Holy Tuesday Flowers

Over a year ago I had to give up gardening at church. That branch of my life had to be pruned out so that other things had room to grow. But I miss the contact with the earth and growing things on the big property, and all the assortment of flora, some of them my own plantings and most of them friends in whom I've invested time and attention. So after Bridegroom Matins this morning I lingered and took some pictures while the light was still gentle.


 

native iris

cistus

The service and the flowers were certainly the highlight of my day. After that, I had planned to spend time working in my own garden, but instead, grueling computer confusion demanded all of the patience and peace I could find.

I never stepped outside again until evening when Mr. Glad and I took a slow walk. It was a great bloon to get into the air and away from electronics, and with someone I love who loves the outdoors, too, and I wished I had my camera along then -- or better yet, a magic bottle in which to capture the smell of honeysuckle and other sweets.

 





It's nice that this evening I can look at images of those morning flowers, which seem now to be getting ready to deck a bridal chamber.

Joseph preserved his soul.

HOLY AND GREAT MONDAY

I often think of the Church as a treasure chest full of precious gems, so overflowing and of such varied hues and designs that I will never even see all of them, or be able to fully appreciate them in my lifetime. That's because the Church is "the fullness of Him that fills all in all." (Ephesians 1:23) or in other translations "who fills all things everywhere with himself," or "who fills everything in every way," or "who everywhere fills the universe with Himself." Doesn't that sound like a lot to take in?

Every day on the church calendar is rich with the history of our salvation, and with the memory of people who are our brothers and sisters in Christ. But because I  1) have a finite amount of time, and 2) am overly caught up in the cares of this world or my own selfish concerns, I miss many of those connections as the days fly by. Today is the first I recall noticing two traditions of Monday in Holy Week, stories that are brought to our remembrance every year on this day:

Jesus Cursing the Fig Tree -- That I love fig trees and figs is not pertinent to this story, in which a fig tree is symbolic of those who do not bring forth the fruits of repentance. This is an event that "actually occurred on the day of the biblical Holy Monday," as the Wikipedia article tells us.

 

The Patriarch Joseph -- The story of Joseph the son of Jacob, how his brothers sold him into slavery but God raised him to be a ruler in Egypt, is one of my favorites. It's such a lesson in how God has His purposes which most of us can't comprehend, especially when we suffer because of the sins of others.

The theme of the hymn this day is: "Joseph, though enslaved in body, preserved his soul in freedom." He is the positive counterpart to the unfruitful fig tree, and this Mystagogy post explores how the freedom from passions (sin) compares to the kinds of freedom we typically care about and fight for these days. 

One of the passions that Joseph seems to have avoided is bitterness or resentment. He didn't want his brothers to feel bad anymore about what they did to him, because he thinks they all should rejoice instead and be grateful for what God has done in preserving their people, God's chosen nation, in the famine. Years ago I learned in a Bible study all the many, many ways that Joseph is a type of Christ. Just more of those riches that I am inadequate to hold on to.

But this week we also have the theme of Jesus the Bridegroom. In our parish we are able to have Bridegroom Matins at 6:30 a.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. What a blessing! And Lord willing, I'll be there for at least one of those services and feel the warmth emanating from a few diamonds or rubies of the Church's treasury.

Lazarus

Tonight was the service of Matins for Lazarus Saturday. It made me so happy. About a week before Pascha we experience this foretaste of Paschal joy, witnessing the raising of Lazarus after he had lain in the tomb for four days. But first, picture the scene when Jesus came into town: Lazarus's sisters were grieving and seemed to blame Jesus for their brother's death, saying, "If you had been here, he wouldn't have died." Jesus wept. The sisters made mention of the fact that their brother's corpse was at the point of stinking. It was kind of a downer all around.

I know Lent is a time of drawing close to God, and learning of His tender love for us, and looking eagerly toward The Resurrection. But it's also characterized as a time of bright sadness. This year I have felt the sadness part more than the bright part, as a burden-bearing, until these last few days.

Since December I'd had bright white lights still up around my kitchen window, and for many weeks I left them on night and day, to help my mood. Sometime in March I unplugged the string, but I was still reluctant to untape and untack them. I pondered leaving them all year, unlit but ready to come to my aid with the next dreary day in the Fall, but it was an idea stemming wholly from weariness.

