It’s negative eight degrees outside my window.

Inside my window a handful of houseplants lean toward the light, despite the frigid temperatures on the other side of the glass. There are oak trees growing in the houseplants, oak trees almost six inches tall, sprouted from acorns buried by squirrels last summer when the houseplants were sunbathing on the deck.

I’ve got to find more soil for these tiny oak trees.

When these little sprouts were planted by squirrels, SOLIS was just an acorn too. An idea that existed only in the hearts of us, and most of us didn’t even know each other. Like the oaks in my window, the seed that is SOLIS has been planted in the artificial soil and light of the Minneapolis suburbs. Like a miracle it has unfolded in front of us, the seed erupting into something organic and alive, an organism whose every cell is driven by the life-or-death longing for sun and soil and water.

Someday this acorn will be a real oak tree, home to countless creatures of many species including us. Someday we’ll build a treehouse in the oak and all our friends will come and dance among the treetops with the squirrels and the owls and the raccoons and the wood-peckers. Someday the oak tree will stop growing, and then sometime after that it will crash back to earth, treehouse and all, and the whole beautiful organism will disappear into the eternal stream of life and death that flows at every moment through every field and forrest floor. This is the life of an oak tree: “Three hundred years to grow. Three hundred years to live, three hundred years to die.” (Robert MacFarlane).

Someday our oak tree will hold more stories than any of us can imagine, generations yet to be dreamed. Right now our own tree is fighting with houseplants for a scrap of January sunlight on my windowsill the in the Minneapolis suburbs.

When spring comes we’re taking the houseplants and oak trees north, where we’ve found enough soil for both to thrive.

//

Since we found that soil earlier this winter, my stomach has often been a knot of anxiety as I wonder how this tiny thing that has sprouted in our house could possibly grow into an oak tree worthy of a treehouse on the banks of a river far north of here.

Can a houseplant acorn be transplanted to sandstone soil? Will it survive the first winter? Will it lose too many leaves along the way? (There aren’t so many to lose after all.) I look at this tiny house-bound seedling and wonder if its roots are deep enough to hold it until we find real soil. I wonder if it will remember how to grow when it’s planted in the forest, as its ancestors were.

In one of my favorite poems, Wendell Berry wrote:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at least sound
for fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…

I come into the peace of wild things…
I come into the presence of still water…

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.

When I worry about this little acorn sproutling, I try to remember the peace of wild things and the presence of still water. I remember the river we’ve found, and an old verse from the religion of my childhood about a tree planted by rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season, an organism of deep roots and interconnected live, thriving in the family of things.

//

For ten years I have praying to the River these simple words:

“Give me, O River, grace to trust as you bear me along.”

Ten years ago the River was a metaphor for a distant abstraction, a poetic reference to a God who never felt quite real in my bones. In those days the closest thing to Divinity I could find was the French Broad river in North Carolina:

But the River… She’ll be here. Winding her way down from somewhere up north, carrying with Her the stories of ten thousand stones. For all Her unpredictability and evershifting currents, She’ll still be here waiting for us — waiting to bless us, to wash us clean, to baptize us into newness of life again and again.

And that’s why we’ll come back again.

For the River.

Later, the River became a way of speaking of that which is beyond language, the mysterious flow of energy whose headwaters are shrouded in the singularity at the beginning of the Universe.

More recently, the River has been more material than metaphor — the River is real. It is made of water, just as I am. It is a continuous stream of energy, just as I am. The River is Divinity encoded in molecules, a literal body of water whose headwaters “arise in the shrub swamps of northeastern Pine County” and whose end in the ocean.

This is the River I pray to these days, but the words are unchanged:

“Give me, O River, grace to trust as you bear me along.”

//

When we first moved to the treehouse where we now reside (the treehouse of oak trees in windowsills) there was a stream nearby that I at first believed would have energy enough to carry us in its current. For one green summer month it did. We put in upstream and drifted to the bridge and were happy.

Then the powers that be closed the dam, so as to protect the water levels of the lakefront empires upstream, and our creek dried up. We were reluctant to accept this sad reality —

One day we went upstream and put ourselves in the current as we had before, but the current was gone. We drifted in the almost still water, hoping there was enough energy still to move our family.

There was not.

Finally I dismounted our makeshift flotilla of kayaks and inner tubes — two parents, four kids, and a dog — and in the absence of any flow I began to drag the whole conglomerate downstream waist deep in the stalled creek, knee deep in mud.

As metaphors go, this one is a bit heavy-handed by I am telling it just as it happened. The creek dried up, and I tried to drag our family through the mud for four lonely years after that.

We were standing in that same still creek almost a year ago when for the first time the idea of SOLIS was spoken aloud — a place with water and dirt, with dear and eagles, with gardens and chickens, a place where a river flows fast and clear. When we walked home, I loaded a blank page into my old typewriter and SOLIS emerged through my fingertips:

there are forests, oak and aspen
a creek rushes across the land, wide and beautiful,
(a spiritual relative of the French Broad river)
the water flows enough that you can swim.

in the winter, snow piles its bank and
in the summer we make that creek
our home. there are fish. we fish. 

we are in relationship with the land, in the
spring we plant our garden and in the fall we
forrage for mushrooms of all kinds.

deer wanter through our space, eagles nest overhead
and the geese stop every year on the way back to Canada. 

in this forest there is a clearing with a garden where
our children learn to draw life from the land, fruit
trees and grape vines and we make our own bread and wine,
barefoot on holy ground.

at night we watch the stars and planets whirl overhead.
we learn their names. We learn to let our lives
move with the heavens bodies, as above so below. 

Over this hot, dry summer as we held this acorn in our hands and wondered how it would possibly grow, Wonder and I found a book about a daddy bear and a baby bear who are trying to find their way to the river.

She had me read it to her over and over and the words of that little book became to us a liturgy:

“It’s quite a long way to get to the river… There’s the grassy part to go across, the bushy part to push through, and after that you’ve got to jump from rock to rock.”

When fall came and we began in earnest to search for good soil, I heard that distant whisper of moving water. As we waited for it to show itself to us I prayed again:

“It’s a long way to the River… give me grace to trust as you bear me along.”

//

I wondered (often I still do) how I could possibly drag all these organisms through the mud all that way.

But this river is alive, and before we ever laid eyes on her wooded banks her rushing current began to carry us. As autumn turned to winter we found ourselves in a stream flowing faster and stronger than our most hopeful imagination, a gathering of vision and energy that leaves no doubt that we are carried by something larger and older than any of us.

If you want a treehouse, you’ve got to plant an acorn. Then you have to be very patient.

We have been frantically trying to figure out what legal entity should hold this little oak tree, and also trying to figure out what legal entity will hold the treehouse we will build in its branches. I lie awake at night and imagine the village that will grow in this soil, and the songs we will sing there. I sit in my room and worry about my windowsill oak tree, and how far away the river is and how fragile this organism seems to be.

But then I remember that at every moment the current of this river flows faster and freer than any weary mud-march I might lay upon myself. Why would I in any way rush that which carries me?

Give me, then, O River…