What a wondrous time is spring : when all the earth is budding : the birds begin to sing : the flowers start their blooming… (from the song “Pass It On”)

Today is the best kind of central-Texas day: brilliant sky and sun, with wind to bring cool air from the shade. I treasure this place, these nearly twenty years of spring weekend, in all its weather–but I prefer this kind.

I’ve walked a new trail. I think they made it last year, but it’s still bare and raw in places. I can see from where I sit, mid-trail, back to the familiar places: classrooms, guest rooms, paths. I didn’t expect it to feel isolated, but now that I’m here, it does. 

I suppose the benches are to go with the clump of trees–the only clump in the once-field the trail winds through–and the bird feeders are to go with the benches.
The birds think these feeders are Great Stuff. My ears fill with the thrum of wings as they shift from branch to feeder-perch, to another perch, to another feeder or branch. At least a half-dozen different species are vocalizing…carrying on with and at each other. I, in my orange tshirt and jeans, am beneath notice. One just swooped a foot from my shin, in a hurry to someplace interesting. No one cares about my presence enough to be worried.
Oh, and there are uninterested bees as well.

  

  

When I come out here, I tend to do a lot of walking and thinking…and listening, since while I’m considering I’m also trying to find God’s intentions. It has become my resetting time and place. And I’ve found God’s intent while I was here just often enough that I’ve built an expectation–
here is where revelation happens. 

Not that I don’t find it elsewhere: I do and have. But that it certainly will happen here. 

Ah yes, me with the certainty. 

  

---

I wrote this post once already. I walked a different trail.  I wrote sentences full of sensory detail, and anecdote; I saw it was good and I pressed “post”…

…and in the absence of any digital connectivity, it evaporated into an error message. (Yes, I tried that. It didn’t work. Neither did the other thing. It’s quite gone.) I contemplated trying to recreate it–I was thinking on a former coworker’s calling–but even though it pleased me so I don’t think it was the right thing. 

  

I want to write about calling. I want to know (know) my calling. I want to walk the labyrinth here and again hear God’s voice, with new words which are maybe less mysterious. 

And I realize I’m pushing. Shoving a rope up a hill, asking the natural order for something beyond nature: certainty. I am not a magician, nor the follower of a magician, and my God is not a made-thing that grants wishes like a genie. 

 

If I could retrain my expectancy to come here yearning to cherish the wind across my arm, the noisy bustle of dozens of birds, even the roar of tires on the main road, that could be my next big revelation to learn. 
Sometimes nothing is an allegory, but is only wing, seed, claw, and chirp. By declaring it good, God also declared it enough.