Manifestations at Sunset

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God." - Gerard Manley Hopkins

I took these photos on the last evening 

of a staff retreat at Salter Path, N.C. 

Transformation was the theme. 

Of Daffodils, a Concrete Bench, Courage and Grace

Early daffodils, most likely "Ice Follies"

In the last week or so, the early daffodils have been blooming. Daffodils look rather fragile, with their delicate nodding petals and soft spears of green leaves. But one week in January, I discovered a secret. 

Note part of concrete bench at top right.

My husband and I moved the concrete bench (see top right in the photo above). This bench is so heavy that both of us can barely lift the top for a few seconds, so we moved it in stages. Lift top slab. Lean against tree. Move one concrete pedestal. Move other concrete pedestal.

To my astonishment, under the second pedestal, yellow growing tips of daffodil leaves were poking through the soil.

Daffodils that were under the bench.  

Weeks later, I keep returning to reflect on the life force of these daffodils, at the energy with which they grew up through the earth. They could not feel the sun's warmth or see the light as they grew, but instinctively, blindly, courageously the plants grew, cell by cell. Their desire to be in the sun, to become the flowers they were meant to be, overcame the weight of a concrete bench.

I seek the courage of these daffodils, the energy, the love and the trust with which they grew despite heavy odds against them. How wonderful in this case to be the witness - and the accidental agent - of a small miracle. I think now of God's grace as the removal of an unmovable bench. My job is to keep growing without fear. 

Maine Island: Variations on a Scene

The island in Casco Bay where my husband's family cottage sits has many moods. I have been coming here for 14 years as summer slides into fall. The slanting light becomes more beautiful each day as the equinox approaches.

Each familiar scene never looks the same twice. Always something is different - the light, the wind, the clouds, the vantage point, the tides that rise and ebb 10 feet every 13 hours. Here are a few favorite photos from the last three years of the East End point. This is the view we see when walking a couple of hundred feet to the stairs that lead to the beach. 

After a rainstorm, the late afternoon sun strikes the white birches that line the shore.

Wind from the northwest brings low dramatic clouds and rockweed is exposed as the tide goes out. 

This view of the East End was taken from halfway down the beach.

A different kind of calm from the photo above. The scene is ethereal at dawn. 

Inviting in the late afternoon.

Violent, yet exhilarating, during tropical storm Irene.

Cold and lonely when the sun goes behind a cloud.

Tonight we'll sit on the point that looks toward the East End and watch the stars. It was here that God began to find me. 

Silent Saturday: Sadness

"But listen to me; for one moment, 

quit being sad. Hear blessings

dropping their blossoms 

around you. God."

~ Rumi

Sun's Rays

Emerald Isle, N.C. 

I've been in a bit of a dark place lately, waiting for the sun to break in. 

Pine Tree Praise

Father Brian Pierce spent years working with the Lenca Indians in the mountains of Western Honduras. One year he participated in a ritual in which the Indians, carrying pine boughs, processed through the mountains singing. They arrived at a church decked with pine boughs.

Father Brian, filled with curiosity, asked the shaman about the significance of the pine boughs. The shaman's eyes became wide and he said, "You mean you don't know?"

"If you listen long enough at the foot of a pine tree, you'll hear the pine tree singing to God."

A Rainbow is a Promise

One recent Florida night, sheets of lightning flashed in the sky over the Gulf of Mexico, punctuated by jagged bolts. The next morning, a rainbow appeared.

May peace be with you.

John Muir and Freedom

Reading John Muir has filled me with enchanted visions of mountains and wildness. So today I drove 12 miles north to the nearest high point, the 867-foot Occoneechee Mountain, and walked its trails. Tall trees block most of the sky in our area, so it was refreshing to see a vista after scrabbling up the white, flaky cliffs on the northeast side of the "mountain."

I thought of Muir and his joy in the wilderness, of living on bread and tea and sleeping on beds of pine needles and cedar boughs while exploring the Yosemite. His idea of freedom was radically different from ours - we tend to think of freedom as having enough money to purchase whatever we happen to want. Muir's freedom was that of time and experience, not comfort.

He pitied the constraints his friends placed on themselves. When his friend Professor Butler came to the Yosemite Valley, Muir tried to convince him to camp in the High Sierra. But the professor only had two days to spend in the region and Muir bade him goodbye. 

"I'm glad I'm not great enough to be missed in the busy world," Muir writes. " ... I scrambled home through the Indian Canyon gate, rejoicing, pitying the poor Professor and General, bound by clocks, almanacs, orders, duties, etc., and compelled to dwell with lowland care and dust and din, where Nature is covered and her voice smothered, while the poor, insignificant wanderer enjoys the freedom and glory of God's wilderness."

Nature as Bible

One of my favorite spiritual writers, Fr. Richard Rohr, has been reflecting in his daily meditations this week on our need for a new cosmology. 

"Nature itself is the primary Bible; the world “as is” is the primary locus of the sacred."

“For what can be known about God is perfectly plain, since God has made it plain: ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and divinity, however invisible, have been there for the mind to see in the things that God has made.” 

                                                                                                                             ~ Romans 1:19-20

My husband practices crane breathing on Pass-A-Grille Beach.