Frost is forecast for next week, but today, this is what it looks like at my place. I’m picking early asparagus, and spotted two Christmas cactus blooms. It’s perfectly balmy. I should be taking advantage of the warmth outdoors to clean out the greenhouse and set up its heater for when winter descends again.
Contrary to my recent posting about the dead feeling of winter, I was for several days experiencing living “streams in the desert” that were, I realize now, an onflowing of Theophany grace. It was rain, rain, rain, and when it fell on a real live desert in southern Nevada, I felt the rivers as symbolic and real, all mixed together.
At the end of last week I flew to visit church friends who not long ago settled in that state, a large homeschooling family whom I’d been longing to see. We had planned that on Monday we’d make an outing to Valley of Fire State Park in the Mojave Desert. It was raining, but in such a dry climate I assumed the precipitation would be light, or fleeting. We all donned our rain gear; I wore a light shell over my sweater, and wished later that I had put on my longer raincoat.
The rainfall was fairly constant, though not ever heavy, and I managed to take plenty of pictures without wrecking my phone. My Newly Nevadan hosts had visited this park many times, but never before when the landscape was wet, with the colors popping out dramatically, highlighting the lines and textures of giant rocks sloping every which way, and towering above us.
Everywhere we looked, there was a new vista of pink and red and purple, and even yellow. This scene got my attention because the grass seemed to be reflecting the yellow stripes behind — and look! blue sky:
A couple of the children scrambled up higher than the adults (like the bighorn sheep that we saw in the scene at the top of this page — but they are probably too distant to notice in the picture.) and the toddler was pleased with the chance to toddle through pink sand and over flat stones on the trail. I was shown the field of marble-like pebbles and heard the theory of how they were formed, from erosion of aggregate rock nearby:
Our company was dripping and soggy by the time we got back in the car after our excursion, but everyone was cheerful. We had breathed gallons of refreshment, and feasted our eyes on the loveliest colors and forms of Creation. Showers of blessing had fallen on us and made us glorious.
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape –
the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
–Andrew Wyeth
Why do people think it intelligent to say, “I can see no difference”? It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured: we call him short-sighted. Now there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter; but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference…
This is a strange epoch; and while, in some ways, we have quite dangerously encouraged the appetites, we have quite ruthlessly crushed the instincts.
— G.K. Chesterton in The Illustrated London News, December 1912
Gladsome Lights 