There are days when I breathe deepest within the cradle of sensory input…When I need to push against something that already is in order to make space for what I am feeling or thinking. Coffeeshops are often perfect for that…it is indifferent input, asking nothing of me, not requiring response and not interrupting…just a steady buffer of sound. Visual input is similar. For a long while, I knew I loved Matisse–the combinations of colour and patterns, the textures; Wild English gardens hold similar appeal–and so too scenes like the post-rainfall dispersion of rhododendron blooms, the ‘poem of earth.’

There are days when “reading the poem of earth” is more than enough to sustain me…there is so much beauty…and sometimes that can be accentuated in the grey-light of fog or rain–both of which have been present in super-abundance these last weeks.

I love that sometimes the sensory nourishment is intentional (a trip to a coffeeshop) and sometimes it is complete surprise–something noticed, glanced at, chanced upon… And how all of it, the input itself and the space it creates within me to feel, to think, to create expression of the fullness of it all, teaches me about the wonder of God… It is all of a piece… a beautiful stained-glass verse of being alive.