Tag Archives: Nature

359. Every child is born a naturalist. His eyes are, by nature, open to the glories of the stars, the beauty of the flowers, and the mystery of life. ~Author Unknown

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As stillness in stone to silence is wed,
May solitude foster your truth in word.

As a river flows in ideal sequence,
May your soul reveal where time is presence.

As the moon absolves the dark of distance,
May your style of thought bridge the difference.

As the breath of light awakens color,
May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.

As spring rain softens the earth with surprise,
May your winter places be kissed by light.

As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance,
May the grace of change bring you elegance.

As clay anchors a tree in light and wind,
May your outer life grow from peace within.

As twilight pervades the belief of night,
May beauty sleep lightly within your heart.
~John O’Donohue

Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always. Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, . . . ~1 Chronicles 16:11-12 ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

**Photo taken by Lessy Sebastian

358. White. . .is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. . . ~G. K. Chesterton

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White, pristine, unblemished…

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The paper I write is white

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White is holy, pure

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They say light is white
Because it combines all colors

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So white is the mother of all colors

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The churning of all yellow, blue, green

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Colors sacrifice their egos
To the eternal white
The matriarch of all colors

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The fountain of extent colors
~Excerpted random lines
from a poem by John Matthew

White appears often in nature, and down through the ages references have been made to it in music, art, poetry, and prose. It seems it’s a color many have sought and still seek to embrace. Could it be because it’s the color of the heavenly orbs, the moon and stars that illuminate darkness, or because it’s the color of light, light that warms, heals, and inspires faith, or because it’s perceived as the color of purity, purity of the spirit, of the soul, and in the Christ. Regardless of what draws mortals into its web, many, like me, adore white and sing its praises especially the white flowery faces that grace a garden. In them it’s easy to see that as Chesterton asserts the color white is a “shining and affirmative” thing. Walter Bellingrath once rightfully noted that a garden “is like a beautiful woman with a different ball gown for each week of the year.” And dressed in her gowns of glistening white, a garden is one of the most glamorous and inspiring muses at the party.

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. ~Ecclesiastes 9:7-8 ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

**Some of the images are from Pinterest

347. I believe in pink…and I believe in miracles. ~Audrey Hepburn

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I think miracles exist
in part as gifts
and in part as clues
that there is something
beyond the flat world
we see.
~Peggy Noonan

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If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet’s garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature’s, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite, miraculous stretch of blue or pink.  ~Edited and adapted quote by Marcel Proust

You are the God who performs miracles; you display your power among your peoples. ~Psalm 77:14 ✝

Thank you, Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

340. I sit in my garden, gazing upon beauty that cannot gaze upon itself, and I find sufficient purpose for my day. ~Robert Brault

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The garden reconciles human art and wild nature,
hard work and deep pleasure,
spiritual practice and the material world.
It’s a magical place because it’s not divided.
The many divisions and polarizations
that terrorize a disenchanted world
find peaceful accord
among mossy rock walls,
rough stony paths,
and trimmed bushes.
Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile
because it achieves an extraordinary
delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality.
It has its own liminality,
its points of balance between great extremes.
~Thomas Moore

My beloved has gone down to the garden, to the beds of spices, to browse in the gardens and to gather the lilies. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he browses among the lilies. ~Song of Songs 6:2-3 ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

337. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. ~George Eliot

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I’d give all the wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.
~Lewis Carroll

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The sidewalks were long and narrow that ran between the stucco houses, and high was the exterior wall of the two-story duplex two doors down from us on the seaward end of the block. At the base of that duplex’s stucco wall was an elongated flower bed filled with pansies and strawberries, and about halfway down the wall was a door that separated the flower bed into two sections. Behind the door was a storage area, a closet of sorts, filled with all kinds of fascinating objects. Because the closet was under the front stairwell of the two story structure, it was one of those odd-shaped little niches with a downward sloping ceiling on one end. In the closet’s mysterious, deeper recesses were all kinds of tools. When the door to the closet was ajar, it meant Uncle was inside sitting on his stool and working on a yard or household task Auntie had commissioned. The “doghouse” as he called it, was a rich and irresistible den of curiosities for a young child, and in it with Uncle as tutor-in-residence I not only learned but also fell in love with a myriad of things. The closet with its earthy smells and assorted contraptions was a magical place, and the gardening tools were as provocative a sight for young eyes as the images of the storybook gardens they conjured up. Decades later when a friend commented that I live close to nature, I thought of that closet again and realized the lasting impression that it and Uncle had made on my life. Then and there in a place that smelled of soil and sea I came to love and respect the earth for its charming and sometimes “shy presences”–the visible ones, the audible ones, the tangible ones, even the ones that dwelt in dim obscurity. Uncle’s closet and his tales gave birth to “stirrings” that ultimately led me to believe that all Creation is a gift to be cherished and that its Maker is to be adored and praised.

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The LORD is my strength and my song; He has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise Him, my father’s God, and I will exalt Him. ~Exodus 15:2  ✝

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Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

**Images via Pinterest

336. While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned. ~Seneca

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In depth a light will grow,
A silver shine no shadows know,
Like wings unfolding in the sky,
That circle ‘round a gleaming eye,
Turning darkness all away,
Even depths will know their day,
For every shadow has its end,
In light! Life will return again!
~Robert Fanney

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For myself, I am grateful to nature not so much when I see her on the side that is open to the world, as when I am permitted to enter her shrine. Then one may seek to know of what stuff the universe is made, who is its author or guardian, what is the nature of God… Life would have been a useless gift were I not admitted to the study of such themes. ~Seneca, 4 BC – AD 65

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Grace is what picks me up
and lifts my wings high above and I fly!
Grace always conquers!
Be graceful in everything;
in anger, in sadness, in joy in kindness, in unkindness,
retain grace with you!
~C. JoyBell C.

