This morning as the sun rises and the sky is lapis blue, I am virtually walking along the E.O. Wilson Boardwalk in Blakeley State Park.  If we can’t actually be in that place of vital enrichment, we can go there in our mind’s eye. It is also the aim of these words that they can take us there when the world seems too much, and we wrestle with upheaval – that of the pandemic and of the violence occurring throughout the United States.  To borrow the words of one of my favorite poets, Gregory Orr: “Saying the word / Is seizing the world / Not by the scruff / Not roughly, / But still fervent / still the fierce hug of love.  We need to love the world in which we live. We need to hug a tree – and maybe stand in the very heart of it – and think of how we can affirm our being in the universe.

            Words can shape the ways we confront the dailyness of our lives, both in celebration and heartbreak.  I am, at this moment, listening to birds sing: “Sweetsweetsweetsweet.” 

I want to say that places like Blakeley State Park – and places that we hold close in our hearts  -- are  sanctuaries. We enter into a special kind of relationship with Nature just as as we do with human beings, a fellowship in which we both give ourselves to a place that matters and receive sustenance from it.

            The voices – our own, that of birds, the enunciations of wind, the tenor sound-clips of waves, the declarations of hope are there in waiting. Come, walk with me this morning.  See, how the trees reach out their limbs and hold us, how they give beauty and shade--and like pines, they show us that we can bend without being broken.