The seeming contradictions with Nature are a bit glaring today, what with my hiking adventures of yesterday and the week long storms (thunderstorms, tornadoes, and torrential rain) hitting the central portion of our country. I have family in those parts, so my antenna is up.
I am hard pressed to find Peace and Beauty when challenged, and how do I find it there when I am either existentially or so incarnationally pressed? We live in an earthquake zone and the “They” tell us we are overdue for a big one soon.
My default for today is Wendell Berry’s, The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It is the pause button which seems to be my doorway or entry to the Peace which Nature offers, much like sitting on that bench I mentioned a while back. But sitting on the bench and lying down on the Earth offer two very different perspectives/lenses. Wendell Berry’s offering is that there is something to be said for the larger surface to surface contact our bodies make with the Earth. From time to time I still lie on the grass in my backyard and stay long enough, and wait for the hardness to dissolve and allow myself to be cradled by the Earth as well as take in a very different view of the trees and the sky. You could say it is the great equalizer, the Earth and me settling into each other, a cradling of sorts, perhaps coming into unison of breath. Weather permitting; I just may have to do this today.

And so here is the end, my 40 days of writing on Beauty – another type of pause will ensue. I suspect I will be marching back and forth on the bridge for the next several days (Day 19 reference). Who knows how the insights will percolate in me and then how they will emerge when I write again?

Thanks to those of you who read my posts.