Having Our Place

It is healthy for each person to have a place they go to for nourishment. I immerse myself in the sounds of the crickets tonight as the almost full moon rises and the heat of the day turns into a cooling salve for the heart. Sometimes it is a deep dive into the single note of a nuthatch or the melodic call of a hermit thrush. There are those who find their nourishment from a rift from Miles Davis or the strokes of Picasso, but for me it is in the gestalt of nature.


Wendell Berry wrote this poem and it struck me as fitting this theme:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world 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
or grief.  I come into the present of still water.
And feel above me the day blind stars
waiting with their lights. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

I am of an age and culture that has wrapped me in the garment of the consumer and producer. It is often a challenge to slow down the pace so I truly feel the rhythm of this place... to feel the rise and fall of heat as a presence rather than as something that must be overcome. There is this deep seated craving to be removed from the world of consumption and activity in order that the lessons of nature blesses me with a new insight.

Thomas Merton (Contemplation in a World of Action) wrote this: ...the monk has a quiet, relatively isolated existence in which it is possible to concentrate more on the quality of life and its mystery, and thus to escape in some measure from the senseless tyranny of quantity.

...the senseless tyranny of quantity... a line to think about.