Nature issues an invitation. It sneaks up on us in a beckoning fashion. It lures and calls us. If we pay attention, we will find its beauty irresistible. Perhaps we even are compelled to share with others what we experience.
"Wasn't that a beautiful sunset last night!" Or "Over there, a parent bird is feeding newly hatched babies!" Or "Look, a rainbow!"
We are invited to revel in the natural world's beauty. Majesty, simple and complex designs. Amazing patterns, surprises, perseverance, and abundance. Robert Frost's poem about the pasture has always been one of my favorites "I'm going out to clean the pasture spring . . . you come too."
Jessica Powers is another poet writing about this invitation: " Make decoys he told me/set them on the blue . . . Let him have his decoys . . . My decoys are fashioned /to bring heaven down."
Nature is about listening to silence. I just finished reading the book One Square Inch of Silence. The writer makes a journey across country recording the amount of sound that surrounds us - and the lack of places to experience natural silence. A very thought-provoking book that has made me aware of how much sound intrudes and invades my life. Sound that I previously filtered out, just as we talk louder in restaurants to be heard by others at our table, not consciously realizing why we have raised our voices.
And I have been re-reading the Rule of Saint Benedict - and notice how often he uses the word listen.
It is a challenge to find times and places of silence. But I return again and again to favorite places in the natural world to find silence to nourish my heart and soul.
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