The Wind Telephone: Connecting in Love and Loss

The cherry blossom is falling around us. I saw a car covered in it the other day, my car was too I noticed as I left for home the other evening. There is beautiful pink snow all around the grounds at the chapel, it will soon be gone. The cherry blossom does not cling on, it knows it must let go for new life to follow. For we human is it not so simple. We hold on to life, we hold on to our lives and we hold on to one another. We hold on to love that we have shared with those we have loved and lost. This is grief, the price we pay for love.

The beauty of the cherry blossom causes me some sadness, it makes me grieve, and yet I love the cherry blossom. That said part of its beauty comes in the fact that it only lasts for about a month and then it falls and it is gone. Even though I know it will come again, when it goes, my heart aches for the loss. This is grief.

Grief is about love and it is about the loss of someone or something that we love or have loved. This is why grief comes in so many forms, we lose so much in life. The most aching grief, of course, is caused by the death of those we love so dearly. The more we love them, the greater the grief. Grief of course is not something that you can just let go of, I am not so sure you ever should. We should hold that love close to our hearts. Yes, when someone we love dies, an aspect of them always remains in our hearts, that said when we lose someone we love we also lose a piece of our hearts.

I host a fortnightly grief group on zoom. We used to meet in person, but ever since the pandemic hit we have been unable to do so. The group is needed by those who join us. It helps us feel less alone and isolated in our grief. There is so much grief around at this time. I am sure we have all lost someone we love over the last year and none of us have been able to mark the loss and grieve as we would normally do. We have also been unable to live our lives as we would normally do, there is so much grief in this too. Grief is everywhere. That said if we had not done so how much more death and loss would there have been. We only need to look at India now to see the horror that could have happened had our health service become overwhelmed. I grieve so much for the suffering all around, it breaks my heart.

I have noticed that something that grieving people share in common is this need to still communicate in some way with those that they have lost. People go to places that are special to them and talk, it is common, but not something folk will share publicly. These one way conversations continue on and on. It is a way to keep the love shared alive, even after a loved one has gone.

I recently learnt of a powerful and beautiful example of this in Japan. When the garden designer Sasaki lost his beloved cousin in 2010, he found a unique way to come to terms with his grief, to call his loved one by telephone. He built a white telephone booth, in the style of the old red ones that were all over this county - I don’t know if you have noticed but in the countryside those old boxes often host defibrillators, bringing life to those who might lose theirs - Sasaki placed the phonebox on his hilltop garden. In it was an old Bakelite dial phone, unconnected to any earthly telecom system, his words were spoken to the wind, carried off like prayer flags, blowing in the wind. He did this to keep the memory of his cousin alive, by calling him and speaking to him regularly. As he told the Japanese public broadcasting network NHK, “Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.” He called it “The Wind Telephone”

“The Wind Telephone” was build on the outskirts of Otsuchi a small coastal town in northern Japan. As Sasaki was finishing his project the region was hit by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake on 11^th March 2011. Even though the quake was off the coast and didn't inflict direct damage, it did lead to gigantic tsunamis and Otsuchi was hit by 30 foot high waves, destroying the town and killing one in ten of the 16.000 inhabitants.

Soon “The Wind Telephone” became a place of solace for thousands, it is thought that over 10,000 people visited the site in the next three years, to speak to their loved ones, that were now lost. Some of the dead were never found. It was not only the lost to the Tsunami whose loved ones came, others joined the pilgrimage too, including those who had lost folk to suicide, accidents and in other tragic ways. Many media outlets have told the story and some of the conversations on “The Wind Telephone” have been recorded. If you listen to them you will hear tears and laughter and deep conversations, a kind of unanswered confessional where loved ones speak their hearts into the wind, where their loved one can perhaps hear without judgement. There are voices crying out regret, the pain of loss, despair, guilt, frustration, the search for strength, hope, and the will to carry on without the loved one. Beautiful cries of the human heart.

