What the Mountain Taught Me

 Om Tahomaya Namah. I bow down to the Great Mountain Mother whose very name means, in the native tongue, 'breast that nourishes us with white streams.' I offer you these Cascade Lilies. Holding one for each of the five elements, filled with gratitude, I bow down before your snowy whiteness here at tree-line.

Our entire ecosystem thrives through your snow-melt streams, providing our energy, our food, our green emerald home. Therefor I make flower offerings to you.

The living sun, whose light goes over all, manifests Christ in nature. His golden power gently melts your snow, pressing your white breast, causing those streams of blessing to pour down upon us. Fire mingles with Water, Water mingles with Earth, flourishing green power. The green power of Earth sends forth the Air we breathe, and that breath becomes our prayer, transmuting all we perceive and offer into the Ether of consciousness.

Therefor I place these flower offerings before you, Mother Tahoma. As I bow down you teach me the secret of worship:

To praise one petal of a pascal flower, bow to a ball of goat's fur lying in the lupine, or pray to a blue moth disguised as an alpine aster, is to worship the universal Creator. The whole Word of God speaks through a blossom of columbine, and the passion of Christ is the ripening of a huckleberry.

It is false to distinguish Polytheism from Monotheism, Paganism from Christianity. The tiniest gnome that dwells in a thumb-knuckle of quartz, the flower sylph dancing on the petals of a shooting-star, or the soul of a hummingbird sucking nectar from a blossoming sweet-pea, is a Fifth Gospel. The Logos, as in the beginning of time, streams through the sap of the smallest weed.

A worshiper may enter this stream at any point, vast or tiny. Praise God in a honeysuckle. Bow down to a singing brook or cedar tree. That bow is pure as any worship in church or temple, acceptable to the Lord of Hosts as if it were offered at the Mercy Seat in Jerusalem.

Any act of sincere worship, however "primitive," taps into the divine current flowing through all creation. If I praise the undine in a dewdrop, my Eucharist returns to the Christ through whom all things were made. Through this drop of dew, reverence carries my attention back to the Unity from which every impulse to worship arises. There, in pure Creator-Consciousness, all devas and elementals, all nature sylphs and elfin sprites of this green earth, are fused as a single life with the highest cherubim, the rolling angelic spheres of inter-galactic intelligence, the powers and principalities of heaven. In the most innocent act of earth-centered offering, I touch supreme Godhead.

Is the microcosm of my body not a sign of this all-pervading reverence? The consciousness in every cell inter-radiates every other cell to awaken as one Me. If I enter a single atom of my flesh, I enter my whole personality. Just so, the humblest creature on Earth is a gateway to the divine whole. To praise the beauty of a moth is to contemplate the face of Christ. 

Therefor, I make flower offerings to You, great Mother Mountain Deva. Om Tahomaya Namah. Carry my prayers to the One.

"One who offers to Me with devotion only a leaf, or a flower, a fruit, or even a little water, this I accept from that yearning soul, because with a pure heart it was offered in love." (Bhagavad Gita 9:26)