Tag: Quiet spots

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Journal Joy Notes Who Am I

Grace Gardens — A beautiful spot

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You could call it the mother lode of daylilies, but I just cannot resist the sheer beauty of a hillside filled with a variety of hemerocallis in bloom.  That is what you see at Grace Gardens.  (Hemerocallis  is the formal scientific name for a daylily.)   I try to visit at least once each summer and I have already been there twice this year.  Each time I go I end up adding one or two more of these elegant flowers to my own collection.   Tom and Kathy Rood invent new daylily varieties too.   Kathy has one named after her now that has been featured in a magazine because it is very fragrant.  I knelt down to smell its pleasant fragrance on this trip.    I recommend visiting just to enjoy the beauty.    But be prepared to get snared by the charm of hemerocallis too.   Open house is this Saturday.

 

http://www.gracegardens.com/

Categories
Americana Journal Joy Notes

Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Conn.

A few weeks ago we visited Keely and Mark and while we were there we took time to relax in the gardens at Elizabeth Park in West Hartford, Conn.   I have written before that I like to look for quiet spots to relax.   Well, this is a beautiful one.   It’s main feature is the extensive rose garden which was not in bloom this early in the spring.  But it also features this exquisite annual garden which is very well tended.   In the spring it is planted to tulips.  It also has goldfish ponds and grassy areas.  I have not had time to blog about it until now so here is a gallery of some shots we took.

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Categories
Journal Meditations

The simplest and most compelling reason for seeking God

Here are two sections by E. Stanley Jones from a daily devotional book I highly recommend.  I have followed them with my own conclusion.

Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior (Isaiah 45:15 NRSV).

Here is the hidden God, like the hidden thought…we cannot know what he is like unless he communicates himself through a word.
If you say, “I can know God in my heart intuitively and immediately, without the mediation of a word,”  then the answer is: “But your ‘heart’ then becomes the medium of communication and knowing the heart as you do with its sin and crosscurrents and cross-conceptions you know it is a very unsafe medium for the revelation of God.”
God must reveal himself.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God (John 1:1).

Here is the hidden God and he expresses himself through the Word…
Jesus is called the Word because the word is the expression of the hidden thought.  Unless I put my thought into words you cannot understand it.  Here is God; we sense his presence, but he is Spirit, hence hidden.  We want to know what he is like—not in omnipotence, nor in omniscience, nor in omnipresence; a revelation of these would do little or no good, but we would know his character, for what he is like in character, we, his children, must be.   So the Hidden Thought—God—becomes the Revealed Word—Christ.   (365 Days with E. Stanley Jones, Mary Ruth Howes, editor, Dimensions for Living Nashville, 2000, pp. 74,75)

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known (John 1:18 NIV).

I was impressed as I read these that spending time in God’s Word, accompanied by a prayer that the Holy Spirit would teach us, is an essential part of seeking God.   Christians do not meditate with empty minds, but with thoughts shaped by God’s Word.   The still-small inner voice of the Holy Spirit most often uses the written revelation, the record of Jesus’ words and presence, to guide us and speak to us.    

What an incentive to our discipline to seek God.  The situation turns out to be so simple—too simple.  Unless we spend time with God in God’s Word and in prayer, we will never really know God.   We would prefer a fast-food shortcut, a spoon-fed alternative, an easier way but there are none. But the truly good news is that God desires that we discover him!  And he has provided a means for us to begin. 

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near (Isa 55:6 NIV).

 

Categories
Americana Journal

Hell’s Canyon – the scariest drive

Let’s just say that we figured out why they call it Hell’s Canyon.    Getting down in and back up the other side, even one branch of it took hours and involved the scariest driving in all of our Northwest adventures.     The switchbacks came one after another, stacked one above the other in tiers.   I downshifted the Nissan into second and at one point into first.   About then a double –yes double– grain tractor-trailer came roaring up the switchbacks – what would happen if you met him on some of the sharpest, blindest corners, I don’t even want to speculate.  I can’t imagine why doubles are allowed on this road!!   Did I mention that there were few guardrails or stone barriers?  The area is very arid yet the steep mountainsides are range land and we actually saw cattle on them.    I don’t know how the beef cows have any energy left to grow after all it would take to move around the canyon sides.   There were fences too, but the ranchers must have had climbing gear to build them.  We really didn’t get all the way down to the Snake River which forms the very bottom of the canyon; we crossed a tributary river called Grande Ronde.  

Before we began the drive down, we drove to one of the overlooks to view the scenery.   The area is very remote and getting to the overlook involved a  40 mile country drive one way.   It was our first experience at seeing the slippery metal cattle crossing grates across the main roads, an experience we would repeat many times.   Every mountain stream and river looked like a super-sized version of a Pennsylvania trout stream—pure clear water, often with that greenish cast of a spring run-off.  The canyon itself is vast in its scope and depth.    It is definitely grand enough to invite comparisons with the Grand Canyon itself.   There are few canyons in that league.  This one was much more complex in structure if that is possible; involving a large number of tributary canyons.  It did not have such precipitous sides as our experience of the South side of the Grand Canyon.   The rock here is much more eroded and has some sparse evergreen covering.     We spent some quiet time at the overlook while JoAnne sketched and I observed the flowers, scanned the canyon, and watched for birds with my binoculars.

canyon view
first stitched panaoramic
JoAnne holding her hat in the breeze
canyon beauty
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setting sun
switch back canyon roads
two levels of road on the opposite wall

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Categories
Americana Journal

Redwoods

We have always wanted to see the redwoods of California.    We learned that there are two kinds of oversized trees in CA, redwoods in northern CA, the tallest trees in the world and sequoias in southern CA, which are much bigger around than redwoods, but not quite as tall.   We would be seeing redwoods, not sequoias.     We also learned that formerly hundreds of thousands of acres of northern CA were forested with redwoods, but lumbering demand over the years has reduced the acreage greatly to maybe a tenth of that.   So now there is a complex of state and national parks in northern CA to protect some of the biggest and oldest groves   [ http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=24723]. 

We hiked in Jedidiah Smith Redwood State Park and drove through several others.  I remember, one time recently we asked Keely what he thought was different about the west.   She replied, “Everything is bigger.”   Now that we are traveling here, we agree heartily, and the redwoods are a perfect illustration.   In the East, we admire a mature towering grove of hemlock or Adirondack pine.   But those would be like children standing beside these towering redwoods.  Both the height and width are in another league to us Easterners.   I remember seeing three people standing fingertip to fingertip in front of one trunk and the tree was wider that all three together.   

dwarfs amid the redwoods
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in the redwoods
a dwarf appears
trees grown together
thankfully someone has cut out that roadblock
now there's room for a bear or two
Now there's a stump
looking up
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We were especially impressed with the quiet in the redwood forest.   We are so used to noise that quiet impresses us greatly.    Another interesting feature is the fern-covered forest floor.   There is very little undergrowth, bit am abundance of ferns.  We also noticed that neighboring redwoods seem to grow together and merge into one tree more than most trees do.  So one would occasionally observe complex structures where multiple trunks had grown together or crossed each other.   

It was in the redwoods that JoAnne first introduced what was to become the theme song for our trip, it just seemed so appropriate.   “How great is our God, sing with me how great is our God… and all will see, how great, how great is our God.”