The earth laughs in flowers...and the walker gets the joke

This blog post is dedicated to Barbara Shallou, whose daily walks, gorgeous photoshoots and heartfelt blogs inspire me to a slower pace and a sharper eye for natural beauty that can only be found at a slower pace. I am even shamelessly stealing her style today. As always, photographs can be enlarged by clicking on them.

I brought my tennis shoes and camera to work and stole away at lunch for a walk. It's the first time I've been outside in months for anything other than commuting between the house and the car.

Right outside my corporate park, I found a meadow and lost myself in its secrets. Most of these shots are of tiny, tiny flowers. I kept thinking of Matthew 6: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?  

 

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk. ~Raymond Inmon

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. ~John Muir

 My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. ~Aldous Huxley

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. ~John Muir

 Solvitur ambulando, St. Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around. ~Gregory McNamee

 In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. ~John Muir

 An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day. ~Henry David Thoreau

After a day's walk everything has twice its usual value. ~George Macauley Trevelyan

 I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see. ~John Burroughs

 If you are walking to seek, ye shall find. ~Sommeil Liberosensa

 Thoughts come clearly while one walks. ~Thomas Mann

 How can you explain that you need to know that the trees are still there, and the hills and the sky? Anyone knows they are. How can you say it is time your pulse responded to another rhythm, the rhythm of the day and the season instead of the hour and the minute? No, you cannot explain. So you walk. ~Author unknown

 Now shall I walk or shall I ride?

"Ride," Pleasure said. "Walk," Joy replied.~W.H. Davies

 Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. ~Soren Kierkegaard

 Walking gets the feet moving, the blood moving, the mind moving. And movement is life. ~Carrie Latet

 Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. ~Wallace Stevens

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. ~G.M. Trevelyan

God speaks in 3D

I have a condition known as logophilia: the love of words.

God loves words too, but he's also kind of famous for putting some meat behind his words. (Jesus, for example, is THE word. And his favorite kind of words were word pictures.)
I find great comfort in the words of God that have been preserved for me, but when God paints a picture...it speaks to your soul from the inside out.

God's paint is love.
Sometimes you're tossed directly into the paint pot of His loving message for you like a kid into a pool--joy is the result, even if takes your breath away at first. 
You're covered with it, splashing it around with abandon.
You slip and slide in it.
And laugh.
I've had that happen.

Maybe the paint comes buried in a word, which makes its way from the page to your eyes (or from someone's lips to your ears), and into your heart.
Maybe you toy with the word...
Or maybe it just sits there like a little serendipitous time bomb until something comes along to puncture it, transforming a little piece of you from drab (an actual color, according to my friend Barbara) to green.
I've had that happen.

Other times, God's paint is carefully brushed onto the canvas of your concerns by one of his artists.

Maybe it's a whole gallery of his impressions, each one containing you--from your best angle, in perfect light--as he sees you.

It's obvious he's been stalking you, taking pictures of you in the past, present and future, without your knowledge, casting everything you do in a better light than you do, yourself, always minimizing your good traits and emphasizing your bad ones.

Maybe your logophilia causes you to convert these images into Answers you can turn into words and retell, fit neatly into the compartments of your thoughts, and revisit as needed for comfort.

You buy up the whole lot to frame and add to your collection.

Only something happens. 
The paint doesn't stay on the surface.
It's alive...it's starts to seep through the pores of your pain, dripping into dry and desperately thirsty places you can't see, permeating, drenching, saturating, until it starts to pool, then run.
From every direction, colorful rivulets begin to gather speed and volume, as they unite with the love already poured out in your heart which had slowed to a trickle because of all the debris in the way.

Love levels begin to rise.

You're going about with your life, applying comfort on the outside as usual, strengthening yourself with WORDS, His words, your words, the words of the wise.

You can't see the increasing flow or the verdant life popping up like instant spring along the banks of your internal streams.
Until it reaches critical mass.


Suddenly, the comfort isn't academic and cerebral--you feel happy. 
Ideas start to explode.
Things that were impossible yesterday feel perfectly feasible today.
The realization of His love for YOU, as shown through that gallery exhibit, eclipses the external tides of difficulty and so-called impossibility that just keep hitting you, day after day after day.

You stand taller.
You don't care what anybody thinks about you.
You hear his voice again.
You know what you have to do.
You know you will make it, because he loves YOU, just as you are.

I've had THAT happen.
This week.

I needed an Answer...
And instead, I got to see who God sees me to be.
And when I saw me,
I saw YOU.

Oh, how he loves us!