Whigmaleerie Stump - Greenough Park, Missoula, Montana

Today’s splendid found word, courtesy of C.S Lewis: whigmaleerie: 

2. A whim, fanciful notion, a crotchet, fad, vagary (Source: Dictionary of the Scots Language)

“...I’m talking of science, not of Butler and Bergson and Shaw and all those whigmaleeries.”

-p. 49, The Dark Tower story fragment by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Trees Awake - Greenough Park, Missoula, Montana

“She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! --she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.”

― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

Sunkissed - Missoula, Montana

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.” - C.S. Lewis, from Is Theology Poetry? (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1962),164-165.

Read the larger context of this quote (click the hyperlink) from a paper given to The Oxford Socratic Club , in which "Lewis sets out to answer the question, Is the imagination of followers of Jesus so aroused and satisfied by the poetry of the Gospel message that they have mistaken intellectual assent for mere aesthetic enjoyment?"

Greening Patches - Missoula, Montana

"Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience." - C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm

Beauties of Nature, East Missoula, Montana

“Bless the body. Mine has led me into many scrapes, but I’ve led it into far more. If the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble. And but for our body one whole realm of God’s glory - all that we receive through the senses - would go unpraised.…
I fancy the ‘beauties of nature’ are a secret God has shared with us alone. That may be one of the reasons why we were made - and why the resurrection of the body is an important doctrine.”
C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly On Prayer

Blooms of this river bottom wild potato vine definitely fall in the “beauties of nature“ category. Let the beauties treasure hunt continue amidst our everyday.