...

Sometimes I really wish I could go back and change the past... For instance, I'd love to travel back about three hours and undo all the mistakes I'm afraid I made on my accounting exam this afternoon. Or maybe go back to Wednesday morning and be a little more alert in nature writing, the class that truly gets me moving and excited. In fact, there are quite a lot of things I would change if I could have my perfect world, my perfect life.

I'm so exhausted right now that all I really want to do is go to bed. But I have to work all day tomorrow (grading exams--woo hoo), and I feel like I should do something relaxing and fun now while I have the chance. After all, this whole week has been about everything but what I want to do. But my husband went to bed already, and I'm sitting here barely able to force my eyes to stay open--why? Because I want so badly to do something enjoyable that I'm willing to make myself miserable, as I am unable to let go of the fact that I have worn myself into the ground this week and all I really can do is rest.

Right now I don't love my life very much. Joy sometimes escapes me, when I'm under a lot of pressure--I foget that God is there, my source of ever-renewable life and energy. And the times when I forget His all-encompassing presence are generally the times I need Him the most. So right now my spirit is dull, along with my mind, along with my body.

I'm going to bed. After grading 45 exams tomorrow, I plan to try as hard as I can to escape to the outdoors, lie in the grass or something equally warming. Maybe I won't be so dull again tomorrow. Maybe my joy will return in the night, and I'll remember to hang onto it in the morning.

Quiet

I had about ten minutes of down time this afternoon, so I took a brief but therapeutic walk through the Old Athens Cemetery. Being out in the sun, in the still and quiet afternoon air, almost made me wish I could lie down in the earth with the dead and sleep. Sleep forever... Never another worry, another deadline, another human being to please. Just my body, resting eternally in the womb of the earth, while my spirit soars away to face my Maker and to dwell in a place so much more wonderful than here...

I was suddenly struck with that feeling, this afternoon, a longing for stillness and for peace all around me. But alas. While in the world, I will scarcely ever find a moment of perfect stillness without. I have to seek it from within, embrace it and fully strive to live in it. The world gets me down, especially at times like these.

But after tomorrow, a brief lapse. I will return to the cemetery and look for what it has to show me, at a time when I can internalize the stillness to which it calls me, one of the quiet places remaining here on earth.

Oh, to write about nature again

I miss updating this blog almost daily. I miss writing about nature--I miss being in nature! But right now, accounting is sucking the life out of me...

It will briefy come to a close with my corporate taxation test on Thursday afternoon. After that, expect quite a long post from me. In the meantime, I will continue my hermitude, my want for sunlight and for physical activity.

I'd rather be writing!

For no real reason

I just thought this was amazing sunrise. This is Bob's parents' farm, and it's probably about seven in the morning, in early February. Sunsets and sunrises are so beautiful--I don't think anyone would contradict that.

One of my favorite books is Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. If you've not read it, I strongly recommend it to you.

" 'Un jour, j'ai vu le soleil se coucher quarante-quatre fois!'
Et un peu plus tard tu ajoutais:
'Tu sais... quand on est tellement triste on aime les couchers de soleil...'
'Le jour des quarante-quatre fois, tu étais donc tellement triste?'
Mais le petit prince ne répondit pas."

" 'One day,' you said to me, 'I saw the sunset forty-four times!'
And then a little later you added:
'You know--one loves the sunset, when one is so sad...'
'Were you so sad, then?' I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?'
But the little prince made no reply."

I add this for no real reason, other than whenever I think of the sunrise and the sunset I think of that passage. There is something calming about watching the display of light, slowly fading in, slowly out. It does quell sadness, and it evokes thought and reflection and, most soothing of all, silence.

Recently I've been learning to love silence. Particularly silence before God. But silence before God has to start somewhere--silence within myself. In a world of constant white noise our spirits become starved for silence. You cannot find it unless you set out to look for it... or unless the Most High leads your stubborn spirit into it. But once you're there, in the silence, you find all the peace and all the comfort that you have made all that noise in seeking. Then you can reflect, and think, and hear the still, small voice that you have tuned out so effectively for such a long time.

There will be silence before You,
and praise in Zion, o God..."
Psalm 65:1

To explain a little

So I returned yesterday evening from my spring break in New Orleans, and immediately decided to write about my experience in my essay for the week about "my sense of place and how nature affectss it." As I was down there I thought a lot about my sense of place; it's something I've never really thought about before and, quite honestly, didn't entirely understand when the assignment was given. But I learned so much about the undying sense of belonging those people had to their storm-ravaged home, and it made me realize just how connected I am to the places I've called home. Savannah runs deep inside of me, and even when I say I needed a change and that I will never live there again, the area still composes me. It still defines me.

