The Walking Dead 1

I remember the first time that nature really came alive for me. I mean, in such a way that I would maintain this consciousness for the rest of my life. There had been fleeting glimpses when I was a child. I am thinking especially of the time I first really discovered the flowering red hawthorn that grew by the side of the driveway. It was a cool, luminous morning of early May, and when I stepped outside before breakfast, or perhaps on the way to school, there it was in shimmering splendour, capturing the beauty and strength of the gathering sun. That image will stay with me forever. This really began to happen for me again when I'd just turned sixteen. I was walking in Stanley Park with a new friend, a boy of nineteen or so. We were wandering the forest trails and there was something so intense about the gathering new life around us. It was, I think mid or late March, and there was fresh green and new flowers already beginning everywhere, and the light of the sun made it all almost painfully beautiful to our poor human eyes. We later visited the aviary of the zoo, which hasn't existed in many years now. There was an exotic pheasant, called a Himalayan monal. Look it up on Google, because they are breathtakingly gorgeous! My friend, like me in that era, was a bit of a fundamentalist and on seeing this bird, was so gobsmacked by its splendour that he almost shouted out, "And to think they say that evolved!" We all rejected Darwin in those days, now I have no problem at all with Evolution, anyway, though please don't ask me how it really happened, Gentle Reader, because I wasn't there. Less than two years later, my friend died from cancer. I really wonder how many people really see the beauty of nature around them. When I am walking the trails in the forest a lot of people are either in pairs or small groups or they are totally obsessed with their dear little tech toys. I don't think they see very much. Likewise the joggers and cyclists. They are moving too fast. I live in a Zombie Nation. I often feel like I am the few Living among the Walking Dead. From time to time I am pleasantly surprised when I hear someone remark on the beauty around them, but this beauty is always surrounding us. It is always within us too, and takes the Holy Spirit to waken in us this vision, and to open our tired, weak and wounded eyes. This isn't to say that you can't be an atheist and still appreciate beauty. You can, but you are going to have to suspend all your scientific materialism and biological and evolutionary theories about the biochemical compositions and processes and the effects and angles of light, because such presumptions and assumptions only distract your minds make you less receptive to the beauty around you. We really have to learn to be in the present moment, to quiet our minds if we are going to do this, and also to humble ourselves and become like little children, because it is really the child-heart that is also going to receive and appreciate the blessing.