Seek the Lord

This week, I wanted to share with you a few pieces of nature writing I read recently. Whenever the seasons change, I always find myself paying more attention to what’s going on in my environment. I check the weather constantly, secretly rooting for cooler days and turning leaves at the same time as I dread having to turn on the heat and face the oil bill.

 Fall is captivating to us, novelist Chris Bohjalian says, because it reminds us of our mortality.  

The whole of autumn is about transience. The entire natural world seems to be shutting down, moldering, growing still. The days are short, the nights are long, and everything looks a little bleak . . . except for those leaves. Those kaleidoscopically lovely maples and birches and oaks allow us to gaze for a moment at the wonder of nature and to accept the inevitable quiescence of our own souls. Like so much else around us, it's not the leaves' beauty that moves us: It's the fact their beauty won't last. (Boston Globe, Sept. 22)

 The leaves are dying, brilliantly and raucously, sparing nothing as they go.  Even though we speed up every fall with more activity, more work, there is still part of us that is preparing to hunker down for the long winter that is to come.  Our technologically focused 21^st Century life seems separate from nature, but fall reminds us of what we already know.  The cycles of creation, birth and death, are part of our life, too.

 The other piece I wanted to share with you is from Verlyn Klinkenborg, from Sunday’s New York Times.  Writing from a trip to northern Finland, he talks about the quiet,

deep in the forest north of the Arctic circle. Listening in the silence, at first he is disturbed by how little he hears—to fill the sound, he throws rocks, stamps his feet. A week later, things are different. Standing in the same spot he hears not deafening silence, but rushing water.  He writes,

Why had I not heard it that first night? The answer, I suppose, is that I was too busy not hearing the things I’m used to hearing, including the great roar that underlies the city’s quietest moments. It had taken a week to empty my ears, to expect to hear nothing and to find in that nothing something to hear after all. (NYT, 9/21/08)

 Nothing is something to hear--I think what both writers are pointing to is the way we do, or don’t, attend to our surroundings and our created nature. Our mortality is with us in every moment, but we forget.  We think technology can fix everything, and we try to engineer ourselves out our own mortal, fleshy selves. Accustomed to the sounds of ordinary city life, Klinkenborg is aware of how in their absence, they are still with him—he hears that they are not there, but doesn’t hear what is. Many of the blessings of our life are right in front of us, but we are quick to overlook them.

 The second song of Isaiah from the rite for Morning Prayer says, Seek the Lord while he wills to be found; call upon him when he draws near. The Lord always wills to be found, and is closer than we know.

  [My description of these articles is fine, but please look them up for yourself!  

Bohjalian: www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/22/death_and_the_lesson_of_the_leaves Klinkenborg:   www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21sun4.html