Suddenly one morning during a short spell of sunshine, I knew I needed to wash the window and the sill, so of course the lights could not stay there. I washed and swept and scrubbed all kinds of things around the house and the yard for two or three days, and prepared myself to be resurrected. I took away the candlesticks and put fresh flowers instead on the windowsill.

And the brightness has taken over. Pascha is so late this year, Spring also in many places, but Lent seems to have passed quickly. Perhaps during Holy Week I can finish my housecleaning and make the place look properly freshened up for Christ's glorious Resurrection.

But first Lazarus will walk -- alive! -- out of the tomb and be unbound. If he can be raised after his body was rotting, so can I be relieved of my burdens and my stinking sins and put on Christ.  As he said,

Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.

I will try to pay attention and learn and find that rest through the next week as we are on our way to Calvary, and I'm really looking forward to being there at the empty tomb!

The beginning of a true newness

I am somewhat apologetically writing already another post on The Hidden Art of Homemaking, because it is the philosophy and theology, the heavenly underpinnings perhaps, that inspire me and give me the energy to carry out the practical details. From looking at the chapter titles it seems that this introductory chapter might be the one about which I have the most musings.

As to the oddness of me taking my inspiration from yet another man, when it is we women who traditionally do the homemaking and who are discussing a woman's book, I will just say that, Christ who enables us also was a man, and the Life of The Holy Trinity is something greater than our gender roles. The reality of the Holy Spirit operating in the world through us is our means of living out our humanity. Homemaking is one of the many facets of our calling and our life in God, and this particular pastor always encourages me in the fact of "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

The passages from Metropolitan Anthony are from a talk on Genesis given in June, 1986, from the book Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: Essential Writings by Gillian Crow.

Creativeness, however, is something more complex than the ability to call out new forms, to shape one's surroundings or even to determine to a certain extent...our destiny. It begins with the ability to change -- to change intentionally. Creativeness begins with the ability a being has...to become what he is not yet, to start at the point at which he was created and then grow into a fullness that he did not possess before: from image to likeness, if you will -- having begun to be, as it were, a reflection, to become the reality itself; having begun to be in the image of the invisible Creator, to become the image of God incarnate.

...And this process is a creative process. It is not an organic one; it is not something that must develop inevitably; it is something that we must choose and that we must achieve with the grace of God.

Amy mentioned the possibility that we might, contrary to our calling, create ugly or bad things, and even sometimes express not craftsmanship but craftiness. Other and various sinful impulses can also rob us of our creative strength. On the other hand, many times just creating something can give us a boost in the right direction. For example, I am learning not to be discouraged by the disorder of my messy house. Instead I can take joy from the chance to create order and space to replace -- or at least reduce! -- the chaos that so easily develops. But creating order out of chaos is huge. That seems like a good description of one aspect of the creative work God is always doing in our lives.

Met. Anthony says that the creative work he is primarily talking about is not the art and music and literature that we tend to think of right away,

...both of heart and intelligence, of skill and of hand, but is much more essential and also much more important because all the rest can flow from this basic source of creativeness but cannot derive from anything else.

So that here we are confronted with man, whom God has called and loved into existence, endowed with His image, launched into life, and when on the seventh day the Lord rested from his works, the seventh day will be seen as all the span of time that extends from the last act of creation on the part of God to the last day, the eighth day, the coming of the Lord, when all things will be fulfilled, all things will come to an end, reach their goal, and blossom out in glory. It is within this seventh day, which is the whole span of history, that the creativeness of man is to find its scope and its place.

And this is a wonderful call to us because each of us can be a creator within his own realm, within his mind and his soul, by making them pure and transparent to God, within his actions and life, and become what Christ said we are called to be: a light to the world, a light that dispels darkness, a light that, as in the beginning of creation is the beginning of a new day -- that is, the beginning of a true newness and a new unfolding of the potentialities that are within us and around us.

Cindy is hosting a discussion of Edith Schaeffer's The Hidden Art of Homemaking, which anyone is welcome to join, and this post was written as a contribution.

I can be a jovial sweeper.

For the sake of discussion of the late Edith Schaeffer's The Hidden Art of Homemaking, which Cindy is hosting at Ordo Amoris, I am re-posting a book review I wrote last year. Paul Johnson mentions the foundation for our creativity as Schaeffer does in her first chapter on The Artist: it is God Himself from whom our creativity derives.

