The lights

Frosty holly

I’m going to skip Thursday’s Travels today because Mother Nature decided to decorate the meadows.  The morning was steeped in the awesomeness of frost and sunlight.

This song came to mind as I walked through the fields and meadows and Future Woods.  The lights, the lights, the lights…  (The M25 version is here.)

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is a succession of changes so gentle and easy we can scarcely mark their progress.

~ Charles Dickens

Walk with me, through the meadows.  The air is still and the land looks frozen.  Hear the sound of the frost and leaves crunching underfoot as the sun rises up above the trees, illuminating the grasses and dried flowers.   Everything sparkles with the magic of a frosty autumn morning.

We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings.  In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics. . . We believe that all living things are spiritual beings.  Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter.  A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter — grass matter.  The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifested to us in the form of real grass.

~ Mohawk Nation

The spirit of grass manifested

The mantra for this walk is:  Beautiful, beautiful morning.  Beautiful, beautiful morning, as we walk, one foot in front of the other.  Beautiful, beautiful morning, as we inhale and exhale.  Beautiful, beautiful morning, as we stop to look, to listen, to pay attention, to be present in the sparkling moment.

When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions.  To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation.  And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience.  We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language.  In these ways we begin, I think to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.

~ Barry Lopez

Make a wish

It is a short walk in terms of distance.  A walk into eternity in terms of time which, I think, for a little while, might have been suspended just for us, just for this walk.

The lights, the lights

Nature with her wonders blinds and binds one still.  There is no escape.  I love her utterly through all time and times.

~ Marion Cran

Now I know where the fairy lights are made.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

~ Henry David Thoreau

And for those who would miss it… Today’s view of the pond.

Having looped through the meadows, let’s head back to the house.  I need to fill the bird feeders and bird bath.  See the chickadees sitting on the clothesline?  They’re waiting for us.  Thank you so much for joining me on another morning walk.  I hope you enjoyed the lights as much as I did.

(Just a note:  The photos have been resized for the internet, tweaked in terms of contrast, brightness, and sharpened up a bit.  The bokeh (lights, orbs) is as I found it in the fields this morning.)

Near the house and still in the shade. No lights here yet.

Eden is a conversation.  It is the conversation of the human with the Divine.  And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place.  It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation.  To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time.  Altogether we call this beauty.

~ Barry Lopez

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