One of my intentions at Our Father’s World is to create posts that reflect good writing as well as sound thoughts within the general discussion topic of God, creation and our role in creation.  Donn Ring is a friend I haven’t met yet – a man with an eye for beauty in God’s world and a gift that enables him to convey that beauty in words.  Donn sent this email around yesterday, and I have asked him for permission to post it.  Enjoy!

I went for a walk in Middle Wood to welcome the month of July. This Middle Wood is a special place, but visited by few.

In the montane forests of the wilderness West there are the magnificent old growth giants of the lower valleys and the lofty sub-alpine groves that cluster among the broken mountain meadows that descend from spectacular alpine and tundra heights. Most everyone adores the bottomlands with their crystalline cascading rivers, or the pungent copses of weather twisted fir on the high slopes. However, at about the 4000′ (1219 meter) level in the Olympic Wilderness there are transition forests, a rat-tangle of fir and hemlock of smaller size, but still larger than sub-alpine trees — a forest beset by heavy snows and bruising storms that scatter splintered blow-down, and tangled in undergrowth shrubs of ash and mountain azalea and rangy huckleberry. Because of the unbroken density of this forest the heavy snows linger long in their shade, sometimes as late as July. In Spring, to walk through this forest is a nightmare — irregular crusty snow covered with debris and obscuring a thousand booby traps in the hidden blow-down beneath. But that nightmare holds another secret of such startling wonder that every year I must return to witness its fleeting splendor that lasts only 10 days.

The lingering snow of this forest acts as a reservoir, and is close enough in climate and altitude to the spectacular lily displays of the alpine meadows, that Avalanche Lily bulbs and seeds have sloughed downward, populating the highest part of this transitional forest. The snow burden melts in late June or early July, and immediately a lily garden of delicate flowers blooms in such profusion it overwhelms the visual senses. It only lasts a short time, so it is important to monitor weather and snow melt if one wants to see it. This year we hit it dead on.

If you stretch out the picture [above] (taken July 1) for about a mile you can perhaps imagine the overwhelming abundance of delicacy lacing its way through the jungle ruggedness of this storm battered forest — a million, no, two, maybe three, who can count? – these nodding heads of light, so easily crushed, carpeting this battle zone of life that few tourists regard as a destination.

I left the small gravel road that gave me access to the Middle Wood and tried strolling through this profuse wonder. Impossible! I was at a loss. There was no place to put my feet because of the sheer density of fragile beauty. I dared not shove on carelessly. So I found a place where I could straddle a fallen tree trunk and observe the lilies close up at their level with my macro-lens.

There are unplanned delights of tourist-beauty and bliss in chancing upon such a grand profusion. I am a fan of such serendipity. We chalk it up in fragile memory before we hustle on, hoping for some other chance postcard event in life’s limited itinerary. But there are deeper beauties to be perpetually discovered in engaged particularity, a contemplative surrender to the pregnant moment and place. At times it can only be experienced when we intentionally and perhaps ruthlessly halt our frenetic and alien ego journeys that drive us to get somewhere or accomplish some thing. We must drop to our knees or prostrate ourselves or sit in the presence, in stillness, and without preconditions open our being to see and touch and know intimately —  and in that knowing, being known. This is a vulnerable place of close encounter, face to face, essence to essence, being to being, a transformational embrace. It can be frightening for the modern programmed ego to open…and open without the hovering tyranny of prescribed schedules or destinations or benchmarks of material achievement. But once we have begun to receive and understand at this nexus of quiet transparency, however embryonic that mutual knowing, the Whole – yes — the WHOLE begins to grow greater and more integrated in our inner awareness. This is more than a passing event, however pretty. It is fraught with multiple connections and interdependencies and revelations. Thus, we are transformed from a tourist mode of being, careening through life in a perverse maze of imputed and hollow expectations, stumbling upon the occasional unattached postcard moment for our mental scrapbook. We breech the restraining and separating walls and are translated into a profound reality that we are accepted participants in a community and communion of Life that inspires sacramental care and celebration.

Even as a novice, there are grace filled moments when I can find no place to move my feet. Yet…

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1. Our Father’s World » Introducing the J.O.L Jewels — October 28, 2009 @ 8:10 am

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