4 Viburnum Leaves, taken lying on my back looking up through the leaves of a high-country viburnum into a very tall red spruce tree, blue sky beyond.I often re-read RS Thomas's poem, The Bright Field:
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
I drive people a little batty sometimes because lovely or odd bits of the natural world pull me like a magnet. The response 'pauses' conversations and hikes and sometimes even trips in the car. I've come to justify it under the general heading of 'the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush' which is a pretty lofty, perhaps self-serving, claim.
Still...it is that. God as creator leaves DNA in every bit of creation. And the lovely bits are easier to celebrate--they act as a kind of worm hole, a direct-connect to awe and wonder and gratitude and the kind of expansive joy that fills up the heart afterwards. Not necessarily for very long--which is why we have to keeping turning and turning aside the miracles of lit bushes.
