acorns

Maples and Oaks speak though their gestures.

They remain lush in these last days-

When the sun bides its time,

drawing me back to the woods

where I can slowly find the familiar.

The trees are speaking

when the acorns fall on my head.

Hard and abrupt.

They are reminding me of something.

Like a ribbon on my finger.

They are telling me to stop.

To pay attention.

To listen to the wind when it softly guides me off the path.

For the wind and the sun are larger than anything I’ve known.

And an acorn is small enough to fit

into the palm of my hand.

week 31. Reverence

There is a church I try to attend, though I’ve missed many Sundays this summer. This week the pastor talked about the word “reverence”. He spoke about how there are few things that teach us reverence. Few things make us stop and pay attention. He used the writings of Barbara Brown Taylor to help him to describe his thoughts on the subject. In her writing she described a memory of her childhood. Her father would take her out on their deck, place a blanket down and they would watch the stars falling from the night sky. She wrote, “Reverence is difficult to define but you know it when feel it”. It’s true that feeling something with great profoundness can snap you out of the everyday monotony and force you to contemplate greatness. There seems to be a kind of awe that comes over us when we realize our own limits. How is it that so much of nature inspires us to feel closer to our spiritual beings, to find grandeur in the elements. I think it’s these things in nature that remind us that we are only what we believe, and all the rest is hardly within our control.