We're all products of our environment and culture. Just like you can never separate yourself entirely from an experience, even a negative one, you can also never separate yourself from a place that has gotten under your skin. To use a silly example, I love Walt Disney World in Orlando. I've been about a dozen times, the last time being about five years ago, during my junior year in high school. For months now I have been longing to go back, and to share it with my husband (who has never been). Do I think he would love it as I do? Of course not. If I went for the first time at the age of twenty-two I would probably find it rather lame myself. But my wonderful memories there and my feeling that I belong there, that Disney World is mine, all make it a special place for me. I can feel joy today in other situations and relate it back to the joy I felt there as a child; I can do something that makes me feel like a kid again and automatically it goes into the Disney category in my heart, because I associate my youth with Disney. As cliché as all that sounds, it is the complete truth.

Places like that really give us a reference point. I can appreciate a cold northern winter because it is different from a Savannah winter, and I can tolerate a sweltering Georgia summer because it is the summer I have always known. Climate is a huge part of our sense of place; I can just imagine the typical summer climate on the Gulf of Mexico, and while it seems like it would be a relief to escape that kind of heat, people cannot wait to return to it because for them, that is how their climate is supposed to be. The alligators and the herons and the cranes and the seagulls--they too belong there. Terry Tempest Williams had a deep sense of belonging to the Great Salt Lake, though its salinity made it sting and burn and dry with salty crystals caked to her skin. She belonged to the desert and loved the desert; she belonged to the birds and they belonged to her. We all are a part of the places that are a part of us. All we are is nature along with everything else natural around us. Thousands of years of sun has darkened the skin of Africans with melanin, while in northern Europe pale skin and eyes and hair tell of the cooler climate and the less-direct sunlight. Our environment and culture leave even their physical markings on us; how much more will they leave markings on our souls and in our hearts, where the essence of us all really exists?

I was really struck with all these ideas as I did my part last week to help the people to whom New Orleans belongs. They are strongly tied to their home, just as I am strongly tied to mine. Something that powerful you can't question and you can't overcome. If you want change you seek it, but all the change does is add to, not replace, your sense of place. If you don't want change then you stay right where you know you belong. "Here I am, where I should be."

Spring break and my sense of place

The Spirit of Home

The constant pounding of hammers and crowbars reverberates against the naked concrete floor, finally creating a sense of near-deafness in my ears. Opening closets shut up for seven months, avalanches of unrecognizable belongings still saturated with sea water tumble out, smearing our protective white suits with the same black mold that covers everything in the abandoned residences. Gutting houses from floor to ceiling, giving our time to enable the natives of New Orleans to return to the hurricane-ravaged city to reconstruct their homes and their lives.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last August, I was amazed to learn of the number of people who actually remained in the area to face the storm. Even more astonishing, however, are the hordes of people who are eager to return, after months as refugees, to their rubble piles and their ghost towns. Why not just leave? Start anew, somewhere else—Texas, Arizona, even upstate Louisiana—but don’t come back and rebuild, right on the very spot that was flattened by an unstoppable force that makes its return every year. Don’t start again here, only to live in fear until the next storm comes and wipes you out again. To me, it seemed like common sense.

Until my week in the New Orleans area. Until seeing the FEMA trailers erected in the front yards of recently returned residents. Until seeing the spray-painted messages reading “We’ll be back, New Orleans” scrawled on the brick walls of abandoned homes and businesses. Until speaking with the homeowners, filled with gratitude that a group of college students would travel down during spring break to help them come home. Only now do I understand—something more than houses and possessions and jobs ties these people to their Gulf Coast habitat. Something irreplaceable and indestructible, something they would never find anyplace else.

Hurricanes were never a major threat in Savannah when I was young. Savannah is in a blessed location, with the Gulf Stream only miles off its concave coastline, and always seems to evade the hurricanes that threaten it. Twice in my lifetime my family and I evacuated our home in anticipation of a hurricane, and twice we returned to a city spared from all but mild wind damage.

