Last Things

Here we are, once more in the last sighs of the year. There is much to think about and consider: what we dreamed of and achieved; what we never expected that laid us low; those times when despite all odds we prevailed; and most remarkable of all-- when we benefited from an act of grace.  Now is the time to "find meaning in the remainders' as a dear friend remarked and reflect over all these moments, letting go and forgiving not only others, but ourselves and filling the plans we make for the coming year with gratitude for all we have experienced.  Important last things before we close this door and walk on with the gifts we received from all of it.

Peace and Blessings

Be Comforted and Glad

 "Is there anything that can take from you the hope of being someday in the God you are helping to create in each attentive act of love?

Please celebrate this Christmas with the earnest faith that He may need this very anguish of yours in order to begin.  These very days that are such a trial for you may well be the time when everything in you is working at Him, as once you so urgently did as a child.  Be patient and without resentment, and know that the least we can do is to make His Becoming no more difficult that Earth makes it for spring when it wants to arrive.  Be comforted and glad."

                                          Rainer Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, December 23, 1903

 Christmas Blessings 

As It Should Be

The year is winding down.  December too soon it seems, is upon us.  Late in the day,  I went out on the deck to watch the dark arrive.  It comes so suddenly in the winter.  Have you noticed?  I was thinking about Thanksgiving, how much I enjoyed my family, about the changes coming in everyone's lives, the simple richness of living.  The house pulsed and glowed with the jumbled up togetherness of all of us.  My generation is now older, our children's lives no longer the center of ours and the gentle give and take of children leaving home, starting their own lives, alternating holidays gave rise to a sweet poignancy.

As I stood in the early dusk, I  noticed something glowing white in the brown leaves of the flower border.  I walked around and found the first blooms of a winter lenten rose I had planted the year before. The lovely bright faces of its blooms seemed a timely reminder that the call of life is forward towards growth. Roses, long associated with love, are an even older symbol for the manifestation of healing and love at hand.  Their blooms at a time when all the rest of the earth is dormant remind us to look for new birth in our own lives. I thought  of all the people I love, who like me are living their lives, preparing for Christmas each in their own way and I smiled.  It felt good deep down.  Just as it should be I thought, as I went in to turn on the lights.

Where We Give Thanks

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what,

we must eat to live.

 The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the

table so it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe

at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what

it means to be human. We make men at it,

we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms

around our children. They laugh with us at pour poor

falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back

together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella

in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place

to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate

the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared

our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.

We pray of suffering and remorse.

We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,

while we are laughing and crying,

eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy Harjo, "Perhaps the World Ends Here" from Reinventing The Enemy's Language

You Can't Have it All

 But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green.  You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so.  You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like.  You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something.  You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.  And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva.  You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for awhile, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa.  And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.
                       Barbara Ras 

Sometimes

      Sometimes, I am Startled Out of Myself,

     like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,

flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek

across the sky made me think about my life, the places

of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief

has strung me out to dry.  And then the geese come calling,

the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.

Hope is borne on wings.  Look at the trees.  They turn to gold

for a brief while, then lose it all each November

Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst

weather has to offer.  And still, they put out shy green leaves

come April come May.  The geese glide over the cornfield,

land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.

You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find

shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.

All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.

They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker,  from Radiance

Delight

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will every dazzle you
like the dreams of your body, "
 Mary Oliver, excerpt from "Humpbacks"




The leaves are turning more slowly this year around the lake.  This week the zenith of color passed and now the poplars are almost all bare.  The deep reds of the oaks have moved on to dark burgundy brown.  The yellows have deepened into mustard and ocher.  Soon a morning will come for the big 'let go' when the woods are full of swirling leaves on their way to the woodland floor.
Once years ago when I lived in the city I opened my door to soak up the magic and beauty of the leaves falling in the woods across the street.  It was a beautiful clear morning, the street was quiet.  Standing in the warm sunshine I  heard my name called and there, two doors down, stood my neighbor, soaking up the radiance of the moment as well.  We laughed and exclaimed over the beauty falling around us.  It was a moment of complete delight.

