God's paintbrush

When I looked out my living room window this morning, the view just took my breath away.  I am fortunate enough to have a national park as my backdoor neighbor.  In the last few days the fall color has burst out in its full glory.  Closest to me are shades of orange and russet, but a cluster of  brilliant yellow trees stands right in the middle of my panorama.  Earlier today the sky was dark and brooding in the background, but a bright shaft of sunlight spotlighted that grove. 

As the morning has progressed, the sky has brightened to a beautiful robin's egg blue with puffy white clouds, providing a perfect frame for the oranges closest to me.  The wind blowing through the trees brings with it a similar tranquility to listening to the surf at the beach.

In the spring I have been equally taken with the tender lime greens of new leaves, interspersed with the violets of the native redbud trees.  What a wonder! And, especially after a long and hard winter, what a blast of hope predicting an unending progression of color that will follow all spring and summer...leading up to the beauty that grabbed me today. Only God's paintbrush could have created such wonders.

How is it that we have been blessed with such wonder?  It is certainly a gift and one that always lifts my heart when I am alert to that blessing.  This morning I believe I experienced still a different purposefulness of nature's beauty.

I start each day by taking a few moments (occasionally it takes more than a few) to connect with the vibrational feeling in my heart that I believe is my connection to Love or to God...or probably they are the same.  From what I have been able to tell, I can only do this when I am totally present.  If my mind is drifting to yesterday or last week or jumping ahead to later today or tomorrow, I cannot get that feeling.  So it was this morning that my mind seemed obsessed with something that happened in the past that I need to deal with tomorrow. Like a tennis match, my mind bounced from the past to the future back to the past...and so on...inconveniently skipping right over the "net" that is the present.

Determined not to start my day without being present and connected, I tried everything I could to will myself present. I tried for a very long time.  I couldn't do it.  Then I remembered to pray for help, and almost as I did, a snapshot of the landscape in the park flashed across my mind's eye. ("Remembering to Pray" 10/30/2013)  Even in my imagining it was so beautiful that I gasped, and the moment I did, I felt the connection in my heart.  After struggling for nearly an hour to connect, the beauty of God's paintbrush brought me into the present moment instantly.  And...I have stayed there all day.

I have certainly had the experience of awe and wonder in the mountains, the Grand Canyon, and countless other places in nature.  Today, I wonder if the purpose of those wonders is to call us present and to remind us of the omnipresence and timelessness of God's love for us, always there just for the price of recognizing it.