The Earth Speaks To Us
I heard the first sound of Autumn yesterday. I was walking around the pollinator garden, enjoying the activity of all the little insects and trying to sneak up on the goldfinches, when I heard a familiar sound that I couldn’t identify right away, but that immediately evoked Autumn for me. It was the dead, dry sunflower leaves rubbing against each other, making an empty, rattling sound.
I felt like the earth had just spoken to me. I have loved the sunflowers so much, but they were telling me it’s almost time to go. It wasn’t necessarily sadness or anything, just like a reminder that they have completed what they were created to do and to drink in the last week or so of beauty.
Two birds also spoke to me this week. Sunday morning, I heard the most raucous bird call, then the distinct drilling sound of a woodpecker. It took me a while to find it, nearly obscured on top of the light pole – a red-headed woodpecker, beautiful and big. Then a sharp-shinned hawk dove right down in front of Ellen and me, flying from the field next to my house up to the branches of a dead tree across the street. Its flight was glorious with those outstretched wings gliding down low to us and then swooping quickly up. Its camouflage is so perfect that it was almost impossible to see in the tree, even though there are no leaves. Both birds seemed to be making their presence known, and then withdrawing, as if they were saying, “I’m here, I want you to see me, but you have to look.”
The stars are also speaking to us. The gorgeous images from the Webb Telescope have been astonishing. Scott Acton, a physicist who worked for 24 years on this project, relates the emotional moment when he first saw the images. He described it to The Christian Chronicle:
“At the time he remembered a scripture about the stars singing, and when he imagined all those galaxies, ‘I pictured them singing,’ the scientist recalled. ‘Not in any kind of language that people could understand, but certainly the emotion we can understand. I would call that emotion, joy,’ Acton said. ‘It’s almost like the galaxies or the universe was happy that after all this time we could actually see them.”
The galaxy wants us to see it! What a touching thought. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies show his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) The world all around us is enchanted and speaking to us. “The mountains and hills will burst into song, and trees of the field will clap their hands!” (Isaiah 55:12)
God wants us to see all the gifts around us. The gifts are calling to us, if we will look.
https://christianchronicle.org/for-this-abilene-christian-university-alum-the-stars-are-singing/
