Across the road south of the house is a woods wrapped over a hill. Every morning I pull back the curtain and look out my window into that woods.
Some mornings in winter it looks like an army of brown pencils standing sentinel. For a few mornings in spring it is carpeted with Trillium or purple wildflowers. Some mornings it is snowy as Narnia. Through the summertime from mid May to late August it is dark and cool and green. In early October it blushes with color and then late in the month it turns bright yellow and red and gold and orange and flames with glorious hues that draw me like a powerful magnet in my soul. In November it is muted gold and brown and finally gray pencils again.
This morning a bright shaft of sunlight beams at an angle down to the forest floor and reminds me of the power of contemplating the glories of God in the things he created.
I remind myself never to speed past blue water and sparkling sunlight. Never ignore the antics of songbirds, or the banter of children, or the music or water over rocks or the heart-pounding rumble of thunder and the arresting flash of lightning or the charming little lights hovering over the meadow when fireflies are courting on a summer evening. Never allow your soul to be deadened to wonder and the beauty around you but let it ever draw your very soul upward to God.
“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.
P.S. The Japanese have a word for sunlight filtered by trees. https://www.awatrees.com/2017/02/16/komorebi-sunshine-through-trees