walking

The Creative Spirit: An Open, Aware Heart

Steve · June 11, 2016 · 9 Comments

“Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film.” – Ansel Adams

What the great nature photographer Ansel Adams knew and showed us in his haunting, elegant black and white photographs is that there is so much to be seen and experienced in the world if we only slow down and pay attention — not only to the image in front of us but to the light and shadows that surround, encompass and overlay what we see. Adams would hike miles, laden with his heavy equipment and supplies, to get to the perfect place at the perfect time of day. Then it became his job, to paraphrase the renowned words of the poet Mary Oliver, to “stand still and learn to be astonished.”

There’s lesson in that for us somewhere, surely.

Today’s Word: Here

Steve · March 6, 2016 · 7 Comments

merci — Merci, at Marianist Retreat Center. SJG photo.

Well, I haven’t posted one of these for a while…Don’t be shocked! I think it’s the warming spring weather…

Yesterday I took my first real walk of this early spring, a leisurely three-mile stroll around Mallard Lake at Creve Coeur Park near my house. I had my earbuds in, listening to Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor (which quickened my pace right away with its triumphant beginning), but as I rounded the first corner of the loop nearing the footbridge, the music in my ears was overwhelmed by the music of thousands of frogs in a wetlands area. Let’s just say they were having a good time and were none too quiet about it. I stopped and considered how quickly life and its fecundity pick up when the weather starts to heat up. And I thought where I was standing. It was no place special with no particular beauty — just a bog of sorts — but certainly holy ground at that moment. Here.

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Today’s Word: Self-Image

Steve · December 28, 2014 · 2 Comments

mile — Mile High footbridge, Grandfather Mountain, NC. SJG photo.

It’s that time of year again. We gaze into the mirror and, with the prospect of a new year and a new opportunity for beginning again facing us, we start to think of all the ways we can improve ourselves. And I’m all for it. I’ve lost some weight the past six months and gotten into better eating habits and an exercise routine I enjoy. Taking care of ourselves — physically, mentally, spiritually, professionally — is important.

But even as I think about how much more weight I want to lose and what my exercise goals for the next year should look like, I am nudged deep inside by a voice that says, “there’s more.”

Okay, I think. More. Hmm. So I start making a self-improvement list. A class perhaps. Cook more, eat out less. See family more often. Start that journal again. Walk further. Maybe get back on the bike. The list can grow long, as we all know. But then I hear a voice once again, and this time it whispers, “Maybe less would be better.”

Self-care is critical if we want to spend many healthy years with the ones we love and if we want time to do the work to which we feel called. The danger, so to speak, is not letting ourselves slide down the slippery slope toward a self-image that is based entirely on, well, ourselves. For we are more than what we look like in the mirror and how far we walk or run. We are more than our educations and professional relationships. We are more than what we appear to be.

Mile High Footbridge, Grandfather Mountain, NC. SJG photo

We are at our best when we give ourselves to others in service. We are at our best when we are able to empty ourselves of the bounty and noise of life and focus on the still, small voice of the One who calls us to be more (and less) in different ways than the mirror or the scale could ever show us. For God sees us differently than we can ever see ourselves.

Today, even as I think of ways I can improve my health in the coming year, I recall the words of St. Francis of Assisi who said, “I am who I am in the eyes of God—nothing more and nothing less.”

Ask yourself in silence: As I make my New Year’s resolutions, where’s God?

Today’s Word: Green

Steve · October 12, 2014 · 4 Comments

This morning I almost decided NOT to go on the long Sunday morning walk around Creve Coeur Lake that has recently become my habit. It was gray, dreary and a bit cold after raining much of the night, although it wasn’t raining at the moment as I stared out of my bedroom window at the deck and the yard and the woods beyond. What the heck, I finally thought, the worst that could happen is that I’ll get a little wet. I got dressed and drove the quick few miles to the park.

My soundtrack for much of the walk was Rich Mullins’ wonderful and eclectic “A Liturgy, a Legacy and a Ragamuffin Band” album, which begins with the late-Mullins mumbling into the studio microphone: “Bear with me everybody, I’m barely ready to do this…” I felt sort of the same. But let’s move on, I thought.

The first part of the walk was as dull as the steel-gray lake surface reflecting the cloudy and overcast sky above. “Just keep your head down and walk,” I thought to myself, “it’s good exercise, but not so much about the view today.” I circled my way through the woods along the back stretch, walked the length that runs under the highway overpass and finally came to the long homestretch about three-quarters of the way around the approximately 4-mile loop.

