Common grackles, like thousands of shimmering black ornaments on December-bare trees, move as one. Swirling, swooping en masse, from trees to ground and back again, their insistent cackling, crackling voices dominate the airways until...with the collective whooooosh of a multitude of wings, they are gone.
Seven woolly, wayward sheep, masters of independent intent, carefully pick their way through the whitened meadow, phantoms in the frosted, foggy field, almost indistinguishable from the tall, pale, frozen grassy hummocks.
Ice crystals glisten like twinkling stars on fallen beech leaves. Christmas ferns' fearless green growing among the browns of the forest floor. Busy, nimble squirrel feet barely touching the ground, noisily patter their way atop the crunchy remains of last year's oak, hickory and yellow poplar foliage.
Expected, but no less welcome, voices of the regulars call on a late December morning...tufted titmice, white breasted nuthatches, Carolina chickadees, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, Carolina wrens, blue-jays, flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, and the occasional hermit thrush. All busily foraging and feeding, yet still filled with song and conversation.
What stops you in your tracks and draws you into stillness? What delights you? What beckons you into awe?
Pay attention...
For such is the invitation into God...
