Know-Love-Obey God

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High Calling Blogs Book Club:
The Wisdom of Wilderness, by Gerald G. May
Chapter Five: “Of Time and the Seasons”

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No harm has come to me, yet I feel bruised. Tender in spots. Part of it is the steady ache of Homesickness that flares up now and then (like now). Part of it is that my mind and heart are thinking too much of what may happen that I don’t want, and what has happened that I maybe regret.

From my dinette window I saw last Monday’s sunrise beginning. In the other half of the sky I could still see stars, and I wondered at this. It so happened that out that window was the Big Dipper (about the only constellation I can identify). To the left: stars. To the right: sunrise, causing color layers to spread upward from the hill’s silhouette. Sunrise is not just yellows and oranges, but blues, too.

Watching the sun rise is not like watching water come to boil. Sunrise happens quickly. When I looked back to the left the stars were already dimmer than even a moment before. I began to panic. Soon I would not be able to see them at all. The sunrise could not continue without the stars going away. Each time I looked right, to the sunrise (which I did not want to miss), then left, back to the stars, the stars were harder to find. I would look in the wrong part of the sky and think they were gone, then a tiny shift of the eyes and I would see them again. Relief. Not gone yet.

But I wanted to see the sunrise, too. It made the trees and houses look black (I love May’s phrase, “radiantly black”). Everything is beautiful in silhouette black. The aspen tree with its two remaining leaves. The neighbors’ houses.

The silhouette time does not last. Neither do the stars. I hang in the magic in-between time when I could see both.

I did not want the stars to go away, yet I wanted the sun to rise.

It has always been a problem with me: failure to live in the present, to savor the now for what it is and nothing more. May calls it the “just-is-ness of life.”

And that’s the point: everything is just the way it is. Present moment or not, no matter what ideas and concepts we have, things are still just the way they are.

- Gerald G. May, The Wisdom of Wilderness, p. 74.

Being a visionary and having foresight of course is advantageous, but not when it takes me so far ahead that I neglect the present. I even have a tendency to mourn over friends who are still walking the earth. For crying out loud, enough is enough.

I was so worried about losing the stars and missing the sunrise that I forgot to enjoy them. I was in the future and missed the present. Next time I’ll remember: the stars are still there even when I don’t see them, and sunrise happens every morning.