I have just finished sitting on my back porch while the wind blew as the thunder clouds passed my home.  I love being in the wind, in nature.  The wind speaks volumes and brings a calm with it that not many other experiences do.  When I am standing out in the wind, I feel a strange peace with my world, revitalized and hopeful.  I watched the clouds role by and wondered if this is what the voice of God might sound like; a voice like Elijah heard on the mountain.  

In that wind all my ideas regarding life and faith swirl but have no bearing on where I stand at the moment; its just me bracing and feeling the air wrap around me as I stand there.  I have been reading a book called “Black Elk Speaks” and the thing that stands out to me in that book is the connectivity of a spiritual nature that he experienced in the physical elements of his world.  I am jealous of that sometimes.  We have separated it all out scientifically and can explain (so we think) what’s happening and from whence these elements come.  I feel as though in our scientific understandings, we have lost the grace that is present there for us: God’s breath and his presence.  I am not claiming an anti-scientific stance in these words, just a sense of disconnect.  I suppose that is why I love the mountains like I do.  

Recently I was sitting at the foot of the Cuddy Mountains with only one other friend there.  It was peaceful.  There were no answers but a distinct and clear connectivity and peace with the world in which I live.  I really didn’t want to leave that mountain and I have thought about it so very many moments in the time since I was there.  That peace, that belonging, that restfulness is something that is absent in much of my hurried life.    I long to be up on a mountain somewhere, starting a camp fire, with nothing to do but what I am presently doing.  Unfortunately, that is not the norm of my life but the rare exception.  

Maybe I am born later than my heart and soul, a simpler time might have brought more peace and rest than the life I live.  However, I am not living in such a time, so I think I need to find some ways of making the life I do have reflect that ideal.