Looking at life through new lenses is affecting more areas
of life than I anticipated. In the past,
I felt a little guilty when people would comment about the glory of God
reflected in nature. I would wonder what
was wrong with me that I did not feel this connection. After all, didn’t God say His invisible
attributes were shown forth through the things He has made?
It wasn’t as if I couldn’t appreciate a beautiful sunset or
enjoy the foliage or love being at the beach.
It was that others seemed to have more of a meaningful relationship with
God through what they were experiencing.
I never felt that way. And of
course, when I measured myself against their interpretation, I always wondered
why I didn’t “get it”. I contented
myself by joking that I was not a “nature” girl. Most of the time, I don’t even like to be
outside all that much. For a while, I
refused to buy boots, even though I live in New England, so I would have an
excuse to stay inside in winter. Going
for a ride in the car, finding a nice place to park and rolling down the window
felt like being outside to me.
However, I like to take God at His word, so over the years,
I have asked to have a new appreciation of nature since it is His handiwork. It hasn’t been a primary prayer or anything. It was just an asking off and on; here and
there. Once in a while, something caught
my eye in a new way. I noticed a detail
I would have passed over before. I
decided that when that happened, I would take another look. I would take a little bit more time and stay
in the moment. I wanted to capture some
of the beauty, so I began to take pictures of sunsets or cloud formations, but
the pictures never seemed to do justice to what I saw with my eyes. There were no bells, no whistles…just a new
place of consciousness opening up.
Then, I had the idea of challenging myself to describe what
I saw in creative language. I like to
write, but creative writing isn’t what I do most of the time. So, I took on my own challenge and using
personification and new ways of describing what I saw, I began to appreciate in
a greater way, the wonders opening up to me.
If truth be told, I once spent half an hour on a description I wanted to
post on Facebook, getting just the right wording for the feeling I had. But that’s time well spent when I am training
myself in a discipline I am called to.
This is a relatively new place for me; this appreciation of
nature. It’s like a whole new room has
opened up. It’s really like I received
new lenses for seeing things that were hidden or veiled before. I am so glad it is happening in the natural
because it has been happening in the spiritual for a long time. Scriptures that I have looked at from one
perspective, are taking on a whole new meaning with my new spiritual lenses. Some passages are almost entirely opposite to
the way I have always viewed them.
Which brings me to what I realized yesterday; it is this. In New England, we get to enjoy two separate seasons
of fall. There is the flashy colorful
foliage which draws the crowds and is a tourist attraction. That’s when the hills and highways are ablaze
with reds and yellows and oranges. There
is hardly a place that is not boldly in your face with color. All of it is beautiful, sometimes
breathtakingly so. It is the barter of
New England. She hosts a party, puts on
her finest dress and people come to see and taste and partake.
But when the party is over, and the guests go home, there is
the “other autumn”; the subtler, genteel autumn. It’s the autumn only the family gets to
enjoy. To me, it is even more lovely
with its varied shades of green and brown and red. I think I like it better because of the
lighting this time of year. It’s
thinner somehow, more clear and white. There is a period of
time in late afternoon when the shadows make every object crazy long. The silhouettes of the bare trees with the
sun setting behind them are my absolute favorite. I love the black trunks with their branches
lifted skyward in naked surrender as the sun goes down behind the horizon in a
prouder display of color than you see in summer. Even the hues of the sunset are richer at this
time of year with eggplant purples, hot pink and persimmon oranges.
In this second autumn, there are no leaves left on the
trees; they are covering the forest floor, making it look like someone
installed a tan woolen carpet with sculpted pile around every tree. The fields are brown, the hedges are brown,
the bushes are brown, but every brown is different, and every shadow and patch
of light alters the color to be golden or chocolate or caramel. Interspersed with the brown are large patches
of green from the pine and evergreen trees.
They wear their winter colors, which are the deeper, richer, serious hunkering
down greens, and not the yellow greens of spring. I suppose, if I was an artist, I would take
that background as my initial inspiration and add touches of color here and
there to enhance the differences. That’s
just what the sumac and the bittersweet and the burning bush shrubs do.
All across the landscape there are patches of the deep red velvet
of sumac and the lacy orange of bittersweet.
I especially enjoy the bittersweet because there is really no orange in
the plant…it’s just that from a distance, the yellow husk and the red of the
berries make it appear orange to the eye.
It looks delicate and cheerful as it climbs over bushes and even up
telephone poles. Then, dotted here and
there to draw the eye into the picture, are the most brilliantly red bushes we
call the burning bush. Their leaves
eventually fall off, but in this other autumn, they do not have any competition
for brilliancy. There is not another red
anywhere that can compete as they flaunt their fire like boastful eye candy in their
assigned places across the landscape.
You miss all that when you just think everything is brown
and dreary this time of year. It’s not
dreary, it has just been transformed into something totally different, but
beautiful just the same. The flashy riot
of color in the early autumn certainly gets your attention; but the second
autumn has a quiet strength that is going to take us right through winter. It makes a foundation for the blanket of snow
and still allows its personality to shine through, as it refuses to tuck
everything neatly under the covers. We
can still see some of those saucy berries poking out here and there giving
hints that all is not cold and white.
Little did I know that receiving new lenses changes
EVERYTHING. Now I am looking forward to
using these new lenses for seeing people differently and situations and
conversation and political issues and family members and work
environments. They are probably worth
that second look and new interpretation.
I want to make the same commitment with those things that I did with
writing. When I notice something that
gives me pause, I will actually pause and consider and look again because
people are worth it, conversations are worth it, family members are worth it
and I am worth it.
