From My Nature Journal: Rejoicing at God’s Wonders

Three weeks ago today, Gail and I had the ‘blessing’ of the season’s very first snowfall while battening down the hatches to abandon for the winter our little cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula woods. I use quotations because that blessing certainly can be mixed, as it was this year. Whenever we stay through to the last half of October we often will experience the first snow, but it typically comes in flurries or a good dusting, coating the conifers with a crystalline beauty that takes breath away. Not this year. It was a bona fide storm, thrilling for our visiting grandchildren on fall break from school; after snowmen and snow angels, they even got to eat dinner and go to bed during an end of the day power outage, which made it feel like a true Little House in The Big Woods experience for them. But six inches of snow did indeed put the permanent parking brake on the fall raking yet to be completed, and just served to complicate the closing in general. Still, it was better than the blizzard during which we left several years ago. That one made loading the car a real treat.

I admit the result of the storm was beautiful, though. It had been a gorgeous fall in full color. Many trees were still holding on to some of that, so the mixture of the pristine white with all the reds, golds, oranges and forest greens made one’s heart sing. But very warm days leading up to that pre-winter weather event left a lot of warmth in the ground, especially the gravel roads; so though the woods and yards were a thick snowy blanket, the road was wet but relatively clear. 

About halfway through the snowfall I went out for a walk on that road and discovered dozens of these magnificent little snow sculptures where leaves had fallen. You may identify the maples easily. How did you do with the birch and large tooth aspen? In all my comings and goings over the years, I did not recall seeing anything like it before. The conditions must have been just perfect for it, and it reminded me how often a naturalist sees things they’ve never seen before nor ever may again. I love that part of being a nature observer, but it always takes me a little by surprise. (Continued below photos.)

The Northumbria Community of the U.K. has a lovely blessing that is part of the morning liturgy in their book Celtic Daily Prayer, a prayer blessing I have loved for years and offered over many. It goes like this:

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you wherever he may send you.

May he guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm.

May he bring you home rejoicing at the wonders he has shown you.

May he bring you home rejoicing once again into our (or his) doors.

The wonders God has shown me… I see them every day, large and small. I hope you do as well. They’re out there. I am grateful. 

Gitcha some outdoors.

~~ RGM, November 7 2022

From My Nature Journal: A Bow in the Snow

Early this morning I saw something I had never before seen, a rainbow in the snow. The rising sun was very low, ascending through broken skies, and I had just found myself coming into an alpine meadow in a sunny opening. The Twin Sisters loomed on my left, Longs Peak behind. Fragile hoarfrost clung to the taller grasses from an overnight fog, and the ground was covered with two inches of fresh powder, interlaced with coyote tracks.

Then, gently and slighter than a whisper, almost as an undertone, it began to snow. There was no wind. Tiny, brilliantly flashing crystals flitted like falling leaves or apple-blossom petals, dropping thinly from a wispy cloud, through which shown a cerulean sky. Bright sunshine beamed and all was dazzling when just as gently, just as whisper-like, the bow appeared. Was it something on my glasses? I wiped them clean. No, it was a rainbow, small and pale but still distinct, actually a bowed sundog, that hung before me as if I could reach out a hand and pierce the spectrum with a finger.

I actually tried, twice. Finally I held my palm open.

The promise, touched... The covenant,

come to rest upon my hand...

The promise, touched… The covenant, come to rest upon my hand...

I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be for a sign of a covenant between me and the earth… I will look at it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. (Genesis 9:13, 16)

~~ RGM, from an old entry in my nature journal, written several 

years ago while attending a board meeting at Covenant 

Heights Camp and Conference Center, Estes Park CO

QOTM...*: Mark Buchanan

(*Quote of the Month)

All living things thrive only by an

ample measure of stillness.

                  ~~Mark Buchanan

We’re ‘back home again’ for a few days in John Denver’s Colorado. And though the late January ground is free of snow (except for some very small remnants in heavily shaded places from a modest blast a couple weeks ago), the forecasters say we will get a bit tonight. That’s great. It IS winter after all.

There’s something about snow that settles me. Granted, I dislike clearing a foot or more of it off my driveway, but that doesn’t happen often so I’ll gladly take the bitter with the sweet. But back to that settling impression. I don’t know if it’s the deadening of sound that falling snow or a fresh blanket produces. Or maybe it’s the paling and blanching of winter’s stark lines – the bare tree branches, the blunt edges of rocks, the sharp angles of other land features -- or the purifying whitening of drab, brown ground. Perhaps it’s the near hypnotic effect of watching the flakes come down, like being before some panoramic, big-as-the-horizon lava lamp. Or maybe it has something to do with the forced care of driving, or even walking, that a blanket of fresh snow requires. As I said, I don’t know what it is, but these combined effects always still me deeper than a snowfall stills a southern city. They still me physically, mentally and emotionally, even spiritually. My spirit slows, temporarily more reflective. The only other natural vista that comes close to giving me this blessed impression is being before a body of water.

At any rate, looking forward to the snow tonight has turned my thoughts toward stillness today and its occasional dearth in my life, but its general famine in our culture. Surrounding ourselves as we do with a greater cacophony of sound and flurry of activity than is healthy, we do well to slow down. Our need for generous amounts of still moments is why God gave us sabbath.