We are born knowing about delight, but the whirl of modern life have distracted us from our ability to access it outside the world of things. Things do amuse, but I wonder if they have the capacity to feed us the way delight is meant to do. Delight awakens us to a sense of beauty and wonder that feels good deep inside us.  We are opened to experience joyfulness in being alive in the world.  What we are seeing, feeling, touching experiencing feels rich and satisfying, even opulent.  We find it in a sudden smile, an unexpected caress, a splash of light across the garden, the faces of our little ones when they giggle, the leaves drifting down like cast off wings everywhere around us even though we know a hard afternoon of raking is on it's way: "and there it is again--/beauty the brave, the exemplary/blazing open."  Lift up from your burdens, just for a moment if you can, and let some in.

One Heart

I had the opportunity earlier this week to visit the bee hives of some new friends. In their retirement she enjoys her skill as a master gardener; his hobby has become bees.  It was a warm day and the bees were swirling in and out of the entrances busy collecting pollen from the plants in their beautiful garden. I learned how the hives work and saw how much devotion is required of a beekeeper to protect the harmony and health of the colonies. As the trays were pulled out already heavy with honey and teeming with bees, they glowed in the afternoon light, and the beekeeper's slow and careful movements as he worked the hive conveyed a reverence and respect for this parallel world.  He quietly explained the life of the hive ending with the remark that each and every bee had only one purpose: to support the success of the hive in which they lived, working tirelessly together,  to ensure that goal. There was a pause and then I said: "You mean, they are of one heart?"
"Right" he replied.

While we know a great deal about the lives of bees, there is still much about our world and each other that we do not. Perhaps our insatiable desire to know and control everything is balanced by having something unknowable and mysterious surrounding us to temper and burnish the human drive to use knowledge for power instead of deepening. I don't know. What I do feel  is a great need to recapture wonder and reverence and respect for all the worlds, not just the ones we have made, if the health of all is to be ensured. And as I left that day, I was thinking that maybe the way for that to happen is to be reminded more often of what the bees already knew: it will take one heart.

It was only a patch of wild muscadine, but the late morning light falling across it's tangled arms transformed it into a glowing mound, revealing it's true beauty.  We so often overlook the good, the beautiful in living.  Our days, so full of worries and anxieties, things to be done, rarely leave the moment to look again.  The trees have labored and held on through the scorch of summer.  Like us, they face everyday, the unknown.  But they prevail and through their courage, bring glory in the fall, warmth for the winter and hope again in the spring.  See the tall beauties, everyone a queen or princess: look again.  And so are we all.

"We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us.  If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours.  If dangers are there, we must try to love them.  And if we would live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what now appears to us as most alien will become our truest, most trustworthy friend.  Let us not forget the ancient myths at the outset of humanity's journey, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses.  Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage.  Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help."  Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Ripening

  It's hard to think of Fall without imagining the gathering in of a harvest.  In spiritual growth, this is often the most difficult moment-waiting for what seems to be an endless period when nothing seems ready to harvest in our lives despite all our attention and care. Just as in nature, a farmer can sense the crop coming to fullness, but the exact moment is never truly know until one morning walking down the rows or standing under the trees, tasting and feeling, the right time arrives. It is the same for us. The day comes when we discover we are living our lives differently.

The ripening process of the human heart and spirit, just as in The Real World, cannot be rushed.  Each day in the growth process is necessary. We must feed and water and nourish ourselves with devotion, ward off unwelcome marauders and patiently wait until the mysterious process is accomplished within us.  Only then are we able to reap the gain of our inner work and manifest it into the outer world.  And then, just like the ripened fruit, our harvest will be rich with the juices of who and what we really are.

Lord, the time has come.  Summer was abundant.
Cast your shadows over the sundial,
across the field unleash your winds.

Command the final fruits to ripen.
Grant them two more southern days,
bring them to fullness and press
their last sweetness into the heavy wine.