This topic is dear to my heart and one I've mulled over year after year, so I'd like to contribute to the discussion even though I am at a very busy time of the year, as you can see on my sidebar. It's a time of being creative in other ways than writing.

So I'll start by using this old material, and note that Johnson, though not a homemaker or writing about homemaking, still manages to convey the wide range of activities by which we can express and demonstrate the fact of our being made in God's image. The last paragraph I quote can easily be applied to our housekeeping duties!

More recently I have been reading transcribed lectures of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in England, in which he touches on the subject of the creative process in and through us, and I hope to pass on some of his thought-provoking words soon.

Creating Jokes and Clean Streets

I picked up Paul's Johnson's book Creators the other day and am enjoying it three years after my first encounter. This is from the opening page:

Creativity, I believe, is inherent in all of us. We are the progeny of almighty God.... He created the universe, and those who inhabit it; and, in creating us, he made us in his own image, so that his personality and capacities, however feebly, are reflected in our minds, bodies, and immortal spirits. So we are, by our nature, creators as well. All of us can, and most of us do, create in one way or another. We are undoubtedly at our happiest when creating, however humbly and inconspicuously. 

Johnson mentions some of the many creations humans produce, such as written works, farms, and businesses. Some of these wonderful works are not lasting, though they are valuable for as short as a season or as long as centuries.

Some forms of creativity, no less important, are immaterial as well as transient. One of the most important is to make people laugh. We live in a vale of tears, which begins with the crying of a babe and does not become any less doleful as we age. Humor, which lifts our spirits for a spell, is one of the most valuable of human solaces, and the gift of inciting it rare and inestimable. Whoever makes a new joke, which circulates, translates, globalizes itself, and lives on through generations, perhaps millennia, is a creative genius, and a benefactor of humankind almost without compare.

I transcribed the above about jokes because that form of creativity is worlds removed from anything I can imagine drumming up. I am fascinated by the art of making or even telling jokes; the chapter in Annie Dillard's An American Childhood in which she relates how her parents worked their art of joke-telling describes an exotic land to which I could never go.

I'm more familiar -- quite familiar -- with the type of art Johnson also appreciates in this account:

I sometimes talk to a jovial sweeper, who does my street, and who comes from Isfahan, in Persia, wherein lies the grandest and most beautiful square in the world, the work of many architects and craftsmen over centuries, but chiefly of the sixteenth. I asked him if he felt himself creative, and he said, "Oh, yes. Each day they give me a dirty street, and I make it into a clean one, thanks be to God."

Babies don't care a whit...

...about your politics or theology. They don't know if you are fat or having a bad hair day or if your clothes don't match. You can talk nonsense and they won't get bored or irritated. Little Liam is a proper baby and is fun to be with -- no social stress. He doesn't think I'm weird -- come to think of it, he doesn't think about me at all in the way we adults do, though he is taking me in.




A Triple-A baseball game was the place where Liam and I had a good time on Sunday. We Glads drove to Sacramento for an evening River Cats game -- they were playing the Reno Aces -- and sat with Soldier and Joy and the boy on a fairly steep grassy slope overlooking the outfield. It was green all around, and very warm. Baseball feels right when the air is summery.

Compared to San Francisco Giants ball games -- the ones I've been to most often -- it was quiet and laid-back and uncrowded (and the opposite of foggy-by-the-bay). So relaxing. Liam didn't care that our team lost. He was busy checking out the grass under the quilt his mama had spread out, and doing crawling experiments: how to maneuver uphill or down without doing sudden somersaults or rolls.

Eventually he had a snack of mango, using his father for a backrest. And after that my youngest grandson had become used to me again and didn't mind a bit when I pulled him on to my lap for a session of clapping and finger games. Soon we were laughing and shrieking and talking plenty of nonsense together. It did this gramma good.

St. George

From Everywhere Present by Fr. Stephen Freeman: 

The body of Christ is one Body. There is only One Church -- not divided between those who have fallen asleep in Christ and those who remain behind. Whether we are here or in the hand of God, the struggle is the struggle of the whole Church. My success or failure in my spiritual life is not my private business, but the concern of a great cloud of witnesses. Neither are they watching only as disinterested bystanders. They urge us on and support us with their prayers. Were they to watch us without participating at the same time in our struggles, the watching would be like torture. As it is, their watching is prayer and participation of the deepest sort.

