Over the past few days I've been reminded of the deep healing power of country music, and of the healing power of an escape into the mountains. They not only soothe a weary soul, but rescue you from the depths of whatever our materially-driven, high-pressured, post-modern society burdens you with. Waking up in a tent to a rush of cool air, hiking through miles of woods and hills, driving amoung the ridges of powerful mountains, does a person an incalculable amount of good.
Erin said that there are two schools of thought: those people who find God in the civilizations, and those who find Him in nature. Without question or hesitation, my haven for the Holy resides in this earth, in his creation, in the very harmony, perfection, and beauty of it all, in the mountains and the rivers, the forrests and the thunder, the fields and the falls.
In humanity its there...God, He is there, He is all over it. He's just harder to find for me. When I do see him there, its like a small but powerful ray of light in our senseless, dark worlds. So maybe the absence thereof makes a sighting even better, as if we can never take for granted a glimpse of the true love or purity within a fully depraved human.
But in nature, its as if the forrests are screaming of God's majesty, the mountinas giving way, bending their knees toward the Almighty, the animals dancing to the perfect rhythm only their creator and maker can sing, the sky rolls low and rumbles deeply proclaming power and awe before the God of the universe. Yes, nature surrounds us, pleading the case of the Lord in a wholly unique and infinitely complex rhetoric.
Sometimes it is calm and beautiful, fierce and fearsome, dark and forboding. Some see it as fatalisitc, others arbitrary. Not matter its effects though, it is unwieldly powerful and unfathomably beautiful. It centers me. I so deeply understand why Emerson wrote on and on about stars, and why Thoreau moved out to a pond to be around nature at its most simple at all times, and why all those crazy people hike the hundreds of miles of the Appalachain Trail.
It makes complete and perfect sense and I think that its supposed to, at least for me.
