Of nature and mystery

I want to share with you a quote from another journal writer who gives eloquent testimony to the wonders of the natural world. She writes from the northern part of the U.S. Midwest:

"I can’t imagine not wanting to know this world of green-ness and birdsong. I can’t ever imagine that I have learned all I want to learn about it. As I looked out over the marsh and watched a heron fly overhead, I wanted to embrace this world and become part of it again, where eveyrthing matters and nothing seems foolish..."

I just thought these words spoke very directly to me and my own experiences. At the beach where I go to often to escape the cares of the city, my brother’s house faces on one side a vast marsh of spartina grass and tidal creeks, a flowing sea and estuarine world all to its own. It is over those marshes that we have watched many a glorious sunset. On the front side of the house, across the road is the ocean and the beach we have been going to for decades. It is a timeless place.

The other day I was sitting out there watching two pelicans soar overhead and then fly out over the ocean just offshore. They are magnificent birds with long wingspans that seem to belong to this place as much as the tiniest crabs burrowing in the sand or the seemingly modest clusters of sea oats holding down the dunes and preventing erosion. It is a world of salt air and the steady rhythm of waves breaking onshore.

There is no place I know where the tensions of the world, which can be so oppressive and stomach churning, are so gradually and steadily worn away and placed in the dustbin of negative emotions where they belong. Freed from tension, even if only temporarily, I am able to breathe more deeply of the clean air and set my sights on higher things than exist merely in this world of great perils. Of the beauty I seek, I can find it here in abundance, at this beach and beside this vast ocean.