The Discipline of Reverence, Worship and Awe

This afternoon my wife and I walked with some friends in the woodlands above our home. We live on a protected moraine, vital to the re-charge of groundwater for our area. The past few weeks have been extraordinarily warm, so the snow is long gone, and the ponds are now a raucous chorus of frog songs. Moss on stones and rotted stumps virtually were glowing in the shafts of sun beaming into the still drab-brown woods waiting for spring.

Overcome by Awe

Some years ago I was cradling my new-born daughter in the middle of the night when I wanted to sleep and she didn’t. I passed the time by reading aloud from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. It’s a tough story about the darkness of colonialism and of the human heart in general, not exactly bedtime reading for infants, but I needed to finish the novel for an assignment. She had no choice but to listen.

A better river story for children would be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – equally insightful into the human condition, but not quite as dark.

Today I'm pondering a river scene in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.