Fragments From Floyd

I am thankful each day simply to be out standing in my field.

I feel a sense there of gratitude for the serenity and seclusion that this forested bowl of rock provides. I can and do indulge in all manner of odd behavior--sitting at the edge of it for an hour watching ice form in the creek, lying on my back in the fresh-mown pasture watching chimney swifts wheel and tumble at dusk--without having to explain myself to a curious neighbor.

On a frosty morning this week, I stood pointing my camera at the "empty" hillside. Self-consciously, I dropped it to my side and pretended to be about some mysterious manly work when an anonymous truck drove down the road. "What could that man possibly be taking a picture of?"

Order. Order in chaos. Order in chaos, and this, glazed with frost--another layer of crystalline order all its own.

In the seemingly-random jumble of frost-covered tree branches there is pattern and purpose. Phyllotaxy is the name for the very mathematical way that leaves are distributed on twigs. Twigs follow another set of orders so that a maple tree has a different and predictable pattern of twig-on-branch than this magnolia from the edge of our pasture. Trunks branch and divide, not at random, but in response to ancient messages going back through countless repetition of seed, shoot, trunk, branch, twig and leaf.

Like the dew reveals the invisible pattern in a spider's summer web, frost on a rare winter day makes visible the faint but certain forest math of twig and branch. Because of the way we're made, there is a close kinship between order and beauty, between beauty and praise. So I am thankful for dew and frost, for poetry and for prayer. I am thankful for that which reveals pattern and purpose in this world shot through by chaos and indifference.