Keep me as the apple of Your eye; hide me in the shadow of Your wings… Psalm 17:8 ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

**Both images via Pinterest

331. The sound of birds stops the noise in my mind. ~Carly Simon

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Those little nimble musicians of the air,
that warble forth their curious ditties,
with which nature hath furnished them
to the shame of art.
~Izaak Walton

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Is this little guy cute or what! I first saw it yesterday while I was out taking pictures. What made me aware of its presence was the unusual twittering noise I heard above me. Wanting to know what creature’s “curious ditties” had broken into my solitude, I turned around and listened for it to come again. When it did, I spied the little thing sitting up high in the branches of the still barren, woody althea shrub. At first glance and seeing only its back side I thought the bird was a small female cardinal but the longer I stood there peering up at it, the less convinced of that idea I was. Finally it dawned on me what it was even though until then I’d only seen photographs of titmice in books. Of course my first instinct was to raise the camera and snap away, but since I didn’t know how skittish this bird might be, I decided to stand very still for a few more minutes. When I did start shooting, the titmouse continued on about its business seemingly quite unconcerned about my presence, so much so that instead of flying away it proceeded to move, hop by hop, closer to the adjacent peanut feeder. As it turned out the tufted darling, at least this one, was quite the “ham” because it would stop from time to time and look right at me as if posing for the camera. Once its hunger was satiated, the titmouse flew away, but I somehow knew this one would come again. And sure enough it returned today. Its curious little twittering noise alerted me of the bird’s presence, and I, delighted to see it, only watched from afar this time. Life here on planet earth is undeniably fraught with hardships and brutality, but every now and again it gives the appearance of being the untroubled paradise it once was. Where? Mercifully in the little piece of Eden that a garden is the difficulties and noise of a fallen world are sometimes silenced long enough for paradise to reveal itself once again if only for a short while.

My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you. ~Psalm 63:5 ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

**Some of these images were found on Pinterest.

323. Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds, but animated nature sweeter still, to soothe and satisfy the human ear. ~William Cowper

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There’s music in the sighing of a reed;
There’s music in the gushing of a rill;
There’s music in all things, if men had ears;
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron

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The wings of spring have taken flight in the feisty winds of March. In so doing they have lifted Columbine’s curving, knob-tipped spurs on fanciful flights. Spilling down from deep in the throats of the yellow, flowering “bells” are stunning filaments and anthers which are like tiny, musical tongues issuing forth sweet, golden proclamations. Winter, as inanimate as it seems, has a lyrical sound, but the sounds of spring as the earth reanimates itself are far richer and more honeyed. They along with the other silvery sounds of spring are soft-hearted and serene in the beginning; however, as spring grows long in the tooth and summer approaches, the arias reach almost deafening crescendos. Then after the solstice passes, summer moves along to a steady, hot latino beat until autumn comes again and tones down earth’s rhythms with ripe, mellower tones. We, mortals, may never understand the what and where of earth’s magic and music, but that certainly can’t stop us from enjoying it nor from adoring the mysteries of the music’s Maker.  Lest one believe that it is only poets, writers, and musicians who hear the music of the natural world, let me say that it was Giuseppe Mazzini, an influential Italian political thinker, who said, “Music is the harmonious voice of Creation, and echo of the invisible world.”  I believe the love of music comes from the Lord because He gave birds their songs, and also those who love and compose music are created in God’s image.

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Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent. ~Victor Hugo

Praise the Lord with the harp; make music to Him on the ten-stringed lyre. Psalm 33:2 ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us!

318. Water is the driver of nature. ~Leonardo da Vinci

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Be praised, My Lord,
through Sister Water;
she is very useful,
and humble,
and precious,
and pure.
~St. Francis of Assisi

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The sight of water, be it in a pond, a river, the sea, a fountain, or even a drop from a spigot touches something deep in “the temple of my inner being.” I love to sit quietly and watch water fall or splash or ripple or break like the waves on a seashore. And if I peer down long enough into the mysterious depths of a body of water, my mind conjures up images of earth’s origins, and subsequently the Garden of Eden comes alive in my soul’s eye. Even gauzy reflections which quiver and quake in a puddle or body of water seem to possess a captivating life, a compelling story, a gripping sanctity of their own.

Although I know not where it rests in the human psyche, I believe somewhere therein mortals recognize familiar things not necessarily of this world, things they appear to know without human tutelage or logic’s reason. In the same way a child instinctively recognizes its biological mother even after the umbilical cord is severed, I believe we, who are temporarily separated from the Holy Source of our being, retain a sense of the Father’s parenting presence because we belong to the Lord and are inextricably a part of Him. It could be that’s why earth and its waters not only call to me but also comfort me.

…by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. ~2 Peter 3:5  ✝

Thank you, Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us!

**Photo via Pinterest

303. The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature. ~Jeff Cox

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In the corner of his garden, there’s a patch he used to keep
All to himself, to allow nature to creep
There are no trimmed edges
or prim, proper hedges
He left his earth still and alone
Allowed the forces of nature to roam
He said that you don’t always have to be tidy and neat
Just watch the beauty of opportunity grow at your feet
He said just watch the earth produce its own glory
And I watched…and held on to his story
My granddad was right
Add water and light
Behold the sight
There are poppies and flowering weeds
Buttercups and oat coloured reeds
Daisies gingerly lift their heads
Dandelions roar from muddy beds
Purple thistles and strange grasses
Colours that alight and ignite masses
Dark ferns and heathers
Dandelion clock feathers
Birds foot trefoil, a four leafed clover
My granddad’s story is not over
He may have gone, I may have cried
But the beauty he predicted never died
~Melanie Waters

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth.  ~Psalm 57:5  ✝

**photos via Pinterest