Finding Holy Spirit in Nature
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Stories
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works—
who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being. (vv. 31-33)
When I am feeling low, I go outside and walk in the forest behind our home. The fresh air and the energy from the trees flows directly into my soul. Nothing restores my sense of wellbeing more than a few hours of sunshine and blue sky, something I learned tromping the woods and doing fieldwork on the farm when I was a boy.
If I could return to that boyhood farm for just one hour, it would be to follow our 35 Holsteins over the hog’s back hill one last time, past the majestic white pines on the sandstone bluff, and down home to the barn.
Angie Weiland Crosby wrote, “Nature is the purest portal to inner-peace.”
The great American conservationist, John Muir wrote, “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 away from you like the leaves of autumn.”
Muir, who came to Wisconsin from Scotland in 1849 as an eleven-year-old lad, brought with him the Celtic way of knowing he had learned from his maternal grandfather. For Muir this inner knowing began in the great cathedrals of the natural world. “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks. The sun shines not on us but in us… Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
John Philip Newell, former Warden of Iona Abbey in the western isles of Scotland, writes in his book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, how Muir saw “sacredness shining at the heart of all things.” After a several-week bout of blindness from an industrial accident in his early twenties, Muir “…began to experience a new inner way of seeing,” what a friend called “seeing with the eye within the eye, or what in Celtic wisdom over the centuries had been called seeing with the eye of the heart.”
Muir wanted to see everything there was to see. “The world’s big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” Muir said, “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul…I am in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in me-ee—ee. The king tree (sequoia) and I have sworn eternal love.”
Newell tells of a stormy day when Muir “tied himself to the top of a one-hundred-foot Douglas Fir tree, so that he could sway with the wind and hear all around him trees being uprooted by the storm and crashing to the ground.” He adds, “For Muir, opening to the sacred was about opening to the elemental.”
My Roman Catholic friend, Deacon Eddie Ensley, who is the author of many spiritual books about the presence of God, tells how his Cherokee grandfather taught him to look for this “presence of being” in nature.
I have a vivid memory of my grandfather standing motionless on the top of the bluff, letting his eyes soak in all that came to him. Once I asked him what he saw when he looked. I still hear his answer, rhythmic with Cherokee and Appalachian intonations: ‘I see the dirt, the trees, the water, the skies.’ ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Why do you look so long?’ He paused, took his pipe out of his mouth, swallowed, then slowly said, ‘If you look a long time, it will all shimmer, and you will see the glory.’
Every living creature, and every tree and bush in creation, is surrounded by energy fields. I saw the shimmer and beheld the glory often in the fields and forests on the farm where I grew up in southwest Wisconsin. I heard it singing in the ripples as the creek rolled over the rocks under the bridge below the barn, in the croaking of frogs, the trill of the redwing blackbirds in spring, in the howling of coyotes, and the shrill cry of the eagle diving for its prey.
I still see it and feel it when I walk the woods these days as I begin my 74th year on this Earth. The energy is thick, palpable; it fills me, body and soul.
may the Lord rejoice in his works—
who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being. (vv. 31-33)
When I am feeling low, I go outside and walk in the forest behind our home. The fresh air and the energy from the trees flows directly into my soul. Nothing restores my sense of wellbeing more than a few hours of sunshine and blue sky, something I learned tromping the woods and doing fieldwork on the farm when I was a boy.
If I could return to that boyhood farm for just one hour, it would be to follow our 35 Holsteins over the hog’s back hill one last time, past the majestic white pines on the sandstone bluff, and down home to the barn.
Angie Weiland Crosby wrote, “Nature is the purest portal to inner-peace.”
The great American conservationist, John Muir wrote, “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 away from you like the leaves of autumn.”
Muir, who came to Wisconsin from Scotland in 1849 as an eleven-year-old lad, brought with him the Celtic way of knowing he had learned from his maternal grandfather. For Muir this inner knowing began in the great cathedrals of the natural world. “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks. The sun shines not on us but in us… Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
John Philip Newell, former Warden of Iona Abbey in the western isles of Scotland, writes in his book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, how Muir saw “sacredness shining at the heart of all things.” After a several-week bout of blindness from an industrial accident in his early twenties, Muir “…began to experience a new inner way of seeing,” what a friend called “seeing with the eye within the eye, or what in Celtic wisdom over the centuries had been called seeing with the eye of the heart.”
Muir wanted to see everything there was to see. “The world’s big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” Muir said, “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul…I am in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in me-ee—ee. The king tree (sequoia) and I have sworn eternal love.”
Newell tells of a stormy day when Muir “tied himself to the top of a one-hundred-foot Douglas Fir tree, so that he could sway with the wind and hear all around him trees being uprooted by the storm and crashing to the ground.” He adds, “For Muir, opening to the sacred was about opening to the elemental.”
My Roman Catholic friend, Deacon Eddie Ensley, who is the author of many spiritual books about the presence of God, tells how his Cherokee grandfather taught him to look for this “presence of being” in nature.
I have a vivid memory of my grandfather standing motionless on the top of the bluff, letting his eyes soak in all that came to him. Once I asked him what he saw when he looked. I still hear his answer, rhythmic with Cherokee and Appalachian intonations: ‘I see the dirt, the trees, the water, the skies.’ ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Why do you look so long?’ He paused, took his pipe out of his mouth, swallowed, then slowly said, ‘If you look a long time, it will all shimmer, and you will see the glory.’
Every living creature, and every tree and bush in creation, is surrounded by energy fields. I saw the shimmer and beheld the glory often in the fields and forests on the farm where I grew up in southwest Wisconsin. I heard it singing in the ripples as the creek rolled over the rocks under the bridge below the barn, in the croaking of frogs, the trill of the redwing blackbirds in spring, in the howling of coyotes, and the shrill cry of the eagle diving for its prey.
I still see it and feel it when I walk the woods these days as I begin my 74th year on this Earth. The energy is thick, palpable; it fills me, body and soul.
