Love is All Around

Yesterday I walked a path connecting the City of Wahoo and Lake Wanahoo in Nebraska. For most of the hike, wooded Sand Creek is on one side of the winding path and cornfields on the other. Every so often a park bench or shelter with a picnic table appears. On my return from the lake, I sat on a bench for 20 minutes and listened to the symphony of the outdoors.

Birds of various kinds making their calls. Buzzing insects. The breeze blowing through the leaves. The cars on a not-too-distant highway. The spinning wheels of a passing cyclist. Rising, I proceeded on the journey back to my car in town with a newfound appreciation of what’s going on around me.

One could hardly say I was in “nature” as commonly understood. I sat on a bench, not a rock. The limestone path was constructed for cyclists. The corn stalks were there by human intention. Even the lake was man-made.

But if I wasn’t surrounded by nature, I was still surrounded by beauty.

And I felt an awareness of something I had listened to the day before. As William C. Lanyon quotes a potter named Abd Allah:

As a fish is completely submerged in water, so man is submerged, surrounded by mind, and as the fish of the sea finds his supply, health and happiness in the medium of water, so man must be fed, clothed and cared for by the One Mind or Atmosphere of Love…