Perhaps we need to put the Bible on a shelf for several decades until we learn how to read the Scripture of the natural world!

"I sometimes think that we worry too much about Jesus Christ. We have, to my mind, been overly concerned with salvation and the savior personality. This has focused our attention to such an extent that we have abandoned the most urgent projects of our times. We have a great literature on the Scriptures, we have a great literature on Jesus, but we have no literature on the natural world and the Christ-universe equation. The Christ-earth equation has been given little consideration. The focus on a redemptive personality has its place, but it is not the whole story. It is not even the whole of the Christ story. I suggest we might give up the Bible for awhile, put it on the shelf for perhaps twenty years. Then we might have a more adequate approach to it. We need to experience the divine revelation presented to us in the natural world. When a ship is sinking, no matter what the difficulties within the boat, . . . when something happens to the boat it must be taken care of first. Excessive concern with the historical Christ is presently just not that helpful."

Thomas Berry,
Catholic theologian

Photos: (Top) Ice on The Loch at sunset; (Middle) Last season's Cow Parsnip stalks; (Bottom) Andrews Peak; All three photos were taken in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, January 31, 2015

The human is the mind and heart of the universe.

 

"The human is that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself and its numinous origin in its own unique mode of conscious self-awareness.  All living beings do this in their own way, but in the human, this becomes a dominant mode of functioning.  It is not that we think on the universe; the universe, rather, thinks ITSELF, in us and through us . . . The human is the mind and heart of the universe."

Thomas Berry

Yesterday's drive down to Boulder and hike in the foothills left me speechless with awe.  I cannot remember a Fall in Colorado when the leaves have remained on the trees for so long.  Usually they are all brown and blown off  by Halloween, but this year, we still have Willows, Poplars, Maples and Chinese Elm trees turning gold during the second week of November!  I imagine this will all change today as a major Arctic front moves in, along with snow and high winds.  I took these photos  yesterday, in 70 degree weather.  Today, as I look out my window, it is spitting snow, and the temperature is supposed to drop into single digits within the next few days!

Photos: (Top) Poplars and foothills, near Boulder, CO; (Middle) Mt. Meeker and Long's Peak, with willows in the foreground, near Longmont, CO; (Bottom) Smoke from a prescribed forest fire rises from the foothills near Lyons, CO.  All three photos were taken on November 9, 2014.  "Numinous" means "indicating or suggesting the presence of divinity."