It seems that there are versions of the “Wind Phone” in other parts of the world. In Oakland California one was constructed by Jordan Stern who in February 2017 constructed one to commemorate the 36 people who died in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire, one of which was his friend. This “Wind Phone” was created, according to the artist to comfort "a field of people grieving in Oakland".

In August 2017 an anonymous art collective in Dublin, Ireland named Altruchas build a “Wind Phone” on “Two Rock Mountain”. It was built without permission and from salvaged materials. Sadly it was destroyed only two weeks after its construction, there were many people who did not like the project.

Another replica red phone box was created by Tomohiko and Kazuko Katsuna. They named it “Phone of the Sea Breeze”. It was built in memory of one of Kazuko's students, an 18-year-old woman who took her own life in 2009.

In January 2020 another temporary “Wind Phone” was created in Provincetown Massachusetts, by an artistic collective. Whilst another was created in October 2020 in California by Susan Vetrone and sculptor Steve Reed. it was constructed in memory of Vetrones mother who had recently died.

Another “Wind Phone was created in response to the loss of life due to the Covid 19 pandemic. In March this year an artist who has remained anonymous built one on the Aspen mountains of Colorado. The artist has remained anonymous because it is forbidden to build shrines in US national forests. That said t has remained as an outlet for people mourning deaths caused by the pandemic.

I wonder how many more of these will be built in the coming months and years. I think we will need them. I am considering writing to the Prime Minister again or perhaps Andy Burnam the Mayor of Manchester, or even the local authority. I think we will need them, or something like them. We decided during our last grief group that Wythenshawe park would be an ideal venue, as one of our number goes there often to talk to lost son. Maybe I will contact the great British sculptor Anthony Gormley, perhaps he could construct them up and down the land. A place where can go individually and or collectively to grieve, to cry out in anguish to connect to live through our grief, to hold on to the love lost and to live our lives. We need to find ways to express our collective grief if we are to rebuild again, I don’t just mean our material lives, but our emotional, mental and spiritual lives too. Our souls are crying out. Yes, we may well be coming back to normality, but there is so much grief in this land and every land and people are still caught up in the horror of all this, just look at India right now.

We need to find ways to connect, to heal, to express our lost love, something that we have been unable to do for too long and there will be a price to pay if we do not. I don’t just mean for this generation but for the generations to come as well.

All of us belong to the largest community on God’s sweet earth, the community of grievers. Grief is the price we pay for love, it is a price worth paying, for what is life without love? It is nothing, it is meaningless, just an empty vessel. The only way to escape grief is to totally armour your heart and deny love. Now who would want to do that, to live without love, to live the life of a zombie?

When we lose someone that we love, it changes us forever. Life will never be quite the same again. We do not rise above the pain of grief, we cannot pretend that it is not there, we don’t simply get over it. What happens is that we are changed by it and as a result our hearts are enlarged by it and we grow as human beings, if the love has truly been realised. You see grief is really about transformation, rather than transcendence, by the way this is the true nature purpose of religion. Grief is not an attempt to explain the loss or even understand some meaning locked into what happened. Instead, it seems to me that grief is more about finding meaning in the absence of an explanation.

How do we create meaning from the loss of the last year or more? That is not an easy question to answer. Well perhaps it begins by creating space for us all to grieve. Perhaps something like these “Wind Telephones” is one way, I am sure there are many others. Perhaps communities like ours can become that kind of space. Perhaps this something for us all to think about, perhaps this is something we can focus on in the months and years ahead, perhaps we could become a space where folk can come and find solace in their loss and grief a place where they can share and express their love.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts and feelings.

It is up to us, it is up to all of us.

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.

