Sensory
Sacredness
“The
further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is
everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin
of all that is ordinary...”
Mark
Nepo (The Book of Awakening)
There
are two morning sounds that I find most comforting: birdsong and
train horns. I live a few blocks from one of the major train lines
upon which Birmingham was founded a little more than a century ago.
All night long, all day long, I hear trains blow their horns, one
long, two short, one long, two short. Background noise is the steady
rhythm of iron wheels of trains sometimes a hundred cars long
rumbling down the tracks. For reasons I can't explain, those sounds
are precious to me—they punctuate the day at regular intervals and
seem to say, “We're on time...all's right with the world.”
All
the nature sounds—birds, cicadas, crickets, tree frogs—are
constant this time of year if you're listening for them. At night, I
sometimes hear a parliament of owls calling to one another right here
in urban Birmingham. And the hum and thrum of insects rises and falls
like a base line in a symphony. We often see and hear the rhythm of
the divine in nature, but miss it altogether in our ordinary human environment. As Nepo writes, “Light is in both the broken bottle
and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin, and water
dripping from the drainage pipe...”
God
is wherever we are, and can be found in the mundane as easily as in
the holy shrine. We have been provided five extraordinary senses with
which to experience all that is sacred. Let us have eyes to see, and
ears to hear.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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