“All nature is meant to make us think of paradise. Woods, fields, valleys, hills, the rivers and the sea, the clouds traveling across the sky, light and darkness, sun and stars, remind us that the world was first created as a paradise, for the first Adam, and that in spite of his sin and ours, it will once again become a paradise…Heaven is even now mirrored in created things. All God’s creatures invite us to forget our vain cares and enter into our own hearts, which God Himself has made to be His paradise and our own. If we have God dwelling within us, making our souls His paradise, then the world around us can also become what it was meant to be for Adam—his paradise.”—Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
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Reading in passenger seat, she laid the book aside and gazed on roll and pass of the world outside.
Summer, her favorite season, she dressed in its yellow color—yellow tank and white denim shorts that shone length and tone and tan of her legs, color of her clothes like stacked sweet-clover blossoms that dappled the roadsides and pastures in pass.
Wild daisies bloomed amidst the green—thin-white petaled and open hearts. Yellow Susans shone opening too, yellow first-beginnings to their season-hue.
She looked on the yellow. She looked on the white, how she and earth both dressed alike.
The seeing made her smile, and its beam, she felt her glow and skin alive in warmth. Tousle of her hair as the world rolled by: freedom and liberty of a soul in peace.
“Woods, fields, valleys, hills…clouds traveling across the sky…” She saw the light and shadow of cloud in cast upon the earth, fast roll and move of their covering shade that changed tone of the land beneath: more blue in the shadow, more yellow in light—no difference in base of green.
She thought of heaven and mountain highs—limestone peaks that once were sea, awe of their spires and sides of green, mountain pools and lakes in depressions; all seen and lived not long ago. And she thought of the ground over which they drove—same limestone fossils of shells and sea where topsoil and earth wore thin: heaven-relic too in her land of home.
“Light and darkness, sun and stars…” she thought of evening shade, not yet reached, in yellow light and magic-hour; splendor of the scene; of day made night and the evening spill of soul in colored cast; dim and die and appear of night, stars in their pointed light; patio and lights’ strung around, songs and hum of summer’s night.
She forgot about herself. She filled with the wonder and awe of life and place—paradise into which she stumbled when self was lost and Wonder found.
Gazing, glowing, still on world in rolling pass. She reached for him and took his hand. Thumb stroked, delicate in trace, to lifeline of his palm. All the times they held and pressed—in love and feel and match, she knew—their rest was one and same.
Paradise was all around: hers, his—forgetting selves—found in together’s live.