Outside My Window

When I look outside my window I see God – or the Spirit of Life, or the Power of Life, or the Force, or the élan vital or whatever you need to call it. Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the universal currents that run through all of us. I resonate with that too.
Outside my window this morning the land was glistening with the sheen of thick frost. The grass and trees sparkled. The head of the Buddha on my lawn shimmered with the morning sun, refracted by crystallized dew. It caused me to look a little closer at this place where I live now through a renewed lens. Yes, I have seen frost on this same yard hundreds of times. But each time I am forced to pay attention and see the land in a new light. The same is true if it is a soaking rain that gives our micro-farm the name, “Soggy Bottom.” Snow redefines our habitat as well as the kind of heat that radiates off of rooftops in August. Kansas wind transforms all of these, exaggerating their character.
Honestly, if I had passed through Kansas in 1870, I doubt seriously that I would have stopped. There are plenty of stories about the people who lost their minds in sod houses. Their souls were afflicted by the constant wind, the push of blizzards, and withering drought.
Because I have lived in so many places I have learned to see the sacral nature of the earth. Sacral is an interesting word, meaning of or about religious rites, and also related to the nerves in the sacral region at the base of the human spine. Nerves are those fibers or bundle of fibers that conduct the impulses of sensation and motion between the brain and spinal cord, every limb and organ. They are the pathways of all that we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. Without them we could not respond to the stimuli.
I believe there is something amazingly wonder-filled and profoundly religious in the sensation and motion of being human on the earth. I sometimes wonder if the Holy Spirit is the nerve of my soul and the creation. Sometimes it seems to flow out of me, coursing like a spider’s web toward fireflies. At other times it races out of morning dew or the evening sunset, enflaming my imagination.
The same would be true if you plopped me down in a city like Boston, a mountaintop in the Canadian Rockies, or a fishing village on the coast of Maine. I am at home in the universe, every time I look out my window.