Category Archives: nature

Streams in the Valley of Fire.

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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.

Creosote Bush

Blessed Monday

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Monday is usually for me a recuperative day when I try to stay home and catch up with myself after a lot of Sunday “output.” It didn’t happen the same way today, because I wanted to get to the post office early and mail lots of Christmas packages. It was a cold but not freezing, clear and sunny day, and once I was relieved of my burdens, I knew I would take a walk.

It’s very strange, how for more than a year I have been stubbornly averse to the long-familiar walks in my neighborhood. Is it “familiarity breeds contempt”? But as I always say, every day is different out there, and if you can’t see that, then certainly week by week you would notice, that the plants and the weather are obviously different, so that it is not the same place you are walking. I still didn’t care.

Autumn, after the rains, always tries to pull me out for an explore. But until today, I resisted. I had too much on my mind, on the calendar, and didn’t feel the freedom. It was a providential synchronicity that today, when I am transitioning into the remainder of Advent, the weather was perfect for it. As soon as I neared the creek the heady scents filled my head — of wet earth and leaves, infused with the sweetness of fennel seeds fermenting in the dampness.

We’ve had enough rain that the sheep in the pasture had plenty of bright green grass to graze on, and I think it made the fall colors extra bright. And my mood was bright. Now on to cookie baking!

You have to treat it as a living thing.

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Tessa Carman was having a conversation with Paul Kingsnorth last year, on “Following Christ in the Machine Age.” This is an overarching theme of Kingsnorth’s thinking and writing. Their conversation was leisurely and ranged over many topics, everything from books they have been reading, to Kingsnorth’s conversion, to Hollywood, to being “cancelled.” Kingsnorth lives on a “smallholding” in Ireland, so naturally the conversation turned to how we humans treat the land. I liked the point that Carman brings up, about how farmers traditionally have not been sentimental about nature, but because they “have to do” the work of caring for the land day in and day out, they develop an intimate relationship with it:

“Christians were not untouched by modernity. Especially when there’s more uprootedness — I suspect it’s easier to treat things like machines if you are used to living amongst machines. And if you’re used to taking care of a piece of land, where you have to treat it as a living thing in some sense, even if you don’t think of it as a living thing, that’s just what you have to do, because there’s a living relationship amongst the animals and the land and the people. You see that and live that, and you see the reality of it— the cycle of life and death, how manure brings life.

“If you’re in the city, you can have your image of how the natural world is instead of the reality. And there’s the danger of sentimentality, when we have disconnected ourselves from the land such that we think we can decide what’s good for the land without even knowing it, without knowing the people, let alone this specific piece of land, these animals and these plants.”

–Tessa Carman

Orange groves in Tulare County, California.

Theology is all or nothing.

nature, quotes, theology

“Theology means the word about God. Theology is therefore ALL or nothing. The whole of nature and the super-nature and the subternature IS ALL theology; all man and every part of him is theology; every meadow and every flower is theology; Sirius and the Milky Way, nebulae and meteors are theology; the history of the planet and the history of the people, the history of radioactivity and the history of every butterfly, and of every grain of sand, and of every drop of water, and of every ray of light are theology.

“If the whole of nature is not theology, then theology is nothing or nature is nothing. If the whole of nature does not speak about God, who will believe Isaiah or Paul? If the whole of the world around is a wilderness, what can the voice of one prophet crying about God in that wilderness accomplish? If the whole universe does not speak of God, who can without contempt hear the words of one man?”

-St. Nicholai Velimirovich