the world is an altar

There couldn't be a clearer, brighter blue sky.Now that the veil of rain and fog has lifted, not one cloud drifts across the blue. For my Yankee friends, cover your eyes.The daffodil spears, so green and sure are up, as are the day lilies. There are specks of yellow on the tips of my Carolina Jessamine.

There is a story in the Scottish Hebrides about a mother watching as her young daughter gets ready to head off for a good job on the mainland.A city girl she is to become.The city "where gold weighs more than love, and folks are too busy to think of sun or sea."This line touched me deeply.

Another book, a memoir, weaves a tale of desolation that crowds in on a young boy, the victim, along with his mother and siblings of a sexual and physically abusive father. It is hard to read. But there are words that redeem.The boy used to sneak out in the evening, lay on the grass and commune with the stars."Each night, I gave them memories to hold for me-memories of beatings witnessed and rapes endured...in  return the stars gave me understanding.They said to me,""This is not how it is supposed to be.This is not your fault.You will survive.We love you.You are good.""Derrick Jensen.

How startling to read these words. How many of us are saved by these ; the sun, moon, sea, trees, rivers, birds.I have a friend who always seems to encounter a bright red, male Cardinal when she most needs comfort. And then there is the small green shoot that is growing by my special spot at the river's edge.I go there in the winter on sunny days just like this and sit on my writer's log. This log is flat and runs a few feet off the ground like a l bench., with grey smooth bark and an interesting hole here and there. The river curves around the bend just to my left but next to the log is a green plant that looks like bamboo.And this plant one day said this:"You are never alone.Not here, not anywhere."

Thomas Merton writes:"Today, said prayers with great joy, overflowing joy, as if the land and woods and spring were all praising God through me.The sense of angelic transparency of everything, and of pure, simple, total light. The word that comes closest to pointing to it is simple. It was all simple. But a simplicity to which one seems to aspire, only seldom attain.A simplicity, that is, that has and says everything just because it is simple."

It is is all there and simple.