and once more into the wilderness in pursuit of the living God.
So what does a journey back into the wilderness look like in 2025? I believe step one is doing the essential work of shedding the dualistic mind. This default way of seeing the world that America built its house upon is eroding right in front of our eyes. It reduces the most important and complicated questions of our time down to abstractions detached from reality. It insists that in order to elevate and attest one thing, we must oppress and deny another. It thrives when it goes unchallenged, and it goes unchallenged by turning the conscious into the unconscious. In order to combat this reductive mode of being, we are tasked with rediscovering its counterpart, the nondualistic mind, and along with it the blueprint for the survival of our planet and the soul of our species. We must remember the interconnectedness of all things. Only then will we be able to do the liberating work of learning Shepard’s “grammar of now”. A grammar of presence that has been knowable since the beginning. A grammar as ephemeral as a cool breeze, or a birds morning song. A grammar that simply cannot be absolutized or universally defined.
Thankfully, we have much we can turn to for guidance. We need look no further than where the richest and most powerful among us are actively seeking to exploit and destroy, and we will find the very places and people that are acting as the mouthpiece of God in these times of unchecked power and moral bankruptcy. Our call back to the wild must not be purely metaphorical. Healing and renewal awaits us in the ever dwindling wild lands of this planet. Untouched wilderness will be essential not only for our survival but for the reclamation of our collective consciousness. Yes, we must fight for our public lands and refuse to support laws, policies, businesses, and corporations that thrive on their destruction. But we must also simply return to them. We must be in them, consistently. It is hard to overstate the transformation that comes from being in places that flourish free of human influence. The more we study, commune with, worship in, understand, and preserve nature, the more we tap into what it means to truly be human (and, ironically, the more we tap into what it means to truly be image bearers of the Divine).
“A grammar as ephemeral as a cool breeze, or a birds morning song. A grammar that simply cannot be absolutized or universally defined".”
To learn this grammar is not to master it. It is not a lesson that can be outlined in a syllabus or distilled into a set of doctrines. It is an ongoing, lived experience. A willingness to slow down, to listen, to be undone by the world around us rather than trying to shape it to our own desires. Perhaps this is what those trees were trying to tell me on that winter run. Perhaps they were inviting me to step back into reality — back into a presence that had been waiting for me all along, if only I had the eyes to see, the hands to touch, the courage to act.
And for the great many of us who can no longer speak the language of the trees, in the midst of our re-learning, we must listen to the voices of those who still do.
Voices like Robin Wall Kimmerer, who teaches us that the earth is not just alive, but relational. Voices like the Kayapo people of the Amazon, whose resistance is rooted in spiritual kinship with the forest. Voices like Leah Penniman, who tends land as both a Black farmer and a healer, reminding us that the soil remembers, and that justice grows in rows. Or Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, who helps queer and trans folks find a home in the wild again, where naming plants and naming identity become part of the same sacred act of becoming.
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that yes, sometimes these voices rise from behind pulpits, from those brave enough to speak the truth of Christ to power even as their own traditions are weaponized against the very people Jesus stood with. When that happens, I rejoice. But we must also name, in love and honesty, that this is the exception, not the rule. Our path forward will require a sacred vulnerability, an openness to encounter the Divine beyond stained glass and sanctuaries. To find Her at work in the margins, in the wild, in the whisper of trees, in places and people our institutions have long feared, overlooked, and cast aside. After all, Scripture itself is rich with moments when God met people not in temples, but in the wilderness. Moses hears the voice of God from a bush aflame. Hagar, cast out and alone, is seen and spoken to by the Divine in the desert. In fact, she becomes the first person in the Bible to give God a name: El Roi, the God who sees. Jesus retreats to the garden and to the mountains to pray, his most intimate moments with God happening beneath open skies.
These stories were never about withdrawal from the world. They were invitations to see that the world is already thick with God. The grammar of now, as Nan Shepherd put it, is not confined to one tradition or one place. It is spoken by rivers and wind, by prophets and poets, by those who plant trees and those who simply pause long enough to wonder at them. These are the ones who never stopped listening. Who never forgot the language of the trees.
If we have any hope of healing our world — and ourselves — it will be because we allowed their wisdom to become our own.
References
Nan Shepard, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (Canongate Books, 1977; reissued 2011). Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013). Survival International, “The Kayopo”, survivalinternational.org Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). Queer Nature, co-founded by Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd. See: qeernature.org Exodus 3, Genesis 16, Mathew 14, Luke 22