I recently read again Mark Buchanan’s The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath. It is winsomely written, and though lacking the philosophical and theological depth of a classic like Abraham Heschel’s The Sabbath, I find it an enjoyable and motivating read. Here is the full Buchanan quote, from a chapter called In God’s Time: Stopping to See God’s Bigness:

The root idea of Sabbath is simple as rain falling, basic as breathing. It’s that all living things -- and many nonliving things too -- thrive only by an ample measure of stillness. A bird flying, never nesting, is soon plummeting. Grass trampled, day after day, scalps down to the hard bone of earth. Fruit constantly inspected bruises, blights. This is true of other things as well: a saw used without relenting -- its teeth never filed, its blade never cooled -- grows dull and brittle; a motor never shut off gums with residue or fatigues from thinness of oil -- it sputters, it stalls, it seizes. Even companionship languishes without seasons of apartness.

I need to hear this.

More than that, I need to heed its admonishment, both daily and at other special moments. So we’ll get up into the mountains over the next few days and enjoy the fresh powder. Sure, we’ll hike or snowshoe, doing something active, but I also hope we’ll have a warm enough day that Gail and I can pull out our sling chairs, find a nice place to just sit in the sun, take in the beauty, and be still.

~~RGM, January 31, 2015

QOTM...*: John Greenleaf Whittier

(*Quote of the Month)

It has been a lengthy cold snap here in Colorado, longer than is typical, two weeks without seeing a nice fifty-degree warmup. Family members in Chicago, Minneapolis and Seattle have seemed to suffer worse than I, however, and it seems the ones who have had it the easiest this winter, relatively speaking, are my daughter and son-in-law's family in Alaska! So it all has caused the snatch of poetry that follows to stand out strongly: 

The moon above the eastern wood

Shone at its full; the hill range stood

Transfigured in the silver flood,

Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,

Dead white, save where some sharp ravine

Took shadow, or the somber green

Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black

Against the whiteness at their back.

For such a world and such a night

Most fitting that unwarming light,

Which only seemed where’er it fell

To make the coldness visible.

                                        ~~ John Greenleaf Whittier

Now having shared this, though, I have to confess: I am very sorry to say it, but poetry does not often turn me on. And I suppose the more complicated the poetry, the more quickly I lose interest, like, perhaps maybe, within nanoseconds. I have always wanted to love poetry more. Even to sit down with so fine a volume as Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir always sounds more inviting than it ends up being to me. I regret this very much, as some of the most wonderful people I know read it, write it, speak it and think it. I wish this were I.

(all photography by Rick and Gail Mylander)

Consequently, quotes from poetry masters will likely not often grace these blogposts. And though I’m not remembering where I came across this excerpt from American Transcendentalist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, this brief passage has the effect of nearly translating me to the edge of a winter forest at night, almost even feeling the piercing cold of the wind through my overcoat. It’s from a piece called Snow-Bound, published in 1866, and chronicles a memory the author had of his family holed up in their warm home during a blizzard.

Not a poetry reader? Then try this: read it through twice, silently and very slowly. Then read it aloud even more slowly, pausing not at the ends of lines but at the punctuation marks. See if this kind of read-through doesn’t cause you to visually enter the scene, maybe even make you want to pull your collar up just a little bit around your neck.

The tempest comes out from its chamber, the cold from the driving winds. By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters become frozen. (Job 37:9-10)

~~RGM, February 5, 2014

QOTM...*: Peace

(*Quote of the Month)

                          Keep within me

               a stillness

               as deep and sweet

               as a forest's

               in mid of winter.

                               ~~Alistair MacLean, Hebridean Altars

Says the Psalmist, speaking the words of the Almighty, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10).

In my estimation there may be nothing in nature that epitomizes stillness more than a snow-shrouded winter wood. We were able to enjoy a bit of that this week during our holiday visit with family in Minnesota. Having brought our snowshoes along in the event the snow would be deep enough to do some shoeing, we were not disappointed; it was a veritable winter wonderland. Gail and I also get to enjoy lovely forest environments blanketed in snow just several miles west of our Colorado home.

The quotation is from a 1937 collection of Celtic prayers, sayings and blessings, titled Hebridean Altars: The Spirit of an Island Race, by Scottish historian Alistair MacLean. (Interestingly, this is a different Alistair MacLean than the prolific Scottish novelist who wrote The Guns of Navarone; I had thought they were the same man!) Altars is a classic in Celtic spirituality and includes quotes the historian MacLean gathered from the Outer Hebrides, the rough islands on the northwest of Scotland facing the North Atlantic. It may be that he also gleaned some of his material from the earlier and more voluminous Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael published in 1900.

I love the quote, though. Of course, the simile’s main evocative purpose is not to reference the woods but rather the inner peace also spoken of in the Psalm 46 Bible verse. That feeling of repose or tranquility would be a welcome sense for us all to enjoy as the Christmas season winds into the New Year. May you know, and know well, the peace of God that transcends all understanding (Philippians 4:7).

~~RGM, December 27, 2013