Sunday Morning

~ Live & Learn

The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god. Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention has unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory – the pattern of hailstones by my feet upon dark earth; a certain cast of light across a hillside through a break in the clouds; the face of a long-eared owl peering out at me from a hawthorn bush – things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time and possess sufficient quality of attention to see them at all. When they occur, and they do not occur often, these moments open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend.

—  Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020)

Photo: Mand. “We had hail one day and I noticed that one hail stone managed to get trapped on a single web strand.”

13 thoughts on “Sunday Morning”

  3. Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
    INDEED!! … “Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention has unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory .. Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020).

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