From my Nature Journal: The Long Journey

A long, barefoot walk along the Atlantic shoreline at low tide...

I look back intermittently upon firm footprints, sure, distinct, uniquely paced and directed to my various digressions and curiosities along the way. They create a history, of a walk, yes, but also perhaps a symbolic portrayal of a life’s journey.

After some time I turn back. It is a rising tide now, all footprints obliterated by breaking waves. There is no residual indication they had ever existed, nor that I had ever passed that way two hours before. My presence seems to have been of no consequence.

In times of doubt and flagging courage I am tempted to see my life’s journey like this, no residual impact. But I think again. Brief? Yes. Momentary? Yes. But of no consequence? No.

Along that shore I tended blessing and grace to the myriad flotsam and jetsam I encountered along the way. To what end? Aren’t others’ storm-tossed lives also transitory, as fleeting as my own, leaving no prints along their chosen shorelines? Yes. But blessing and grace always pay forward, tend ahead, not backward, always lean into others’ futures, beyond. Blessing endures.

...Blessing and grace always pay forward,

tend ahead... Blessing endures.

Of no consequence?

Along that shore I also extolled my Creator God, that only One completely Eternal, in Whose heart my footprints still remain, etched permanently, tracked across the lasting sands of God's Father-heart. Praise endures.

Along that shore my own heart seemed to burst in joyous, aching gratitude for the simple beauties of sight and sound, touch and smell -- birds, shells and their fragments, waves, sand patterns, sky, salt-air, grasses, heat and coolness, seeds, rain, creatures strange and familiar, smoothed stones, fog, sunrise and sunset, wind, flowers, thunder, dunes, breeze on bare skin, tracks, colors, clouds -- each alternately taking my breath away, yet causing me to praise my Maker while I had that breath. Gratitude endures.

                  

Along that shore God held sweet communion with me, spoke with me, challenged me, reminded me that though my life passes as a blink of an eye, he will one day bodily welcome me in familiarity, eternally, an old friend. Memory endures.

Along that shore I sowed pregnant seeds among the dunes: I loved and was loved. I taught and was taught. I sang and was sung to. I blessed and was blessed. I instilled faith and hope, and such was also instilled in me. Love, faith and hope endure.

                                                 

Impacts as these are not as footprints further up from the waterline, prints that simply last longer than those where the waves break but still are eventually erased by larger waves, higher winds or driving rain. Impacts as these are as everlasting as God Himself, treasures laid up in God's heaven, imperishable, immortal, abiding.

My life is wrapped in his, mingled in Omnipresence, a journey without end.

~~RGM, from an earlier journal entry, after a

walk at Hobe Sound NWR, Jupiter Island FL

POTM...*: Winter Visitors

(*Photo of the Month)

I’m a little rushed for time with my blog this week, as our four Alaska grandkids have been visiting and have preoccupied Gail and me in a wonderful way. We’ve been outdoors much of the time – and over these days have fed a lot of birds, played a lot in the snow or mud, caught the same squirrel twice (he’s sprung the trap and escaped twice more), caught no rabbits (the intended quarry), taken several nice hikes up along the South Platte River or here on a couple of our premier Castle Rock trails, cooked hot dogs and marshmallows on the backyard campfire, driven to the top of Pikes Peak, and explored the dinosaur bones and footprints along west Denver’s Dinosaur Ridge, all among other nature-oriented things I am not remembering. This is to say nothing of the indoor activities that have also filled our days and evenings, but we are always particularly interested in getting our grandkids outside enjoying the wonders of God’s creation, as we did when our own were young. Seven-year-old Madeleine has already developed quite a knack for it all; and, along with their nature-loving parents, we’re always working on her younger sibs and cousin as well, convinced as we are that nature-deprivation can be a very real liability among instinctively imaginative children. (Check out Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Protecting our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder.)

But our offspring are not our only visitors these late winter days. I mentioned that we’d fed a lot of birds, and my photo of the month highlights one of our most frequent callers. It’s the ubiquitous Mountain Chickadee, a gregarious and acrobatic little guest found at our feeders or flitting through our seeded bushes. Among its slight differences from the more common Black-capped Chickadee, whose range it shares in the mountain west, it has a white stripe over each eye rather than a solid black cap, and is a bit smaller. Birds are famous for having onomatopoeic names (Adam must have gotten a bit bird-bored during naming sessions…), and so its name mimics its chick-a-dee-dee-dee call. Mountain Chickadees are also colloquially called cheeseburger birds, as one of their calls seems to say chee-bur-ger. Really. As a non-migratory species (i.e., it is resident all year), its diet concentrates on insects during summer months and seeds in winter.  Monogamous in its breeding patterns, it will usually travel in pairs or small flocks, with individuals moving quickly from branch to branch or tree to tree.