But Savannah meant more to me than just my house and my school. Savannah meant boating on warm summer mornings, sitting on the bow of Dad’s seventeen-foot skiff with the wind whipping at my salty hair. It meant long, carefree summer evenings, complete with clouds of sand gnats at dusk, bloodthirsty deer flies after dark, and cricket symphonies throughout the night. It meant standing on a windy beach and watching the Atlantic Ocean roll predictably back and forth, as I imagined that I could see the faint glimmer of the African coastline on the horizon. With all the joys and experiences came also the few tiny evils, like cottonmouths and eastern diamondbacks and even occasional alligators, and the threat of floods and hurricanes. It was all what made Savannah home; and while my family was fortunate enough to never have had to leave, I don’t believe that we would have ever left it behind us for good.

When I moved to Athens, doors to new experiences suddenly gaped open before me. The firmly packed red hills at the very foot of the breathtaking Smoky Mountains, the crisp hardwood forests and the lovely colors of the piedmont autumn, all became part of my framework of belonging, alongside my coastal childhood. I was ready for a change in my natural and social environment, and I appreciate it still—though, admittedly, there are times when I miss the smell of the muddy banks of the Ogeechee coming in on the morning breeze. You can never escape the places you once called home, even if you leave them physically behind you. They always serve as reference points for each new experience. I am the coastal plain, the Georgia piedmont—they have formed me. When I finish school and move on, some new piece of the world will likely become a part of my formation as well, changing me again in a continuing process.

Many of the people of New Orleans, I realize this week, were not ready for that change. Their beloved city, situated on the Gulf Coast right at the mouth of the Mississippi, was all they knew—and when change came, uninvited, one August day, their natural reaction was to stand up against it, wielding their fierce attachment to home as their only weapon against loss and destruction. Standing on a junk heap of sheetrock and memories I let pieces of their lives sift through my hands onto the ground, a treasured toy here, a priceless snapshot there, all unsalvageable. But these are only material things. As I listen to the stories of their lives, growing up here and going to school, Daddy teaching them how to play the piano, as I stand and eat shrimp and crawfish with them and hear their joyful plans for coming home—now I see the spirit that draws them back. They are New Orleans. How could they not return?

As we leave we pray for them and wish them well, and immediately my tears begin coming. After four short days, I believe New Orleans has become a part of me too.

Walking

"I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least,--and it is commonly more than that,--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." --Henry David Thoreau, from Excursions

Over the past several days I have truly come to appreciate the kind of release that Thoreau refers to in his treatise on walking. So perhaps I don't spend four hours a day just sauntering, but Bob and I have been taking some very glorious long walks, the kind with no specific destination, the kind when you have no time frame in mind and the only limitations you experience are the ones your own body places on you--weariness, thirst, hunger. And unfortunately an escape into the woods or the wilderness is not always a possibility (though sometimes it is, as yesterday when we visited his family on their wonderful farm), we always find a way to experience the joys of nature and solitude.

Today we walked downtown from our apartment and back, making scenic turns along the way. This time of year the pink and white trees appear like cotton candy on sticks, and they are all over Athens right now. The ground is strewn with their blossoms. Violets and other tiny flowers poke their heads out of the greening grass along the sidewalk. I took it all in; I reveled in it. After eating downtown and walking through a few stores, we started back home. Walking in a westerly direction in the early evening, we saw the sky constantly ablaze in the different colors of sunset--sometimes banded, sometimes bright patches of orange light just streaming out from behind a clump of trees or beyond the house on the hill. We saw ancient stone walls built along the hillsides with crude stone steps leading up into former yards. Cracked and worn, with green moss protruding from between each separate stone, the sight was absolutely lovely, reminding me that people come and go constantly, changing the landscape along with them.

We often walk through the neighborhoods of Five Points, and I am constantly amazed at the uniqueness of each house we see. How to describe Athens architecture? The only word that comes to mind is varied. Every house strikes me as completely original, small and quaint and unobtrusively creating its own interesting niche within the neighborhood. I point to each house and say "I want to live there!" They delight me, each in its own little way. Saturday we made such an excursion in the early afternoon; we found ourselves wandering on completely unfamiliar streets. Again, the flowers along the roadside bent their heads in the sun. We saw one yard that looked like a bamboo forest; down in the valley, nestled among the bamboo, was a small gazebo that blended almost entirely out of sight until you were peering down at it. Many front yards in that neighborhood had a deep valley running through them, and a little drainage creek ran through the valley. Often the residents left these valleys overgrown, making their houses, way up on top of the far hill, seem very disconnected from the road. How would it be to live in a place where your front yard served as a natural boundary between your home and the road you lived on? It gave it a wild, rural feel, even though it was in the heart of the city. On the way home I took off my shoes and walked through the clover, which felt cool and refreshing on my feet.

