Every day, I flip the lime green lid of my iPad, and after some minutes of perusing the latest postings on my Google Reader, browsing through the latest Facebook updates, reading emails, touching base with favorite apps…I begin to wonder, “What is it I’m looking for?”
On Sundays, beginning Saturday evening, I try to take a break from it all. I try! It is amazing to notice in oneself the pull of the afore-mentioned things. To note the lure of “just checking in”. Really, what is it I’m looking for?
I’ve just returned from a five-mile walk in and around my neighborhood. I don’t typically do the full 5-mile loop (usually just 2 or 3), but today, I really wanted to be out for a long lovely walk, breathe in the fresh air, hear the leaves rustling as a storm-front begins to roll in. What is it that lures me out on these walks? What is this siren song that sings to me, calling me to come tromp the paved roads while taking in roadside wildflowers? It hit me while I was out there…
Inspiration. Aren’t we all looking for inspiration? We want to be romanced…and I don’t mean in the gooey, lovey way, but in that classic sense of being wooed and won over by Beauty. I look for it when I peer into my iPad, I look for it on my walks, I look for it in the faces of my lovely family who has celebrated me on this Mother’s Day in such a touching way.
To say that I would prefer to be out of doors to gazing into a rectangular square gadget would be an understatement. I often think I could walk and walk and be filled to brimming over with Beauty. My life doesn’t allow for this. The key is to go a-gathering…to drink in as much of it as I can, to harvest it if you will, so that I can then spill it over to those I live with and around. And even perhaps a drop or two of it to you, my blog friend.
It was on an artist’s blog that I found this quote by Wendell Berry. I cannot for the life of me remember whose it was. It was weeks ago. But the poem has stuck with me and has inspired me on many occasion as I recall it to mind. I’ll leave it with you today…in hopes that you might also choose the outdoors over technology on occasion. That you might drink in the Beauty even of just a breeze on the skin, or the smell of grass and earth. And that it might restore your worries to a sense that all will be well. Perhaps you could paint it, draw it, write about it then. When inspiration comes my way, I just have to translate it somehow in a drawn image…perhaps that’s my way of finally ingesting it into my heart and life.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
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