Heaven Cloaked with Earth

Up early, the sun just clearing the tips of the stately hemlocks in the east,
I venture out into the crisp air, now redolent with the delicious smell of damp earth and tender grass.

As I fill the feeder for the stout-hearted little birds that are my winter companions,I see the first male goldfinches, magically transformed from their drab olive and brown into bright canary yellow plumage. They dart about the grey branches quite conspicuous in their new attire.

And then I hear it… the most melodious sound in the world to my ears, the first song of the wood thrush. It is not complete, the cascading trill that transports me to heaven has not been added. It is early yet and practice will perfect it.
How sweet is this season called Spring! For this moment in time, everything is perfect and I am stopped dead in my tracks savoring it.

I am currently reading an insightful little book called The Exquisite Risk, Daring to Live an Authentic Life. Don’t you love when somehow you find yourself in synchronistic harmony and the perfect comment, thought, or reading magically appears to confirm what you are already experiencing?!

The author of this book is poet Mark Nepo and the chapter I opened to this morning after coming in was called “Heaven on Earth”. He starts it with this quote from a letter written to a friend by Fra Giovanni Giocondo in the 16th C.


“Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it.”


Mark Nepo adds “While happiness might be the momentary alignment of what we want with what happens, joy is the fleeting, though slower, sense of feeling our connection to everything with nothing in the way. While happiness is the bud opening on the branch, joy is feeling the entire tree… feeling the root lengthen as the bud opens. And so joy is feeling Heaven on Earth. And April is not the cruelest month but the most promising.”


Feeling our connection to everything, with “nothing in the way”, is a goal worth pursuing…
Wishing you moments of glimpsing your own heaven “cloaked in earth” today…