No Baptism Like Rain

 

With great relief. . .in this smoky fire season. . .the return of the RAIN!

Daily Scripture

Light Leaf

Likeable Lichen

Lightbulbs with Feet

What’s the Buzz?

In Butterfly Territory, Asheville, NC

Intense Concentration, Asheville, NC

In Eleanor’s Garden, Hyde Park, NY

All Photos by Chris Highland

Hearing the “Voice of God”

Thundering falls on a thundering day (Dupont State Forest, NC)

I used to listen for the voice of God–any God–in a church, in a forest or in my head.

Now. . .the “voice” of Nature is wonderfully enough.

Sacred Secular Streaming

Highlandstreams7

This reflection was just posted on Secular Chaplain.

{I’m using the term “sacred” in the new “secular gospel” way. . .in other words, I’m borrowing the “holy word” from those who think they own the terms, meanings and “special knowledge” that come with experiences of wonder}

Everyone Reads their Holy Book in the Same Light

“Our” Sun on 11-11-11

Probably the original God, Religion and Scripture. . .

New Video of “our” Sun

Another Baptism in Heaven

Looking Up at Water Coming Down

Splashing on me and the camera.

Waterfalls have never been something to simply see or hear. . .but to touch. . .to participate in.

Almost “spiritual”. . .like a “baptism”. . .like “heaven”. . .but why call it anything?

Greener Pastures

After some hard rains, I’m looking out over the pasturelands and the Bay beyond.  Last week the arches of color, the rainbows, appeared.  There’s now a small stream flowing through one pasture and quite a lake in another.  I observe the birds.  Flocks of fowl.  Many of them are residents of these hilly lands and open plains.  In a few minutes of observation I notice the diversity.  I see gulls and geese, crows and ducks, turkey vultures, egrets and a great blue (heron).  Hummingbirds rise and fall above small trees where their nests are deeply hidden.  Hawks circle high over the land (the other night on our walk we saw a white owl swooping between eucalyptus and pines.   Later we heard great horned owls hooting in the dark oak hills).

All live and move in this field and the field of view.  All rising to swoop and spy and play, I guess; all descending to eat while they chirp, squawk and chatter. . .or make music, as I hear it.  When they aren’t standing silent and still.

This is a wonderful scene with the watery green backdrop of late autumn.

And it leaves me wondering what we could learn from this Life in the Pastureland.  We are another species–earthbound without wings.  So we share the same pastureland, the greening earth, going about our days seeking food and safety and rest and other things we cannot name.  With birds as our teachers, our guides, how can we become their students?  Would we be better at being human?

I have no doubt of that.

John Muir’s Heaven

Lake Tahoe

My wife and I just returned from 5 days by (and IN) Lake Tahoe.

Walking, biking, swimming. . .but mostly just looking at the beauty.  You can’t help yourself.  The view, the colors, the sound on the shore and in the pines.  You sense you are a part of this great piece of liquid art (unless you’re jetskiing or powerboating or cranking up the boombox on the beach with your barking dog. . .but that’s the OTHER stuff we’ll leave aside for a while).

“The Big Blue” as I call it.  You never tire of gazing over this 22-mile lake and all that comes from your mouth, if you care or dare to speak, is, “Beautiful.”  Yes, full of water, full of light, full of mountain particles and full of pure beauty.  It’s like the sky has poured into a mammoth canyon of the highlands waiting to be discovered, seducing discoverers. . .like John Muir.

Muir called Lake Tahoe “the queen of lakes” and the “water heaven” where all lakes eventually go.

From the John Muir Exhibit (Sierra Club) website:

-Muir first visited Lake Tahoe in October-November of 1873, calling it the “queen of lakes” and writing his friend Jeanne Carr that he had “sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual.” He wrote further, “The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come.” [Source: Letters to a Friend, 1915]
-Muir returned to Tahoe several other times in his life, enjoying its “delightful” beauty.

My mind is still up there in the alpine country breathing the fresh pine air.  Even with the unclean air, noise and nuisance of city living, there’s something refreshing that stays with you when you’re that close, that immersed, in Beauty (what some would call God, the Sacred, or Heaven).

As I am fond of saying, Why wish for, why imagine another world, a “heaven above,” when it’s all right here, right there, if we simply go look and wade in.  We’re all in Heaven, and it’s so much better than anything we’ve ever been told.

Images from Nature’s Scripture

A Selection of my Photographs around and near my home:

Liquid Light (Highland)

Falling water with Mossing Log (Highland)

Sandmirror (Highland)

Skycliffs (Highland)

Bubblestream (Highland)

Sand, Sea, Sky, Sun (Highland)

Life Below the Surface (Highland)

Greentrail (Highland)

Webnet (Highland)

B/W Fleurs (Highland)

Root of Seeds (Highland)

Beyond the Pond (Highland)