Curious

 

Curious

“Curiouser and curiouser!”  Those words were spoken by Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  They are words of sound advice for the person on a walk or someone looking for God.  I’m not sure if they were overly helpful to Alice. 

There are at least two ways to take a walk.  I have a neighbor who I see quite often on my morning walk.  I assume that he walks only for the exercise.  He wears headphones – the cord disappearing down the front of his jacket, so he never hears the morning birdsong.  His pace is fast; I have seen him up ahead of me many times, only to see him get smaller and smaller as he has no trouble increasing the distance between us.  At the times that he passes me going the other way I notice that his head is tilted down as he seems fixated on the road directly in front of him.  I used to wish him, “Good morning.”  He didn’t answer.  This bothered me a bit until one morning I waved at him in addition to the greeting.  The motion caught his attention and he did glance my way and raise his hand in a quick return wave.

While there are days when the wind, if it is gusty and cold, may force me to turn my gaze downward to keep my cheeks from numbing, for the most part I am looking outward.  I learned to walk this way while hunting.  The hunter who walks looking down must be satisfied to see just the flashing white tails of deer as they bound off ahead.  It is the hunter who slows down a bit and glances constantly ahead who just may perhaps see the deer before he makes good his escape. 

This morning was a case in point.  To be truthful, I heard the deer before I saw them.  But all I had to do was turn my head into the right direction when I heard the shell ice break.  The woods that lines the northside of the road is low on this end, so in the spring when the snowmelt forms big puddles during the day and refreezes most every night it forms a lot of thin shell ice.  That was the sound that I heard this morning – a deer stepping on that shell ice.  I figured the deer had seen me out on the road about the same time that it took that step, because it certainly did not take another.  I scanned the woods until I noticed the top of its back about 75 yards into the trees.  Most of what is in a wood is vertical, so when you see a horizontal line, it’s worth checking out.  The deer flicked its ear.  While deer are much more patient than squirrels who always seem to wave their bushy tails around even when they are trying to hide, a deer can’t seem to stand still for longer than a few minutes without flicking an ear, unless they are both cupped in your direction and the deer is on high alert.  This one was just cautious.  He seemed content to wait me out, so I continued my walk.

To the left now, on the far side of the big pond I noticed two things.  First, there was open water against the far shore.  I could tell it was open by the bright blue reflection on this cloudless sunny morning.  Tight against the far shore I saw a bright white object.  I was trying to identify whether they were swans or pelicans when a group of six more birds came dropping out of the sky, calling out loudly in that high nasally tone of swans.  While I watched them settle into that bit of open water, two more came just about twenty yards overhead, the underside of their wings catching the morning sun.  I wished I had seen them farther out so I had time to get my phone out and take a picture of them, but the image is etched in my memory. 

In a snowdrift a bit farther along I noticed a single aspen leaf.  The leaf looked as if someone had pushed it several inches into the hard icy snow without somehow shattering the fragile leaf.  What really happened was the dark leaf absorbed the sunlight when it was direct, and this warmed the leaf enough that it had actually melted its way into the snowdrift.

Curiosity is not listed as a gift of the Holy Spirit, but Understanding and Wisdom are.  And one who is not at first spiritually curious risks going through life with their gaze downward without taking notice of God who is continuously revealing Himself to us.  Look up and wonder.

His Peace <><

Deacon Dan