“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.
So, as regards aging, do far-sighted people fret less because they never suddenly notice via the rear-view mirror that their neck is veering into wrinkle-land? Are they typically less stressed than near-sighted folk because their view always defaults to the big picture and so they don’t get hung up on mind-numbing minutiae? I’m not lamenting my natural state of near-sightedness because it's all I know and there is always delight in the details! I just wonder about obscure, weird things sometimes. Especially things outside my experience realm.
Any aging far-ies out there, please feel free to grace the comment field with enlightenment.
Seeing these vines twining themselves amongst old machinery parked on our friends’ ranch put me in mind of our human fragility. We see ourselves as strong and capable, but then, suddenly, it seems, we hear complaints come out of our mouths - things our parents said when they seemed sooo old, for which we gave them pitying glances and said, “Here, let me do that for you.”
In truth, the hands of time pause for no one….so it’s good to realign our focus onto the things that really matter.
(For more relevantly provoking thoughts, click here for the 6/30/2012 River of Life podcast.)
