Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 6: Look out the window until you find something of beauty you had not noticed before.

I have skipped a whole day of reflection, but not practice.  Day 5 was 5 minutes of silence at noon.  Since I have written on silence as a part of my blog before, I will happily let you look at that post (see my post on September 15, 2009).  I continue to practice 30 minutes of silence a week.

For today’s practice I had a perfect vantage point. I sat, today, for 7.5 hours looking out a fairly large window.  I did so, with one eye on the road and one searching for something beautiful that I had not noticed before.  Since the back of a Wal-Mart truck is not particularly interesting or beautiful, both eyes wandered every now and again to the sides of the road to see what could be seen there.

The landscape does not seem to be particularly vibrant right now.  There is very little color, though in some spots green seems to be poking up among the brown and grey looking grass. 

At one point I did notice, however, that off on the horizon things looked white.  Sometimes, I could see the green of pine trees in the middle of the white.  I looked a little closer and noticed that the white tended to be the tops of bare trees.  I started to notice those bare trees as they were varied distances from the interstate, and I noticed that even at the 75 mph speed limit, I could see quite a bit of detail in the trees if I looked. I could see where large branches gave way to smaller branches gave way to twigs gave way to even places where buds would soon be forming.  It was a thing of beauty.  In the middle of not-quite-yet-spring there was this beauty in the detail of a naked tree.

I once heard that the leaves on a tree show their true colors in the fall before they drop.  They are green during the summer because, of course, of the process of photosynthesis.  When that process ends in preparation for the fall is the very time that the leaves’ color comes through.  And that is a thing of beauty.  However, I had never really experienced a leafless tree as beautiful.  Until now. 

Beauty is all around us, as is, I am aware, the presence of God.  Sometimes it is hard to see either or both.  Yet it is important that we take time to look and we learn how to perceive both.

Dear God, thank you for the beauty that resonates in the world around us. Help our spirits to sing with nature the music of the spheres. Amen.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

I continue to keep a holy Lent with the exercises found here.