And today, once again, a new morning: bright, with close, rounded clouds that frame expanses of the immeasurably deep sky.  Agitation in the treetops. In everything else, restfulness.  Windfall of apples.  The grass softly invites you to walk out of the house...There are so many days here, none like any other.  And beneath all their differences is this great similarity: the gratitude in which they are received.
                               Rilke, Book of Images, Early Journals

Down near the bottom                                           of love, and love
of the crossed-out list                                             is no less practical
of things you have to do today,                               than a coffee grinder

Between "green thread"                                         or a safe spare tire?
and "broccoli," you find                                          Tomorrow you may be utterly
that you have penciled "sunlight."                             without a clue,

Resting on the page, the word                                but today you get a telegram
is beautiful. It touches you                                      from the heart in exile,
as if you had a friend                                              proclaiming that the kingdom

and sunlight were a present                                    still exists,
he had sent from someplace distant                        the king and queen alive,
as this morning--to cheer you up,                           still speaking to their children,

and to remind you that,                                          --and to any one among them
among your duties, pleasure                                   who can find the time
is a thing                                                                to sit out in the sun and listen.

that also needs accomplishing.                               Tony Hoagland,  "The Word" from Sweet Ruin
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

So Many Moments

After a long season of heat, August has finally burned itself out and the first full moon of Fall has brought with it blessedly cooler temperatures.  Welcome September.  Markets now are full of late season produce, the first pumpkins, gourds and apples.  Mornings have a crispness that lifts the spirits.  The great wheel of the year is shifting its gears down and we all turn our focus with it, surrendering summer to our memories.  Suddenly the children are bigger and need new clothes, the yard needs raking, and there are all sorts of schedules to be kept.  Life picks up a new pace and we move on.

In the gathering dark I walked down to the dock to watch the moon rise, thinking as I went of all that has happened this year.  The quiet stillness of the water, the huge yellow pearl seemed more than ever to witness  the inevitability of change. So much happens to us, so many moments we hardly notice, and others that flare so intensely they change us forever. Yet life sweeps them  all together as we fill up and then empty out with the passage of time, still creating, like the moonlight across the lake, beautiful radiance from all of them.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,
 whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able to do three things:

to love what is mortal; 

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and when the time comes

to let it go,

to let it go.

 Mary Oliver, "In Blackwater Woods".

Exactly Where

May today there be peace within.  May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.  May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.  May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.  May you be content knowing you are a child of God.  Let this presence settle in to your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us.         Prayer of St. Theresa

Small Things

Off and on through out the summer I have been witness to what I call a "spider conference" just outside the glass doors from my studio. Every few weeks while watering the flower pots on the deck, I have looked up and seen a cluster of 10 to 15 grandaddy long legs along the edge of the roof. What are they doing?  Why do they always cluster along the same strip of roof line?  Why always about the same number?

There is much about the workings of the Real World we have no knowledge of, much less an understanding.  Yet it continues to  impact our lives in profound ways.  It is true with our own inner Real Worlds. There are powerful places in all of us that are often overlooked or hidden by us as we try to conform to the cultures in which we live. Getting to know ourselves requires life long devotion. We are often more willing to spend time and energy trying to decipher others than we allow for ourselves.  We need to remember when we refuse to acknowledge parts of ourselves, large or small, because we believe them to be unworthy or we are ashamed of them, we are not doing the real work of our lives.  The seeds for our growth and deepening are sown into all the struggles and less admirable ways we deal with the everyday experiences of family, work, rest and play.  Our work is to wonder about them.

"If you ally yourself with nature, with her sheer existence, with the small things that others overlook and that so suddenly can become huge and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is plain and try very simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then every thing will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, perhaps not in your conscious mind, but in your innermost awareness."

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Shade

By the last weeks of August each year the summer furnace is on full blast.  Everything is starting to dry up, shrivel up or give up.  Humans included.  We are all just worn out by the relentless heat..But despite all our sticky, sweaty weariness, off in the woods it's quiet, the light is filtered and cooled as it falls down into the midst of all the tall beauties.  It's what they do best--smoothing out  the hot fierce light of living into shade and rest for all the creatures of the Real World-- including us.

Each One

And we, each one, are all the soils---
weed-choked and stony, deep and fertile--
and, each one, all the worlds.

