Creation

 

Let everything in creation draw you to God. Refresh your mind with some innocent recreation and needful rest, if it were only to saunter through the garden or the fields, listening to the sermon preached by the flowers, the trees, the meadows, the sun, the sky, and the whole universe. You will find that they exhort you to love and praise God; that they excite you to extol the greatness of the Sovereign Architect Who has given them their being.

                                                                                                        --St. Paul of the Cross

 

Nature is truly a great refuge and temple. But nature also makes me inarticulate (which is not necessarily a bad thing, considering my tendency to babble on in both speech and writing). How to capture with words the moment when the crab apple trees become covered in frothy pink and red blossoms, or that hour when the distant mountains turn sharp as etchings and are silhouetted in silver-blue, or the short span of time when the naked desert adopts every shade of luxuriant green after heavy summer rains. What value or truth can anything that I say (or write) have for myself or anyone else, especially when compared with the wholeness and balance that nature displays as a continuous reminder of the “original source of beauty” (Wisdom 13:3) who fashioned it?