 A video devotion based on the material shared in this "blogspot"

Rooted Like The Trees

At a recent “Colours of Grief: Our Shared Experience of Love and Loss”, a group we host at Dunham Road, that offers space in which we share and hold each other in our experiences of grief, a man in attendance shared some wisdom from a nature program he had watched online. He spoke about how a certain type of tree survived hurricanes; how the trees in question while appearing to be standing alone were actually connected and supporting one another. It would seem that their roots not only spread far and wide into the earth, but actually connected together and held the trees firm while the branches and trunks were buffeted and all around was devastated. He shared this beautiful wisdom as we spoke about the need to connect and hold one another in our struggles and suffering that no one is an island. That we need one another, that we are held together by a web of mutuality. As you can imagine the conversation sparked my homiletic consciousness.

A couple of days later I tried to contact the man to ask if he could remember where he had seen the program, unfortunately he could not. I was going to give up but the thought would not let me go. It got me thinking about community and roots and how strong and interconnected roots not only protect the individual but allow them to grow and thrive. It also got me thinking about trees. I have been noticing the trees ever since, paying deep attention.

As I look at the trees I feel humbled. They outlive most of us, they live for centuries standing still and silent throughout the changing seasons and years. Yes eventually their lifespans do come to an end, they do not live forever like no element of life does. They come from the Great Mystery and return to it too. They experience the changing seasons, but offer no commentary on it. Their presence keep our all our too human hubris in check.

I have grown to love the way that trees celebrate the changing seasons, in silence and security. Just standing there as symbols of the changing nature of life. Yes they bend and reshape and change in colour. They look different as the seasons progress and yet stand there safe and secure expressing the eternal nature of life.

The trees have much to teach us. My name sake and American colleague Rev Greta W. Crosby recognises this. She describes a silent none judgemental presence that the trees offer her, something we humans cannot give no matter how well we may think we are at listening. The trees simply stand there erect and open, never shrinking away or rejecting, offering unconditional love and acceptance. In “Tree and Jubilee” she wrote:

“I have long had a sense of fellowship with trees. Since I was a child, I have sought their company from time to time because I like the way I feel in their presence. I enjoy their beauty, but it is more than that. I used the word “presence” in a very strong sense. I felt their presence as living things. And in that presence, I often feel relaxed and centered, peaceful, restored to inner equilibrium.

For many of us, life is the meaning of the tree. But for me, perhaps the greatest thing about the tree is its silence. Whatever the tree says to us, whatever it answers to our questing, the tree gives its message without words. And the tree bears with us well. It does not judge. It does not react to our anxieties. It does not run after us. It just stands there with open arms.”

I was thinking about these qualities as Sue and I walked around the grounds of Chatsworth House last Monday. Sue, like Greta, often embraces trees and she did several times that day. I did not, I simply observed them reverently, occasionally finding myself bowing toward them and as I did my mind wandered to concept of “The Tree of Life”

The “Tree of Life” is a beautiful and universal symbol that can be found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The ancient Chinese, Assyrians, Egyptians, Baylonians and Samarians all had a tree of life symbol. There is Ygdrassil, the Norse Tree of Life, The Etz Ha Hayim of the Kaballistic Jews. The Bahai's speak of it and Christians of all kinds speak of the tree of life, with healing leaves, found in the Book of Revelations. The book of Genesis tells of two trees: a Tree of Knowledge, which is the tree of good and evil, and the Tree of Life, the tree of immortality. I wonder why Adam and Eve chose “The Tree of Knowledge over “The Tree of Life”. The tree of life is a symbol of re-birth and renewal; it is a sign post to the path of enlightenment; it reveals a timeless and eternal wisdom. The Buddha gained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi Tree. The tree blessed him as it did so showering him with blossom. Wisdom also comes to mind when I think of the “Tree of Life”, an eternal wisdom that comes with age. A deeper wisdom than knowledge alone.