I've always loved to walk, but walking with no purpose except to walk is one of the most freeing and refreshing feelings. Bob and I are making a concerted effort to do it more and more. Of course, we walk through campus to class each day--but scurrying off to class, with your eyes narrowly focused on the road before you, just does not compare!

What happened to spring?

Never before now has the rapid climate change become more evident to me... This was the mildest winter I can ever remember, but what is even more shocking is the lack of transition into spring. As soon as March came it just turned hot--so much for my "in between" wardrobe. I'm wearing skirts and T-shirts and wishing for a shower three times a day. You remember the adage "March goes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb"? Anybody who counted on the truth of that saying, who loves the blustery weather (like me), who wants to fly kites and waits all year for the perfect month to do it in, they're quite at a loss this year. No wearing my sweater in the morning and then tying it around my waist by noon...

Climate change is absolutely tragic to me. We're losing something irreplaceable and very sacred by our own apathy toward our world, doing things that are convenient for us in the short run but are ultimately not sustainable--we're making a bed for future generations to lie in. It used to snow every winter in Georgia. You can ask people who grew up here forty, fifty years ago. I remember when it snowed in Savannah in the wintertime on occasion, only twenty years ago. Now, snow in Savannah is unheard of; snow in the North Georgia mountains is rare (it sure wasn't going to happen this year). I want to raise my children where they can be familiar with snow, where they can look out of their window on a winter night like I did once or twice when I was very young, and be delighted by the tiny white flakes that are just starting to sail down from the December sky. Can I count on that in Georgia? Even on occasion? How far north would I have to move to be in a snow-falling region? It's changing so quickly...

Someday soon people are going to have to start caring. Especially in America, someone will have to wake up and realize that we need an administration that is dedicated to preserving something that is far bigger, far older, and far more awe-inspiring than the great United States--that is God's creation, this earth, that is dying under our gluttonous use of petroleum and our constant stripping of irreplaceable resources, our killing of the o-zone and of the forests. We cannot push it off any longer and wait for someone to come behind and clean up our mess... because no one's going to do it. People have to learn now and start now. I don't know what is going to wake this world up from their delusions, but whatever it is, I hope it comes soon.

New appreciation

Terry Tempest Williams has helped me to come to appreciate birds much more than I ever did. I have to admit, with Hitchcock movies and stories like Poe's "The Raven" and the Grimm Brothers' "The Juniper Tree" I have always had some kind of dread of birds, as if they were supernatural creatures. This morning, I sit at my desk before sunrise and I hear the songs of several different species filtering through my window, and it's so refreshing that I cannot imagine having ever dreaded them.

In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams found comfort in the familiarity of the birds, even when the Great Salt Lake was rising and when her mother was dying. The scene in which she prepares the body of the deceased whistling swan is so idyllic and moving and deeply metaphoric. I looked up the whistling swan, and it really is a beautiful bird. She knew each of the birds intimately, and her heart broke as theirs did, slowly as she watched their habitat drown, bit by bit.

I have watched birds a few times in my life. Truthfully, it has never greatly interested me. Until now. I never cared about putting a name to a new bird; they were simply all birds to me. But it might be fun to watch them come and go, become familiar with the frequenters and, like Terry Tempest Williams, become filled with excitement when a rarer species makes an appearance. Birds really are beautiful to listen to, and their colors and shapes are all so varied. I just never noticed before.

Refuge

Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge made me think a lot about my faith, and finding comfort in it. It was beautiful to me, the way she clung to her Mormon traditions during a very hard time in her life; but at the same time as being a devoted Mormon, she also questioned many of the cultural traditions. She made her faith personal to her, by thinking about it in terms of the world around her and not just in terms of what had been ingrained in her from childhood.

I've felt differently about a lot of the mainstream Christian ideals lately. Once I would have called myself a political conservative; now I prefer not to think about politics at all, in relation to my beliefs. It seems stupid to me, when I really think about it, to comingle politics and Christianity anyway. When my ancestors came to America in the 1600s it was for religious freedom from the Anglican Church. Now conservative Christians want to outlaw, one by one, every non-Christian practice. You cannot pass laws to force a religion on someone--you have to show them and cause them to believe that your religion is something worth living for.

