Pathway to the Divine
Every now and then, a faint glimmer of god's hand reflects in
that built by man,
When sunlight grazes a cathedral's spires revealing all their intricacies,
Or some such fleeting manifestation of godly beauty, that
we,
Being imperfect, thinking lofty thoughts, imagine ourselves
more.
But in all things not made by man, the cosmos, physical and
natural world,
Does god's work beam forth with such blinding radiance,
beauty and complexity,
As to shame the greatest, most daunting heights of human
ambition,
With something as simple as a mountain stream.
With brutal indignity and self-delusion hath man pried
himself from god's embrace,
To build up
fortresses for our indifference and keep the sacred from our space,
The soil crushed and entombed beneath our streets, the water
channeled underground,
The skies torn asunder by combusting jets and seas afloat with a
discarded anthropogenic scum.
But god is not defeated, not yet at least, alive and well in
forests flowing among the trees,
In soils richly teeming it leaches life from rock, in oceans
swimming ever against human onslaught,
In clear nights, dancing lights along the milky-way,
In windswept
mountain meadows whispering to us of play,
With infinite love and patience the gift of freedom god bestows.
Shall we come to live in heaven or hell? Our generation may
never know,
God is of all things, our universe, our creator,
She is all of this, nothing less and nothing greater.
She is all of this, nothing less and nothing greater.
I pray we find amidst her many gifts, a state of peace and grace,
3 comments:
Beautiful and inspiring. Glad you had a long weekend in the soil ! Thank you for sharing !
Overwhelming! We are at a loss to avoid superlatives, viz: If you had been writing in the 1820s, your "Pathway to the Divine"would have doubtless supplanted Wm. Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" as the had-to-know-for-the-test i.d. for the pantheistic/romantic Flowering of New England...but on looking it up, you clearly put him to shame!
And you apparently tossed it off during a weekend of Herculean tree felling/garden heaping.
We knew you had the muse well at hand from your earlier evocative blog on maple sweetness, but are overcome by the universal sweep of this one - especially the section celebrating the triumph of the divine, from the playful whispers of mountain meadows to the dancing lights of the Milky Way. Though you later respectfully bow to the Pachamama feminine, you followed Darby's youthful prescience (that god should remain beyond the personal) with "...in soils richly teeming it leaches life from rock..."
So many memorable lines....Do you mind if we share it beyond the river?
Keep it up, and love to all.
I am glad you guys apprciated it, it was born from the shock of being thrust from a weekend spent in solitary contemplation of the marvels of our backyard forest ecosystem back into the downtown core when I returned to work. It does make me think of times with Darb, I should forward him a copy. Feel free to do with it what you will, I use the blog as my published copy, so I may sneak changes in from time to time.
Miss you guys!
Much love.
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