There is a wisdom in the trees, they have so much to teach us. The story I had heard in the grief group kept on nagging at me. I wanted to discover more. Sue did some research for me and found some fascinating articles online, but not exactly what I heard about and was seeking. One was a piece on “The Hidden Life of Trees: What they feel and how they communicate – Discoveries from a secret world” by Peter Wohlleben. He is a German forrester who has revolutionized his field. Through years of dedicated work he has highlighted an unprecedented level of cooperation among trees in a forest, noting that “mother” trees suckle the young saplings, feeding them enough sugars produced by their own photosynthesis to keep them from dying. The trees are connected by their roots, which grow together like a network. Their root tips have highly sensitive brain-like structures that can distinguish whether the root that it encounters in the soil is its own root, the root of another species, or the roots of its own species. He also explains how trees communicate through electrical signals that can be measured through the bark and roots. They send chemical signals through the air when they are attacked by insects. Nearby trees receive these messages and have time to prepare their defenses. Something that has been named as the Wood Wide Web.

Another article described the giant redwood trees of California, the largest trees in the world that have survived for thousands of years throughout turbulent times. It seems that these trees are unique amongst tall trees as their roots are not deep, they grow outwards instead and when they come in contact with roots of other Redwoods they wrap around each other multiple times and form a strong connection. Each tree shares a bond with another tree through its roots, until eventually, every single tree is interconnected. The roots hold on to one another through the harshest of weather, and keep the family of trees standing tall and strong, together. The roots of older and wiser trees hold on to the roots of trees just beginning to grow. They are held and protected by and underground system of interconnection, their strength is shared and they grow together.

I thought that this article must have been describing the trees I had heard about, but it was not. I kept on searching and then I found the film, from a channel entitled “Think Like a Tree”. It was a story about Hurricane Katrina and the 700 trees on Oak Street in New Orleans. The houses were completely destroyed their but only 4 out of 700 oaks had the same fate, the rest survived intact. There was a good reason for this, one being their spiral trunks and branches which allowed them to flex in the wind. Also their leaves curled into a Fibonacci sequence which allowed the wind to flow through with minimal friction. All of these characteristics helped but the real secret lay in their roots, which like the redwoods were intertwined with its neighbour. So when the hurricanes hit a tree it wasn’t hitting one tree, it was hitting a whole community of trees. It was thus the intertwining of the roots of the trees that allowed them to survive the elements.

Click here to watch the video from "Think Like a Tree

As I reflected on these fascinating ways that trees seemingly survive and thrive in challenging conditions through a kind of mutuality, I thought how much we humans could learn. We are not merely individual life forms we belong to web of mutuality, all life is connected and interconnected. To truly thrive we need to take care of our roots and our connections to one another. I wonder if as a society this is something that we lose sight of. What we do to the least of us we do to all of us.

This brings to mind that wonderful hymn “Spirit of Life” by Carolyn McDade particularly the line “Roots hold me close, wings set me free”. The roots come before the wings, we need to be held close, in mutual love, in order to truly thrive and therefore to fly free, to be all that we can possibly be. To focus only on the wings does not create the community and stability that we all need. When I think of those roots that hold the essence of those trees and enables them to thrive it reminds me of communal love. It seems to me that this love is that unseen force that connects all life and that enables us to form deep and meaningful relationships with ourselves, with each other and with all life. I name this God, others may use different words.

It is love that allows us to connect with all that exists, all that has been in the time before now and all that will be in the future. It is love that enables those roots to stretch out and connect to each other, to communicate and feed one another in a web of mutuality, just like the forest trees and the oaks of New Orleans. It is love that hold us close and it is love that allows us to stretch out the wings that will set us free and allow us to glide in the wind. To know love is to know that you belong and it is this that is perhaps the ultimate freedom.

It is the roots of belonging that give us the freedom to stretch out the wings and fly in the wind, free...This is love...We all belong somewhere, no one exists completely in a vacuum.

This to me is the essence of a free religious community. such as the Unitarian tradition that am a part of. A place where you feel that you can belong. A space where visitors and those already present can feel loving roots that hold them close so that they can spread their wings and begin to fly free. A community where the spiritual traveller can rest a while and find sustenance for their journey. A place with deep roots that can hold us during the vicissitudes of life, but not constrain us, so that we can fly free.

A place where you may find a sense of belonging; a space where you may find the love that connects and accepts you and allow you to live and thrive and encourage one another to fly free.