It is for this reason (among many) that many services in the Eastern Church contain the phrase, "Lord Jesus Christ, through the prayers of our holy fathers, have mercy on us and save us." It is a humility of sorts, a demurring to the prayers of greater Christians -- but it is also calling on a reality that abides. We are not alone. The great cloud of witnesses stands with me and in me in prayer.

Every prayer we ourselves offer is a participation in the life of the world. We have a participation in the great cloud of witnesses, but we also have a participation in everyone who is. The prayer of a righteous few has an amazing salvific impact on the life of the world. If they'd had but a few more righteous men, Sodom and Gomorrah would still be standing. To this day we do not know how many or how few, in their righteous prayers, preserve us before God.

Today, April 23, we remember Holy Greatmartyr, Victorybearer and Wonderworker George, and ask him to also remember us to God.

Some things about the Day and the Earth

In truth, I have never paid much attention to what is called Earth Day. But as someone just pointed out to me, every day is God's day. That made me think of how "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." And how He created the earth, to be a home for us people who are made in His image. He is so good to us. And in the beginning he looked over everything that He had made and called it Good.

Yes, we selfish people have done a lot to wreck things. We do damage even when we try to fix the situation, because our motives are not often pure and we are filled with pride that makes us stumble. It's a very complicated and complex earth and task, too, like a lot of situations we or other people create. More often than not, tricky to repair. And is it possible to really love the earth if you despise its Creator? I could get more excited about Creation Day.




"This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." It was a good day for that here, and I thought about Earth Day more than usual because I walked around outside taking pictures of some things sprouting out of the ground, the earth. Dirt Day would get me excited, too, I bet.

This is our lonely -- so far -- foxglove. Notice how foxglove has love in it? They are the loveliest, I think. In many places in Northern California they self-sow, but not here. I planted three last fall, and snails ate at least one of the buds.




I neglected the foxgloves for weeks and when I finally noticed the flower stem it was curving around on the ground. I rescued it and propped it on the fence. Many people who keep Earth Day are trying to rescue the beautiful things God made.

We and the neighbor rescued the fence that divides our yards last week. I had to detach the Cécile Brunner rose from that fence and tie half of it to another fence temporarily. I think it will be o.k. Today I took this picture of one of the roses.
 

 
The first California Poppies of the season have come out! They are our state flower, blooming from perennial roots next to a salvia, across the sidewalk from the lavender pincushion flowers.

When I thought about Earth Day, now when it is already tomorrow for most of you, I also remembered this announcement (below) that Kate penned in her childhood. And it's the most important thing I know on this subject. I hope you had a good (Earth) Day. It was a gift from the Creator.

I like the oatmeal bread better.

A week ago I put some sourdough sponges to ferment, and on Monday and Tuesday I finished the bread from them. First was the batch made with Manuel's Rye Sour starter. I made it with whole grain flours and lots of seeds: sesame, black sesame, poppy, sunflower, and pumpkin. Did I leave anything out? I had a vision of a nourishing lenten bread.

Seeded Sourdough

The next day I was on the Communion bread team at church, and that morning we produced the most gorgeous "lambs," but I didn't have my camera, so I will show you a photo of one from the past. Ours this week were much browner and more evenly browned, having baked in the new convection oven.

It was at church I took these photos of wisteria later in the week. It surrounds the courtyard where the fountain was actually working that day.

As soon as I got home Tuesday I began to finish up the other dough, made with the pineapple starter. (Of course it has no pineapple flavor remaining.) I had decided to make that batch heavy on oatmeal and had added several cups of rolled oats to the sponge the day before.

Both the breads came out pretty well -- but I have decided to end my Sourdough Experiments. I think the natural yeasts in the air of our town just don't make a sour flavor that I like. The odd thing is, they are very active and powerful yeasts, compared to the ones where we used to live, which had a more agreeable flavor.  They work nearly as fast as commercial yeast.

The pineapple starter is a bit nicer, so I didn't throw it out yet, but I keep thinking that I prefer the smell of regular bread in the oven, and out of the toaster. (Perhaps I should try biscuits or pancakes with that starter.) And I like oatmeal bread a lot better with butter in it as well as on it, so considering the small amount of bread we two eat, I may as well just not bother during Lent. I have learned a lot from my experiments. And I think all the bread I've been squirreling away in the freezer will do nicely to make grilled cheese sandwiches a few weeks from now.