About that time, Mullins’ “The Color Green” came in through my ear buds. It is perhaps my favorite song for walking through nature and includes these picture-painting lyrics:

Be praised for all Your tenderness by these works of Your hands,
Suns that rise and rains that fall to bless and bring to life Your land.
Look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that You have made
Blue for the sky and the color green that fills these fields with praise.

No blue sky today, I thought. But then I looked, perhaps for the first time that day, at the green. The green of the grass and the trees exploded into my vision and I was taken aback by the utter beauty and contrast of the wet green against the coldness of the rest of the landscape. I woke up, it seems. It’s not drab, I thought, it’s just God telling me to remember that beauty lies all around us, all the time, if we’ll only wake up and pay attention.

And then, as if on cue from the great director in the sky (and I kid you not nor do I exaggerate the perfect timing on this), there was a flash of brown and white in the corner of my right eye. I turned my head just in time to see a bald eagle gliding to rest on a tree branch not 50 feet in front of me, clutching in its talons two (two!) approximately two-pound fish, obviously and recently pilfered from the lake. My hand went to my chest. I could not move. Seriously, God?

“Seriously, Steve. This is what I do, day in and day out.”

Ask yourself in silence: When was the last time you were totally caught off guard by the wonder and power of God?

Note: As I was writing this, I searched online for the lyrics to the song to double check them, and while I was there ran across this video of Rich Mullins singing the song while walking through a drab, gray Irish landscape, with contrasting scenes in black and white and vibrant color. Great minds and all that. Enjoy the video by clicking on the highlighted text above.

Today’s Word: Beauty

Steve · September 14, 2014 · 4 Comments

Unknown (to me!) plant, North Carolina. SJG photo.

Last evening’s walk around Mallard Lake in Creve Coeur Park in suburban St. Louis was a walk through beauty. No less than a dozen deer crossed my path as I walked along, a few so close we could look each other in the eye. The slant of light from the setting sun caught the water on the lake, the tips of trees and the wings of a soaring red-tail hawk at just an angle so as to take my breath away. I had to stop for a second on my trek and whisper a silent “thank you,” knowing that was enough of a prayer for the moment. I can only imagine that beauty magnified a thousand times in a few months when full-on autumn hits us with the gentle ferocity of Jackson Pollock-like splatters of color and light. There’s so much to be seen on such a walk, so much beauty to take in if we place ourselves in the position to see it. I walk for exercise, but I walk in such settings for the beauty. I need them both to be healthy.

And even as I write this, I realize that this word — beauty — is so overused in our world and culture that we barely pay any attention to it at all. Or if we do, we may be speaking of some artificial kind of beauty. Indeed, if you google “beauty” the very first entry will be a link to products and merchandise that will MAKE you beautiful, a social ploy created God knows how long ago to make people, especially women, think they are just not good enough as they are. Shame on us for buying into that at the expense of the inner and outer beauty that already exists in us.

Beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder, but aren’t some things innately beautiful? Thoughtful people have been asking that question for millennia, of course. I’m no expert on aesthetics, but I do know that my concepts of beauty are formed (or should be) by my faith and belief in the creator of all that is beautiful — in something that transcends both me and the created world.

yoyoma — Yo-Yo Ma from "On Being" website.

This past week I listened to a podcast (something else I sometimes do on my walks) of an interview by Krista Tippett with renowned cellist and composer Yo-Yo Ma on her public radio show “On Being.” Near the end of the interview, Tippett asks Ma for his definition of beauty and, after a bit of creative and interesting rambling, he settles on this: “I can’t say the word beautiful without also equating it with the word transcendence…a moment of reception and cognition of the thing that is, in some ways, startling. There’s that moment where there is, essentially, a transfer of life…human cognition of that vastness, awe and wonder.” (To hear the whole glorious interview, click here: http://bit.ly/WAkzFB.)

For me, this comes close to the mark. This “transfer of life” that takes place in the presence of real beauty is perhaps why we gasp, as if we’re being re-born and sucking in air for the first time. It’s why so many of us find God in nature, in wind-blown places where the spirit wanders as it pleases and finally comes to rest on our lips and helps us pray, helps us whisper that “thank you.” For whether we find God in the natural beauty of a lush forest or a stark desert, whether in a museum or a concert hall, it’s the same God showing us beauty in the bounty and diversity of the earth and in the people who walk it.

Ask yourself in silence: Where do I most easily see beauty? What is my response to it? Do I often enough put myself in a place where I can experience it?