By Rachel Stone Flourish, Spring 2012 Four years ago this month, on a brilliant Sunday afternoon, my husband drove our fourth-hand Volvo through the high road winding through the farmlands of Fife, in Scotland, while I alternately let out long, low, and loud noises and talked about the animals we passed. New lambs! I shrieked. [...]
Beauty
“five crows in a lawn this morning, / I can be like them, dark and picking at the earth, / ever after sustenance…”
Entering the “sacred grammar” of creation.
When you you most need to bring the outdoors in? During winter! Here’s how.
John James Audubon questions whether we’re too blind to see the the beauty around us.
“Who could have the courage to see it?”
Some say that we can’t see God’s revelation in creation. Maybe seeing isn’t the first step.
Some walks open more than just the eyes.
John Calvin is overwhelmed.
Artist Jennifer Lynn Haas takes the themes of resurrection, beauty, forgiveness, and nurturing from creation and paints them across her canvas.
Two poems from poet Debra Rienstra on the tenderness and determination of spring. “…this keeper/ of unlikely things, tender of promises/ more than fulfilled.”
“In observing some of the devastation caused by our own hands, we might hear Him say that we have work to do to restore His Creation.”
No matter how humble our immediate environment is, we must learn and love that place before we can learn and love the whole creation.
In the prairie–worthless by conventional economic measures–writer Cindy Crosby find the invaluable.