Sourdough Oatmeal Bread

 

Addendum: In the old days either Pippin or I would bake 5-loaf batches of un-sour oatmeal bread once or twice a week as our household's basic bread. It was a more traditional shape of loaf; these loaves are flattish because I haven't yet worked out how much dough fills my new extra-large loaf pan and it came out a bit short.

I want to become a stronger swimmer.

A view from our front yard

As a man whose head is under water cannot inhale pure air, so a man whose thoughts are plunged into the cares of this world cannot absorb the sensation of the world to come.

~St. Isaac the Syrian

I've definitely had that underwater feeling lately -- so I was relieved to take part in a lenten service at church today, one designed to clear the head of transitory concerns. During Communion in the time of Lent, we sing lovely meditative hymns to the words, "O taste and see that the Lord is good."

Because that world St. Isaac speaks of comes to us in the Eucharist. We breathe the pure and sweet air of the Holy Spirit, a taste of the world to come and tonic to strengthen us for the labors of this world.

Mr. Glad and I have all sorts of busyness on our plates these days, and much of it is of a proper and happy kind, helping and loving people. But there is the other sort, as when one's computer crashes and requires hours of trouble transporting, repairing, restoring. For me that's the sensation of drudgery.

There's the fence that falls down and needs replacing, which means hours of talking to the neighbor and the lumber store, and more hours actually tearing out the old and putting in the new. This kind of work often blends into another: The old bodies of us humans wear out and need more frequent maintenance, trips to the chiropractor or pharmacy.

It's helpful that the melody of the "taste and see" hymns stick in my mind pretty well, so I can remember and come up for a gulp of that Air of Life, Sweet Jesus. I may not be walking on water, but I'm not drowning.

Sweet Dreams and Blue Eyes

I relived one of the literally sweetest experiences of my childhood yesterday and I didn't even have to journey the five hours back "home" to the groves my father used to tend so lovingly. We Glad gardeners visited a local nursery just to get one replacement plant for our project of last fall.

navel oranges in bloom

We were looking for a helianthemum, and they are in the area in back of the store, so we passed through the breezeway and were suddenly enveloped, not in a breeze but in a stillness heavy with fruit and flowers.

Overlapping rows of pots containing various citrus trees, including many oranges and mandarins, lined the alley and were exhaling their essence into that space. For me it was a whiff of the deep past, springtimes slowed down to a dream -- orange trees taking their sweet time and confusing the mind, because isn't springtime when everything and everyone is waking up and getting busy...?... but this air is like a drug that makes me want to lie on the grass and let my eyelids droop.

grapefruit and orange trees side-by-side

Our house was surrounded on all sides by orange trees, so that for many weeks every year we walked around in our own tropical island of scent. Can you imagine living in that house and being allergic to orange blossoms? Two family members were -- and I pity them mightily, because orange blossoms are one of the happiest things in the data bank of my senses.

My husband and I had only a few minutes to find our plant, so I couldn't linger, I quickly pushed on through to the shelves of California native plants and other drought-tolerant species. Our first choice wasn't there, but we found this:

I had luckily forgotten my Western Garden Book in the car so I had to make two more passes through the little paradise to retrieve it. Then we read a bit together about the above plant and some other offerings.

In the end we did decide on this dear low-growing plant, a newish species of Blue-eyed Grass, developed from a California native, and sufficiently xerophytic for our needs. I remember my friend May showing me one of these wildflowers decades ago as we hiked in the Coast Ranges of our state. They aren't really grasses but are actually in the Iris family, which seems obvious now that I know it.

new planting last October

Except for the one that died, all the plants of our project shown at right are bigger now, but there's still a lot of space to be filled in. 

I can't settle on which is more fun as a name, Sisyrinchium or Blue-eyed Grass. This is the first we've ever had them in our yard, and as you can see, we bought two, because they are small. I planted them tonight, where a blue penstemon, actually two, one after the other, had died last year. I hope to have nice photos of them and the whole bed to show in the future.







