Among the trees

 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

‘Tis a gift to see. Walking west, November nearly gone, daylight fading, a valance of luminous orange clouds frame the horizon, shouting one last “alleluia” for the gift of light.

Extraordinary. Except it isn’t. Heaven’s display is common for any with a mind to stop and look, even here in this suburban woods as radiance pales to pink, filtered among trees, the fruit of their boughs, brown and dry, rustling at my feet as I stop and listen to the silence, grateful for eyes to see and a heart that knows.

Reach for the phone to picture it? No. Let it go. Just be here. Only the heart has a lens large enough to capture this day’s final grace with gratitude for the gift of seeing more than autumn’s end.

For both gift and Giver offer themselves in this moment.

The mystery of life is here—first, that anything at all should exist and second, that I should not only exist but be allowed, privileged to see, to feel, to know my little life caught up in a mystery as grand as the universe itself. Why? How? And what are these tears that sing a song of praise for which I have no words?

Perhaps it because here, standing still here among the trees, I know: There is Love within all this wonder and in the wonder of every love I have ever known.

And this Love wants me. Yes, wants me. And wants me to know what I know here, among the trees.

David L. Miller