We are each seed from the hand of
'The Father of lights'.
Seeds of light falling through the empty space
at the heart of the star which is everywhere
and in all things.
                      from Parabola

Tall Beauties

After a month without rain, the long awaited summer cycle of afternoon thunder storms finally arrived. For weeks,dark blue violet clouds full of wind and lightning had been swelling up in the west most afternoons only to rumble and flash and move on without emptying themselves along this end of the lake.  But at last, deep in the night whatever precise atmospheric conditions that needed to happen arranged themselves and the rains came. The ground was baked solid, and the water sheeted off, gushing down the roads, sluicing out new ravines and washing away the tenuous grip of everything weak and unprotected.  Towering old trees, weakened by age, their heartwood riddled by decay as well as strong vibrant ones sheared off by lightning and wind,  fell with every storm, taking down power lines and altering the line of the horizon. The sound and smell of the rain was wonderful, as were the renewed songs of the tree frogs and cicadas, but the relief was tempered by the cost in hardwoods as all across the ridge, the tall beauties fell.  Laying in the dark, the lightning popping like old flashbulbs, the thunder snarling in the torrents of rain, it felt as if the woods was being beaten down by the very forces meant to restore them. It was frightening.

There in the dark I could not help but think how all across the world, it feels the same way. Generations of drought in governments and political systems, in food resources, financial responsibility, personal integrity, human rights,and natural stewardship have gathered into terrible dark storm clouds.  We need the rain, but it is being brought to us in a storm that is altering the landscape of our lives. It is frightening, because real change involves letting go of what we know and moving forward without the knowledge of what lies ahead. The air is thundering with voices that can only talk of what is wrong and will fail. There is danger and pain in the forces of the natural world and the manmade one.  But let us not be seduced by the chronically fearful who are so  captured by blaming and rigidity they would have us fail to see the enormous potential for growth and realignment; for possibility and wholeness; justice, parity; to imagine what good can come.  Now is the time to be hopeful, resourceful, constructive and fair; to bend and stand back up, to hold tight to the beautiful and creative and genuine, and in every way we can muster, to be ready to return with strength after the clouds open and the rain has fallen.We are not being beaten down, we are being called to grow.

"Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past....
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty."
Mary Oliver, from "Skunk Cabbage" 

Maybe

She was struck by lightning a good while back and hung on for a long time, but finally the severe winter and the long dry spell won out and she surrendered.  That wasn't a surprise.  Eventually we all do, despite everything we do to pretend we won't. Then the morning arrived and driving by traffic began to slow because  rather than take down the tree completely, the owners decided to do something very different with her once graceful leafy arms.  It seemed to be a reverential act; a tribute to a long steady life of shade and company and beauty and gracefulness.  Let us all pause to wonder if our own lives will make such a beautiful skirt around our knees.
 

 "Maybe death 

isn't darkness, after all,

but so much light

wrapping itself around us--

as soft as feathers--

that we are instantly weary

of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river

that is without the least dapple or shadow--

that is nothing but light--scalding, aortal light--

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones."

Mary Oliver, excerpt from  'White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field"

Becoming Good

 I came across a dead water snake in the road this week.  From the condition it was in, I wondered if it could have been dropped by a hawk.  It was certainly a vivid reminder of how the natural world operates. There everything is taken for what it is; which means the fox who stole the baby birds for supper, the snake snatched up by the hawk, the lightning, are not judged as being bad for doing what they are born to be.  Being good in the natural world is being true to whatever you are and your place in the order of things. Goodness is not niceness and prettiness and safety.  Goodness is authenticity and wholeness.

As we have moved further away from meaningful connection to the natural world, we have interpreted goodness less and less on this original concept. Instead, outside the merit of consequences and accountability, we have fallen prey to defining our personal value or goodness by a host of criteria that are artificial: things, color, abundance, and especially culture, politics and religion. We have lost touch with the original, more complete and powerful affirmation of genuine goodness:  the capacity to live our lives attuned to who we are and in relation to the rest of world.  When we artificially measure each other we choke off tolerance for difference and uniqueness and stoke the fires of discord and control. Rather than be accepting of the nature of other people, their cultures, and beliefs, we have made the assumption that because it is not the same as ours, it must be inherently dangerous.
This is not a discussion about not having consequences for hurtful actions, but  wondering why we have separated ourselves with so much fear. There is room in the natural world for everything to be what it is, living side by side, in tune to their own rhythms. We are the only ones who are so afraid there isn't.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
  love what it loves....
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting---
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver,  "Wild Geese"