There’s no question but that we will greatly miss our grandchildren, daughter and son-in-law when they return north. But we know for certain that there is one winter visitor who will be sticking around.

Jesus said, "That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life -- whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn't life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don't plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren't you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? (Matthew 6:25-27)

~~RGM, February 21, 2014

Blowin' in the Wind: "Creation Calls" and the BBC

(Blowin’ in the Wind is a regular feature on my blog consisting of an assortment of nature writings – hymns, songs, prayers, Bible readings, poems or other things – pieces I may not have written but that inspire me. I trust they will do the same for you.)

OK, so sometimes those of us who love nature can also be accused of being cheesy. I’ll own that unashamedly – I can be a sentimental fool.

Typically, my blog’s Blowin’ in the Wind feature highlights something written, but this time I’d like to share something of a different medium. (Click here and settle back for six and a half minutes.) I came across this video during a worship service some time ago, and it never ceases to thrill me. The Creation Calls song by Brian Doerksen is good in itself, but the videography is absolutely spectacular. And why not? The video comes from the BBC’s Planet Earth specials. They've been around for a while, I think airing on the Discovery Channel in 2007, but if you are not familiar with them by all means check the series out at your public library and have a gander. Don't expect to watch it in an evening, however: there are eleven episodes on different land forms, each over an hour in length. Quite amazing, they often include photography of natural events, creatures or objects never before filmed.

But back to Creation Calls. If you are more left-brained, you might want to leave this week’s blog entry to us hopeless romantics. My favorite scene? It comes after about 3:20 of the piece. 

~~RGM, February 14, 2014

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

From My Nature Journal: What Could Be More Humble than Dirt?

What could possibly be more humble than dirt?

Yes, it's potting soil... It is winter, after all!

Perhaps it’s a strange thing, but I lately have been thinking about dirt. Not the kind on clothes, mind you, nor that slung by seedy politicians these days or celebrated in the media. But good ol’ soil dirt, of the plain ground variety, what we trod upon, usually without thinking. Where would we be without dirt?

Humus is another word for it. Where would we be without that? From it comes our very existence, created from the dust as we were (Genesis 2:7), yet also sustained by it through crops and meat and as filter for our drink. As if that weren’t incredible enough, did you know that there are more organisms in a tablespoon of rich topsoil than there are people on the planet? Or that soil sequesters ten percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions? Or that it contains stardust from distant suns? Or that fifty percent of soil is made up of air and water, the rest being mineral and organic material? Yet, I confess I actually don’t know if what I have always told my kids is true, that one has to eat at least six pounds of dirt before they die; Google says it’s only one.

You’ve got to get pretty low to appreciate dirt, and of course, it needs to get pretty low itself to do its best work: it’s the refuse of the world that ends up nourishing it in such a way that it can nourish us. Dare I say it? Things that we wouldn’t touch – decaying matter, organic garbage, the leftover substance that both beasts and human beings void – become the stuff of life in dirt, creating the staff of life for our benefit. Amazing.

Interestingly, the word humility comes from the root word humus. (Hmmm… root word… appropriate.) Does humility have something to do with dirt? Maybe there are some correlations here. The one gifted with true humility becomes as the soil. Good, fertile humus can be taken for granted. We walk on it and it supports us, quietly, without complaint. But yet it is also ever ready to accept the seed, help it germinate, then provide the nutrients for growth. Do you know people like that? I sure do. And I am deeply grateful for them.

The one gifted with true humility

becomes as the soil…

So I guess you realize by now that this essay is not so much about dirt as about something else, the gift of humility. You say you’d never want to be treated like dirt? Perhaps at further thought, that cliché is not always the insult we normally would assume.

When we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world... (1 Corinthians 4:13)

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things... to bring to nothing what the world considers important. (1 Corinthians 1:27-28)

~~RGM, from an earlier journal entry,

revised for my blog January 31, 2014

QOTM...*: Viktor Frankl

(*Quote of the Month)

OK, I’ve got a pretty penetrating excerpt this week for my Quote of the Month. It’s from Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning. I’ll admit it is also more of a passage than a quote, but I wanted to share it in its entirety, as it is pretty incredible, particularly within its circumstance.

