Inhale Autumn

It's a glorious September day.
Cool and it brings to the heart
gratitude. How could it not?!!

I read in Letters on Cezanne
by Rilke a wonderful description
of heather. To take something
so ordinary and start to praise
God for what He has done or made:

"Never have I been so touched and
almost moved by the sight of heather
as the other day, when I found these
three branches in your dear letter.
Since then they have been in my
Book of Images, penetrating it with
their strong and serious smell, which
is really the fragrance of autumn earth.
But how glorious it is, this fragrance.
At no other time, it seems to me, does
the earth let itself be inhaled in one
smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that
is in no way inferior to the smell of the
sea, bitter where it borders on taste,
and more than honeysweet where you
feel it is close to the touching of first
sounds.....

And the way they look: like embroidery,
splendid; like three cypresses woven into
a Persian rug with violet silk ( a violet
of such vehement moistness, as if it were
the complimentary color of the sun.)

...I don't believe these little twigs could
have been as beautiful when you sent them:
otherwise you would have expressed some
astonishment about them. Right now one of
them happens to be lying on dark-blue velvet
in an old pen-and -pencil box .
It's like a firework: well, no. it's really like a
Persian rug. Are all these millioins of little
branches so wonderfully wrought?

One lives so badly, because one always comes
into the present unfinished, unable,
distracted.






All this from looking at heather.
Be still, the Lord says.
Know that I am God.