Worshipping As We Roam

Worshipping as We Roam

My parents, good pre-hippies that they are, were intense organic gardeners.  I grew up surrounded by vegetables, fruit crops and orchard, and flower gardens.  As is perhaps the case for many farm children, I am not sure I properly appreciated all of this.  The farm and the gardens were  just the backdrop of my life.  Simultaneously, books and words anchored and transported me.  I may not have been overly excited when the hayfields got replanted, but the names of the seeds in the mix continue to be magic to me--red clover, alfalfa, and bridsfoot trefoil.  Fifty years later those words are the key to my farm memories.  

What the farm did do is to give me a profound sense of how God created and sustained our natural world.  I think this is one of the reasons why it bothers me so much when farmers and others close to the land tell me that "this world will fade away and just think how heaven will be."  I love this tired but beautiful world so much.

When my kids were young and we lived in New York, we attended Quaker meeting at the Upperville Friends meeting house in Smyrna, New York--a long way from anywhere is the land the time forgot. In the eys of my kids, there were two advantages to Sunday morning.  First, after we struggled through First Day School, we went out and walked up the road behind the meeting house.  My goal, every week, was to gather one wildflower of each species that we came across that week.  This way we watched the wheel of the seasons.  I can't imagine a better way to worship God's glory.

The second joy was Upperville Falls, right around he corner from the meeting house, on the Chenango River.  All of our kids climbed down ont the rocks under the falls, although, unlike the other children of the land that time forgot, we didn't swim under the falls.  Waterfalls are also enchanted places, but the additional gift was that the stones were covered with fossils.  I could fall of fossils and not see them, but Emily can walk along and just reach down and find a fossil anywhere.  We took rocks home every week.  Some shoeboxes of rocks came to Wisconsin.....Again, I can't think of a better way to be aware of the mystery of God and this world.  

Upperville Falls

Under the Falls 

Upperville Meeting House

I am pleased to say that some of this has embedded in my now-adult kids.  Christopher, who says he doesn't remember anything from his childhood (a mother's worst fear is the reprecussions offifteen years of hockey goalie-ing,) but we were talking about churches and religion a couple months ago and he said he and Ashley had been talking about how important it was to let your kids learn about different religions--and then he said "But I said isn't the best thing you could do with your kids to take a walk and look at what you see?"

I spent a lot of years of my life in campus buildings, working year-round and not being outside.  I consider that one of the sadnesses of my life.  This was one of the reasons why I started riding my bike about five years ago.  It gets me outside and I am physically, psychologically, and spiritually healthier.  I now watch the change in the wildflowers each week as I ride--and I think about God and about how Bullthistles came to Wisconsin on the railroads and how even they are beyond lovely.

In case you haven't been wildflowering--the colors get brighter as the summer progresses.

              Enjoy the ride, friends.