This I believe

I am something of a naturalist. I believe in what I experience and observe. I believe in matter and energy. I believe in space and time. I believe in being able to verify how the universe is and how it changes.

And I am something of contradiction to myself. I believe in truth and beauty. Somehow, it seems to me that the universe is more than the sum of its parts. Beyond reason, I believe that embedded in a natural universe is goodness and meaning.

My walk to the river is a natural act. It is also an act of faith. My walk to the river is a real thing and it is a metaphor for my life.

This is what I tell myself: I walk to the river and observe the world around me and then I ascribe meaning to this experience.

We all do something like this. At least I assume you share my sense that this very natural world around us also has meaning – it matters to us in some existential way. And many of us strive to express in all sorts of ways what matters to us. That is, we hope to share our minds with minds like our own. It is good to not always be alone.

So I walk. I take pictures. I write. And in these digital pages some of you are looking, reading, and thinking your own thoughts, believing that somehow there is meaning here – if only for a relatively brief time.

I walk a step at a time. I go out and then I come back home. Each day’s walk is the same and not the same.

Heraclitus was right: We don’t step into the same river twice.

St. Paul was right: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.

Socrates was right: Know thyself.

Jesus was right: Love thy neighbor as thyself.

My mother was right years ago when I would step out of our front door and her parting words to me were: Be good.

Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and countless unnamed people – especially those people who have put their arms around me or extended their hand - were right. And perhaps, at points along the way, they and I were mistaken.

Never mind.

The universe is a big and mysterious place. The corner of it where I walk seems both mundane and sacred to me. Sometimes I can hardly believe all of it – or any of it.

I have said: The sky is reflected in the river. You can read that line in a natural way – Light and air and rocks and water, observed with our human senses; each moment my various views of the Kaw River are mostly the same and always changing.

And you can wonder with your human consciousness what else those simple words might mean. Sometimes, I think that what I see reveals so much more beyond the material realm, that it somehow all means something I can’t quite get into pictures and words, but I try.

And so I walk on, for now …

And as always, thanks for the savory and the sweet.



Bert's Hidden Corner