The Sunday after the Sunday after Annalise’s wedding, we returned home from a two thousand mile round trip to Boston. There we celebrated the newly minted bride’s newly minted Law school diploma. At the end of that journey an old friend’s words came back to me. As our van took the road that led us to our hometown, and then took the streets that we regularly walk down, and as we climbed the stairs that led us to our front door, I found myself echoing my friend David’s words that he uttered the week after his own daughter’s wedding. “It’s kinda nice having all that behind me.”
John Denver captured something of the felt sense of that experience in his tune, “Back Home Again” (1974). In hindsight, I’ve noticed the same felt experience at the conclusion of any vacation I’ve ever taken, no matter how exotic, beautiful, or life-changing. There’s something about rounding the corner and seeing the familiar tree-lined street that conjures that familiar set of feelings.
In his book, “Eternal Echoes,” the poet laureate, John O’Donohue, described the sacred landscapes of his childhood home in Ireland. Before furrow or seed could touch that emerald soil, the ancient Celtic farmer’s first order of business was stone removal. Over the centuries those unwanted stones have risen up forming patchworks of ancient walls. O’Donohuedescribed how the particularity of a farmer’s walled landscape framed visual and emotional encounters with an otherwise overwhelmingly vast panorama. The gaps in the stones, the lichen, the moss in the shade, the ivy in the sun, their gilded glow at sunset, their illusion of softness at sunrise… for that farmer and his family, and their family before them, those stone walls contained a roofless chapel… in Dr. Beldon Lane’s words, a “Landscape of the Sacred.” They provided rendezvous spotswhere a kind of Celtic magic could occasionally cast its spell.
For the last few months, O’Donohue has been my morning companion as I read a five-minute section of his book everyday. What has gradually seeped into me, is a pre-Enlightenmentview of the Supernatural hidden in the natural. For decades now, Lisa and I have enjoyed a vacation coffee-walk at sunrise, or a glass-of-wine-walk at sunset on a beach. Anyone who claims the ocean as their sacred landscape knows that each day (even moment-to-moment) something brand new is revealed in her ever-changing face.
Lately, Lisa, and I, along with our dog Winnie, have been conducting coffee and wine walks in the park near our house. What I am learning is that what’s true of the ocean, is true of the landscape out my backdoor. The God who makes all things new is always at play revealing Herself for those with eyes to see. No two leaves or blades of grass are the same. Did you know that light cascades differently down the soft needles of a tall Cypress than it does down the waxy leaves of a mighty Oak? It pools up differently on the ground too. I’m learning that the wind dances with the tender ends of the Walnut trees, but causes Cottonwoods to wave like a queen demurely greeting her subjects.
Researchers who study flourishing, happiness, and resilience are united in the view that attentiveness is the starting point. Every mystic or would be mystic I have ever known says the same thing. Developing the “noticing muscle” in the here-and-now is the doorway to the thin places between heaven and earth. And you may discover that one of those doorways exists closer to you than you ever imagined.