GOD’SCORNER

by Gertrude M. Puelicher

THIS IS THE SEASON when an invisible Presence covers the land with a healing grace. The forest floor is an Oriental carpet of delicate colors: yellow violets as well as purple, creamy white trilliums with long green leaves, frail hepaticas with the faintest lavender tints, and spring beauties stretching far back into the forest as far as the eye can reach, a melody of dainty shades of pale pink! Along the Giant Pine Road in a startling brilliance of yellow blooms and lush green leaves carelessly rooted in tiny roadside rivulets, the marsh marigolds demand attention.

Only he who has no at-oneness with what goes on around him could miss the love pouring forth from the land. We are inclined to think of love as an emotion that exists only between humans, or between humans and an extension such as animals or a hobby or an interest. Not so! The land sends forth more love than we are capable of absorbing. Drop a seed into the ground and like a fetus in a mother’s womb, it comes forth as a splendid new life, loving and beloved. Take an amaryllis bulb, brownish and dry, give it some care and within weeks it becomes a giant plant with magnificent blooms.

The land takes pride in its capabilities and love for us as it gives forth of its very best. It needs praise for what it accomplishes. It needs appreciation just as we do. It craves conversation with us. It longs to be understood. Have you ever watched the reaction of your garden as you admired its beauty and told it so? Plants and flowers have a subtle way of letting you know that they are listening and understanding. A tiny tremor runs through them. We, in our superiority as humans, may think a bit of a breeze has come up, but what nonsense. It is our garden of growing things talking to us.

One can visualize the scoffing eyebrows, the cynical expressions of the amused. How stupid, they are saying. How utterly boring! What nonsense in a practical world! Yet back in 1807, there was published a sonnet by the wellknown English poet, Wordsworth. He said, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Without question we have given our hearts away when we no longer appreciate the invisible Presence that covers the land as well as us with its healing grace. The Soul and Spirit of the land are as real as your own Soul and Spirit. The creative Principle is a spiritual activity, one we cannot afford to ignore. It involves all life, human, animal, vegetable, mineral.

In Psalms we read, “I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” As we accept and rejoice in our oneness with God and in our oneness with the land, with all growing things, with all life, so shall we see the goodness of the Lord and be at peace. n