I love being a Christian. I love God and I love experiencing Him in the world around me, every day, in new and exciting ways. But for a long time I believed and subscribed to everything every other Christian told me. Now, I prefer to learn about God's heart myself, with nothing but my Bible and the Holy Spirit to lead me. That's what I felt like Terry Tempest Williams was doing, when she blessed her mother in private when women in her religion had no official authority to do so. I felt like she did that throughout the book, in little ways. Her deep connection with nature helped her to experience her faith in ways that one could not if one were not willing to dig deeper into the heart of everything. I feel like, in seeking God through the natural world, I have learned a lot more about God than a Baptist pastor would tell me on a Sunday morning. I can see the Psalms come alive with depth and meaning. I can see so many different sides of His character, one piece at a time. Seeking Him for myself has meant so much for me and helped me to mature in my faith.

Finally done

I finished my long creative piece today (except for some polishing), and I have to say that, on the whole, I'm pretty satisfied with it. I think it tells the story I want to tell, and I feel like it uses nature very metaphorically throughout. It gels together better than I thought it would when I started composing all of the random experiences that comprise the piece. It's amazing how effortless it was to tie nature back in as central--because nature really was central to the experiences I had when I was depressed, and it really was central to my healing and my spiritual rebirth.

I'm so excited to edit it and polish it. I just hope I can get far enough removed from it that I'm not looking at it through biased lenses. With accounting as my main focus on Tuesdays, I'm sure the topics of my paper will be pushed far out of my mind...

The poem I posted yesterday was inspired by our reading of Loren Eiseley, though that connection may be difficult to see. I liked how he put his central focus outside of himself and on what the true subject should be, whatever part of nature he was writing about. That's how nature writing should be, and in my poem that's what I was trying to do. I don't even know if my poem made any sense or not.

...

Penumbral parade,
wax-dripping moon
scalding tenderness revealed
on a solo promenade
through time and back
to seasons underground
and wishing that breath
were less finite.

Acquainted trespassers,
silent pulsing
eyes of the cosmos
observe the same,
filled with winking and
telescopic chuckles.

Going veggie?

So I think my husband and I are going to make the switch to vegetarianism...or at least pescovegetarianism, for now. Plant-based is always the diet we've preferred anyway, for health reasons. We started thinking about all the economic and environmental reasons to become vegetarian too, and now I think we've finally made a decision.

I've been reading a lot lately about how livestock consume enough grain to feed 800 million people--people who cannot get enough to eat. How many children starve to death each year around the world? The meat consumption that we sustain in the United States is quite a waste of both grain and fresh water. In fact, with per capita meat consumption in the U.S. reaching 260 pounds annually, the rate at which we eat meat is unsustainable from an environmental perspective. Not to mention the cruelty that goes into factory farming...

So why fish? Organically-raised fish, anyway, are not going to put much of a dent in the world's grain consumption, if at all. They won't have been treated cruelly. Plus, they're healthy and low in fat. I think fish are pretty safe. Anyway, that's our decision for now. Maybe we'll take it a step further once we adjust to this.

As it is, we probably only eat meat at an average of 3 meals a week. So we don't have that much farther to go to reach the vegetarian stage. There's actually a word for our current diet--flexitarianism. Isn't that a silly term? You can just tell it was made for people who were not ready to be vegetarians, but wanted to show the world that their diet was different from the average. Anyway, the word sounds silly to me. But... Veggies are great! I prefer a plate of turnip greens, broccoli, and asparagus any day over a hunk of beef or pork or even chicken.

That's the deal. And I don't, by any means, think that having meat in your diet is wrong. I just think, for me and Bob, this was a personal conviction and a decision we had to make.

Terry Tempest Williams, and more on nature and spirituality

You know, thanks to Kristin I have been thinking a lot more about the idea that we discussed somewhat in class, about a genetic need for spirituality. On the one hand I have a hard time believing that could be true--in my mind, everyone has a need for something spiritual, to believe that there's something greater than themselves out there. Whether they run from that feeling or embrace it is a different matter.

I have never been one to boil everything down to genetics--in the nature versus nurture debate, I tend to think that our culture and values and a lot of our personality get stamped on us when we are young. Certainly there is a hereditary factor--a huge one. I always thought identical twin studies were cool, and it amazes me to hear stories about identical twins who were separated at birth growing up apart yet living radically similar lives. But when I think about spirituality, a lot of people who are raised in very spiritual environments turn out to embrace spirituality themselves. Is that because of genes? Or is it because of the way they were raised?