And before the citrus bloom is past I will return to that nursery when I have time enough time to wander. I'll consider the snapdragons in the back, and then the perennials in the front, and I'll go back and forth through the citrus tree lane at least a few times. I'll walk slowly each time past the mandarins and Meyer lemons and orange trees and sip my sweet daydream.

I pose my nest among flowers.

When the latest birthday package came in the mail I was alone in the house. I unwrapped the tissue paper knowing already that the gift inside had been handmade by my daughter-in-law Joy. It appeared to be something very small and lightweight....and then out came a knitted nest of eggs! The beauty of them and the love that had been expressed by the patient labor...my hands actually began to shake -- lucky these eggs are soft and comfortable and not brittle.

I began to pose my new toys around the house, and then went outdoors to find a natural setting too. Every day it seems there is a new flower somewhere, so I had lots of choices of where to plant my nest.

I don't remember what these tall spiky flowers are; they grow from bulbs I planted a few years ago. They are striking for a couple of weeks, but then the flowers get too heavy and the stalks lie down on the sidewalk by the front door.

So we should enjoy them right now at their peak, before they get annoying. If you enlarge the photo above you might see Mr. Glad's bent back, beyond the rosemary bush at the top.

And a glimpse of Johnny Jump-Ups and various other little blooms behind this close-up.




A happy discovery was that the helianthemum I have been nursing along for almost two years has finally bloomed! I know it does still look a bit scraggly but I am greatly encouraged. I think it is named Henfield Brilliant.
 
  

Eventually I took a picture of my birthday eggs nestled among the simple alyssum flowers. Then I brought them back indoors to be the near-perfect springtime table decoration. They would be completely perfect if they didn't make me miss the dear gift-giver herself. Thank you, Joy!

Blowing over tulips and into turbines...

When the spring winds blow, the howling through the trees and the chimes of the patio bells drown out the call of the garden so that I can listen to the world's discussions on many matters, including -- wind! Wind power, to be precise, and wind farms.





I had no idea that those scatterings of wind turbines on the Altamont Pass east of San Francisco were called farms. When a new turbine is installed they even call it a planting. Altamont is the wind farm I am most familiar with, but now I've seen photos of much more beautiful and even brilliant settings for these harnessers of wind energy, such as tulip fields in The Netherlands.

Turbines neatly lined up along a canal or placed here and there among what is primarily a tulip farm don't impress me the way they do when spread over hills that would ordinarily be drab without them. In those cases, like the slopes in California that in summer turn golden brown -- or a brown that is just plain dull -- the wind turbines grace the slopes with dynamic art.

I haven't taken the time to exit the freeway and drive to a good vantage point, but I think that one man who did got some lovely pictures that capture the beauty. The most artistic photographs cost more than I'm willing to pay for permission.

Several colorful photos are on the Pattern Energy site, gorgeous shots of their turbines at installations in Manitoba, Nevada, California and Texas. And some of these pages I'm linking to tell the stories of wind farm controversy in more depth than I will, so you might like to visit them for that reason, too.

The problem with the turbines is that they kill birds. The ones on the Altamont Pass kill more raptors than any other wind farm in the world, including the protected Golden Eagles, of which the world's largest breeding population lives in this area.

This article explains that worldwide the deaths from wind turbines are a small fraction of total bird deaths from run-ins with manmade structures such as office buildings, power lines and our houses; who hasn't experienced the dismay of hearing a small bird hitting - whack! - against a window? Even nuclear and fossil-fuel plants kill more birds than these converters of wind energy.

But it has been found that the more modern wind turbines, which are taller and slower, kill a much smaller number of raptors. So the old ones are being replaced. Bird and bat mortality are the topics of this site, annoyingly formatted but with useful links and an explanation of why Altamont wind turbines have been particularly deadly for birds.

Driving along Interstate 5 in California, we more than once have passed a truck carrying one turbine blade. These things are huge!

 Here is a photo of a "re-planting" of a turbine.

If I were to take a trip past those fields of wind turbines this month the scene might be greener and wetter, something like this.

The labor and intelligence of mankind that is applied to growing tulips results in a product that gives delight to millions of people. The wind turbine is an elegant result of technology, a thing of beauty in itself for its simplicity of design, but also as a symbol of man working with nature and using the gifts of the Creator. Thanks to God for putting some of His own creativity into us His creatures. May the glory go to Him.