Frankl (1905-1997) was a three-year survivor of several Nazi death camps during World War 2, liberated in 1945, and became a world-renowned psychologist following the war and founder of a psychological approach called logotherapy: its major tenets include finding meaning in all experiences of life, including horrific suffering. Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) was his first book, rewritten after his notes were taken from him and destroyed in his first prison camp assignment. This is a profound book, and yet is one of 39 written by him. I read it again recently, just a tiny little thing, in which he first describes his Holocaust experiences and then draws conclusions for the foundations of his philosophy. It is a simple but very thoughtful read. (Hit this link for more quotes from this insightful book.)

One of his recollections referred to the healing effect of natural beauty within the context of their misery. Here we go:

As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp, as we beheld through the little barred windows of the prison carriage the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor -- or maybe because of it -- we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.

…the healing effect of natural beauty

within the context of… misery…

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods, the same woods in which we had built a hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!”

It gave me joy to read this, imagining these tormented men in this situation. God’s creation truly does possess a remarkable ability to lift us, to draw our spirit to a higher plane of mindfulness, contemplation and delight, regardless of our circumstances.

~~ RGM, January 23, 2014

P.S. A key to Frankl’s psychological philosophy is that, no matter our circumstances, good or appalling, the opportunity is still ours to choose our response to it. No wonder he and others could find a modicum of pleasure even in the prison camp context. That’s something for us all to muse upon a bit this week.

Blowin' in the Wind: The Music of the Spheres

(Blowin’ in the Wind is a regular feature on my blog highlighting an assortment of nature writings – hymns, songs, prayers, Bible readings, poems or other things –pieces I have not written but that inspire me. I trust they will do the same for you.)

God’s creation is not the only thing that touches me at the depths of my soul. You may find that, for yourself, like me, music does that as well. In fact, I think nature and music often go hand-in-hand to naturalists. But beyond the singing of birds, beyond the echoes of one’s voice in mountain valleys or at the shore of still lakes at night, beyond the impulse to break into songs of praise upon seeing something of natural beauty – music itself, like nature, often has a power to translate us into God’s very presence. It is no wonder that some of the great philosophers since before the time of Christ have referred to one aspect of creation, the heavens, as producing ‘the music of the spheres.’ Even Martin Luther, not to be forgotten as a gifted hymnwriter (A Mighty Fortress is our God, Away in a Manger and many others) is quoted as saying, “Music is a fair and glorious gift of God.” I could not agree more.

…Music itself, like nature, often

has a power to translate us

into God’s very presence.

My blog writings on creation not infrequently lead me into references to Christian hymns and songs, so I thought it might be of interest for readers who share these two loves with me to be able to reference back to earlier posts that deal with some of the great songs of our faith. As a result, it occurred to me that an index tab at my blog’s masthead might be a helpful tool for doing so. Maybe you remember a musical post that touched you and you’d like to find it again but can’t remember when it was published. Or maybe you are newer to this blog and want to reference some of the previous posts that combined a love for music and a love for nature. Then this index is for you. Who knows, it might serve you some quiet evening when you are looking for something uplifting to inspire you before you sleep!

So consider this post an announcement: I have added the tab called "The Music" above. I will, of course, continue to add to that tab page songs referenced in future posts.

Here are the listings of songs about which I have written, and links to them:

-- All Creatures of our God and King, by Francis of Assisi, music by Peter von Brachel:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/01/blowin-in-wind-all-creatures-of-our-god.html

-- Day is Done (or, what we sometimes call Taps), by Horace Lorenzo Trim, music traditional:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/09/blowin-in-wind-taps-not-just-for.html

-- For the Beauty of the Earth, by F.S. Pierpoint, music by Conrad Kocher:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/04/blowin-in-wind-prayer-for-earth-day.html

-- Hallelujahs, by Chris Rice:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/03/blowin-in-wind-hallelujahs-by-chris-rice.html

-- How Great Thou Art (see O Mighty God below)

-- In God My Soul Rests as on Placid Water, by Carl Boberg:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/08/blowin-in-wind-some-of-those-old.html

-- Joy to the World, by Isaac Watts and G.F. Handel:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/12/blowin-in-wind-nature-hymn-in.html

-- O Mighty God, by Carl Boberg, music traditional:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/08/blowin-in-wind-some-of-those-old.html

-- Taps (see Day is Done above)         

-- We Plow the Fields and Scatter, by Matthias Claudius, music by Johann A.P. Schulz:

http://www.rickmylander.com/2013/11/qotm-unusual-thanksgiving-pairing-from_28.html

More to come!

~~RGM, January 16, 2014