What is experienced in meditation as aridity, or even as dark night, can at the same time in a hidden but true sense be the brightest radiance of love. But this love must hide itself in the nakedness of faith... Every silence in meditation is meaningful. In other words, where in an earthly sense we experience wordlessness, the spheres of Word and meaning beyond expression open up.
One's relationship to nature is a deeply personal experience. To some it's best represented by a walk in the park, or along the river, or under a summer night's sky. To others it reaches its pinnacle in the study of a smell, a sound, the sight of a bird's egg, a gray whale, or lodgepole pine. And while all of nature is laid out before us to appreciate, not all is understood, known, or even knowable. But about human nature we do know at least one thing, which is that it embodies an irrepressible and infinite ability to create, to express, to give, and to share.
~ Al Gore in THE NATURE OF NATURE by William H. Shore
All around me the precious quiet of evening and the pungent smell of hay in the air. Above me the starry sky. Such a sweet inner peace fills me and gently takes possession of every fiber of my whole being and existence. And one surrenders to her, great Mother Nature, fully and completely and without reservation, and says with open arms, "Take me."
~ Paula Worpswede in DEAR FRIEND by Eric Torgersen
I felt myself a steady, fixed point on the earth round which a whirling gathered and spun a center. Then it was that I seemed to be no one, to belong to no one, and suddenly beholding the russet light of the turning sumach tree in the pasture, I thought,
I am leaf and I am wind and I am light. Something in the world likes faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes of them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.
Nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness in deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs . . . Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Barnaby was what I call "heart smart." While other dogs accompanied me in our intellectual journeys and listened while ideas came in, Barnaby just walked and walked with me, looking at the river or the woods and feeling deep feelings. Rarely have I had a walking companion who could just be silent, not having to make a talking point or a barking commentary. With Barnaby, one barked in silence in which much of a more contemplative nature was communicated -- peace, simplicity, the glory of the natural world, the presence of God.
The spiritual properties of the world are subtle . . . The whole earth breathes the divine spirit. When you know this it informs everything you do, every word you say, every act.