My parents profess little or no need for God--they don't go to church and at times have actually discouraged me from going to church. The certainly don't see the value in prayer, or see any sense in trusting God. My grandparents? My mom's parents, and my dad's mom, have all been faithful churchgoers at some point in their adult lives. Both of my parents were raised in the Southern Baptist church. If spirituality were in our nature, then what happened with my parents? Did that need for God skip them and resurface in myself? I don't know--that's definitely a possibility. What I tend to think, though, is that my parents were raised in the post-World War II era, during the Cold War, when people were taught that hard work and success were a way of life. I think people to some extent were conditioned to fear--and I think fear ultimately leads you to turn inward to find answers, because it takes an awful lot of faith and trust to turn outward and find answers in the spiritual realm. My grandparents stopped going to church at some point when my parents were still young, and it wasn't until their old age that they returned. And then what happened with me? I don't know when my need for God surfaced and I really started seeking after something consistent to bind the universe together. But I remember feeling that it was the answer I always knew, and had just turned my face away from for so long. I have definitely needed God all my life. I personally feel that most people, if they could really search themselves objectively, would admit the same thing.

I have thought a lot about Terry Tempest Williams in exploring this idea. Here is a woman who is deeply rooted in the Mormon faith, deeply spiritual--she clings to faith, to spirituality. No doubt that need arose from her family--but was it the nature or the nurture? You cannot separate her from the genes that her parents gave her, nor can you separate her from the Mormon culture in which she grew up. Is there a genetic need for spirituality? I cannot be sure.

Speaking of Terry Tempest Williams, I want to talk so much more about Refuge. But I don't have time to go into that right now. What a beautiful, moving book! That's all I will say, until this weekend.

Nature and healing

I know I've mentioned before the idea of nature being a healer, and I thought I would run with that thought a little more. After all, my long nature piece is about healing--and a little about reconciliation. It was through communion with nature that I came out of a season of clinical depression and came into communion with God. What was going on the whole time, was that He revealed Himself to me, piece by piece, through the natural world--His creation--and then it all came together and I knew that I couldn't be depressed anymore because the Lord of heaven and earth somehow loved me and wanted me to have a meaningful and joyful existence here on the earth. But there will be more on that later--say, perhaps, at the end of the semester.

But for me, nature was the beginning of my healing, and the vessel through which I was drawn out of a very dark time in my life. It was initially because nature would not reject me; if I drew close to nature, then I would know it and it would know me. Unlike in my relationships with friends and family--it came to a point where I did not want to trust anyone with a piece of myself again. I withdrew to nature often, listening to the sounds of birds and crickets and running water and wind through the trees, and letting the world listen to the sounds of my crying and my shouting and my breathing. There, my secrets were safe. There, I could be myself and never worry about being cast away.

There came a point when I started seeing so much of myself in nature, and it made me feel like I wasn't alone in the world anymore. I saw the weather change sometimes as unpredictably as my own stormy emotions; I saw flowers hide their faces from the sun; I saw little points of light in the night sky and knew that there was hope for me even when I felt like I was trapped in neverending darkness. I remember once I went to the zoo with a friend, and as we neared the tortoise exhibit it happened that the tortoises were mating--very loudly. When we got there people were crowded around, watching, whispering, pointing. I remember turning away, ashamed for the people who felt like this very private occurrence was for them to gawk at. And so I felt sympathy with nature, and in sympathy I found healing, because for so long I had not felt sympathy for anything except myself.

Finally, there was the realization that God made all things. He made the sky, the birds, the trees, the sunset, the tree-frog and the Venus flytrap. And He made me. And everything he made, he made with purpose. Do you remember the hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful"? All things bright and beautiful / all creatures great and small / all things wise and wonderful / the Lord God made them all... Look up the rest of the verses--it's a beautiful expression of God's creative nature. In that song I was able to remember God all around me, His personality shining through every single piece of artwork that He set on the earth--and I began to see myself as beautiful, "A rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys" (Song of Solomom 2:1). If that realization does not heal you and restore joy to your heart, then I don't know what does.

The whole process took a couple of years. Looking back it's hard for me to understand what I found to be so upset about for so long. But really, it didn't take much to upset me. If I had no purpose on this earth, if I did not have the very handprints of God all over me, then what would I have to be joyful about? I would rely on experiences--which is exactly what I did. And great experiences come and go. But God--just like nature, and in fact more so than nature--does not come and go. He does not change. And He created me and knows me, inside and out. Isn't that great? It's all I need for the rest of my life.