Autumn Ride...

I've begun to have a sense of place. I've been here a year - plus. The trees that I saw today naked, are trees that I first saw naked. I have seen them bud, and green and pass again.

Most of the enclosed are shots from along The Road today from a not-so-long ride up to Craggy Gardens. It would have been longer, but there was a huge fog bank and then rain. There would have been more pictures, but the rain prevented me from taking the scooter on the longer ride I wanted to take. C'est la guerre.

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All of these are clickable for desktops.

It dawned on me as I was riding around how like fire these leaves are. And from there it was a short leap to "Our God is a consuming fire". Kabbala teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, in order to make the Universe, had to pull back a little bit in order to make room for the universe because He, Himself, was filling all the space. They teach only a transcendent God.



But the Orthodox Faith teaches that God is "everywhere present and filling all things." And not only that, but in these latter days He became one of us in His love for us. God is, despite what Kabbala teaches, totally present, totally within reach. (I speak of real Kabbala, not the newage (rhymes with sewage) that Madonna Esther, et al, are handed for their cash in Hollywood.)



And then I saw the fire on the leaves in a different light. That God, everywhere present and filling all things is, for all of Creation that is not fallen, the Life of all things.



Do not confuse what I'm saying with pantheism - or even Matthew Fox's "panentheism" (sic). But the Universe, the Creation, is the first Bible. St Dionysius offers that, For anyone who reflects, the appearances of beauty become the themes of an invisible harmony. Perfumes as they strike our sense represent spiritual illumination. MAterial lights point to that immaterial light of which they are the images.



Only Man tries to live life without God. Only man tries to Go It Alone. The fire in the leaves... forgive me if I sound pantheistic, I do not mean to... That is God, calling us.



The Chill of the Fog, equally is God calling us. The silence is God calling us.



The winds, which here began to blow the fog back and forth in tatters, the wind, too, is God calling us. Not that we might confuse the wind with God, but that we might better know Him. "... for love of us He hides Himself mysteriously in the spiritual essences of created beings, as in so many individual letters of the alphabet, present totally in each one in all His fullness..."



So says St Maximus the Confessor, and St Gregory Nazianzen replies with "Everything that exists prays to Thee. And to Thee every creature that can read Thy universe sends up a hymn of silence. In Thee alone all things dwell with a single impulse all things find their goal in Thee...



Thou art the purpose of every creature."

As on earlier rides, the higher up I went the more the season changed. But now instead of regressing to winter from a lowland spring. We progressed to winter. The trees in the fog have no leaves. It is nearly November in the lowlands. But December whispers its morning prayers on the peaks.