Wonderfully Troubling

"The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when were young."        James Hollis

"Skeeree"

 Coming upon this arresting creature on the road this week set me to thinking about all things scary.  Spiders are definitely on the top ten list for many people.  It also reminded me of the reaction a dear friend told me about recently when her little grandson saw some battle scene paintings.  His response was emphatic and clear: they were 'skeeree' Nana--SKEEREE!

People are afraid of all sorts of things.  The world is very beautiful but it is also very scary at times. Watching the squirrels on the deck as they creep right up beside my chair, I know I am not on their scary list along with the fox or the hawk or some of my neighbors with BB guns. We have our own lists in our daily lives, but unlike the other inhabitants of the Real World, humans also carry another kind of skeeree around inside.  Its is the fear of not knowing what happens next.

  By the time we reach the second half of life, if we have been paying attention, we will have learned that no one really knows what comes next. There will have been enough failures and disappointments and heartaches--in other words a rich and meaningful life-- to teach us we are incapable of always knowing what life will bring. Now all the energy spent to make things turn out a certain way, to orchestrate and control because we believed that we would make us safer and less scared seems so unnecessary. Age and perspective help us look back and realize the life changing impact of the things we could never have imagined for ourselves when life arrived unannounced. Not having all the answers, just moving along watching to see what unfolds is not as skeeree as we had been led to believe. There really does exist a plan much larger than our own. When that happens something deep inside of us lets go and sighs back into itself because finally it comes to us that the only thing we really needed to know all along was we can navigate life and and enjoy it as it arrives each day.

.

A Wholesome Shape

By July, summer is traversing its zenith. The constellation Sirius has positioned itself in the heavens to announce the impending arrival of  'the dog days'. Crops and gardens are teeming with produce.  The woods are full of  vines, wildflowers,the sounds of baby birds and young animals navigating the trees and leaf carpeted ground.Several times already I have surprised baby fawns on my morning walk  Even the nights are full of life: crickets, tree frogs and cicadas sawing away, the local geese squabbling and owls hooting. My raccoon babies and the possums, regular visitors to the food scrap pile, sometimes have a heated discussion over who has prior reservations. The Real World is bursting with the power of life. This is when the woods threaten to overtake the house and a good chainsaw and pruning shears become an asset. 

One of the pleasures of living in a beautiful locale is the opportunity it provides for my guests sink into reverie when they come.  Early morning often finds them curled up in a chair in a quiet corner of the house or out on the deck with a cup of coffee practicing what I call the long stare...that unfocused gaze of looking out that also allows us to look within.  Seeing this happening always affirms to me how essential and healthy  it is to stop and consider the powerful events in our own lives which are bursting with the same intensity of living.  I have often thought of this ruminating as a kind of inner life pruning.  When we live at full throttle, eventually we need to slow down and clear out some of the debris living has created.  And just like pruning, the best way to do that is not to just shear off the tops of things, but to reach in carefully and select the right limbs to cut back that will provide room for sunlight and new growth and create a wholesome shape.

"What can I say that I have not said before?
So I'll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
  and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
  chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
   were a child
is singing still."
Mary Oliver,  excerpted from "What Can I Say"

To Trust Our Sadness

"Consider whether great changes have not happened deep inside your being in times when you were sad.  The only sadnesses that are unhealthy and dangerous are those we carry around in public in order to drown them out.  Like illnesses that are treated superficially, they only recede for a while and then break out more severely.  Untreated they gather strength inside us and become the rejected, lost, and unlived life that we may die of.  If only we could see a little farther than our knowledge reaches and a little beyond the borders of our intuition, we might perhaps bear our sorrows more trustingly than we do our joys.  For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown.  Our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, they take a step back, a stillness arises, and the new thing, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing."             

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The Best Remedy

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God.  Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.  As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be.  And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles." 
Anne Frank, from The Diary of Anne Frank