By the Intermittent Creek

This is man's mission! The earth cannot feel all this. We must. Living away from the earth and trees, we fail them. We are absent from the wedding feast. 
--Thomas Merton, journal entry, February 17, 1966.


Early autumn in West Tennessee. Lots of leaves are still green, but fewer every day. The dry creek behind my house is flowing after a few welcome hours of rainfall.

I sat by the creek for a while this morning, listening to wind in the trees, and the softly flowing water. Looking at colors that will be noticeably different next week, for those who look closely. Watching the light play on the ripples in the stream.

Merton is right: we have a function on earth that goes beyond doing the ordinary work of the world. Paying close, loving, attention to what's around us pays us back with  immediate delight of the experience itself, and in later reflection, knowing we have not failed the earth and the trees.

I watched part of what the trees were doing today. They bended with the wind, they dropped leaves, some still green, some more yellow and brown, some in little heaps on the water. Some of the leaves are the color of the stones in the stream bed, in the way that the colors of the earth echo each other in so many forms.

If my mission is to feel the earth coming in through my senses, I accept.