... we overlook so many joys, so many hidden treasures, when we hurry from place to place, person to person, experience to experience, with little attention anywhere. All that matters passes before us now, at this moment. It has been said the greatest gift we can give one another is rapt attention; additionally, living life fully attentive to the breezes, the colors, the sorrows and joys as well, is the most prayerful response any of us can make in this life.
Observing the rhythms of nature and recurring cycles of the year, Henry Beston describes what he calls the "pilgrimages of the sun" across the sky, and at night, strolling the beach, "the dust of the stars" that fill "the night sky in all its divinity of beauty." For a moment of night, we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars--pilgrims of mortality voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Nature is a part of our humanity and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery we cease to be human.