a green mile

My new house may not be in all ways, or even most ways, an improvement upon the last, but for the sake of one irreplaceable feature, I've decided that I love it. Take ten steps straight from my front door, and you will see what I mean. Here your feet will encounter a broad gravel bike trail, with a median of green striping down its back. Take it to the left, and it will lead you beneath the tar-scented creaking beams of the Incline Railway and down a pleasant mile to where it dead ends into Scenic Highway. Take it to the right, and all the winding footpaths of the mountain (Point Park, Mountain Beautiful, Sunset Rock, Craven's House, Covenant College, etc.) are at your command.

This morning I decided to go left towards Scenic Highway, opting for a brisk run rather than a brisk ramble. A mile is not a long distance, measured by the amount of time it takes to traverse it. Even by foot: a mile there, a mile back--it's over in a quarter of an hour, and then I am bursting into the cold kitchen, panting and glugging a glass of water. But God has crammed my newest pet mile with such a glorious density of matter. Such atmosphere, summer damp and summer bright! Such effusions of foilage--such madness of buzzing and chirping and chugging and rustling! Greenery fawns around my ankles as my gravel-chomping tennis shoes carry me past flashes of grandeur, where the trees thin enough to disclose the trail's elevation, and then enfold me again in sunlight and verdure. Chattanooga, splattered off the edge of the treeline and bisected by the glittering Tennessee River, keeps flickering in and out of my peripheral vision. Cars cruise along Scenic Highway. I feel isolated and yet involved: queenly. And that is what I should feel.

Daughter of Eve: this is your dominion. Of course you can't know everything about it, or even everything about some of it. But you can love it and delight in it and be grateful for it, for the way it makes your heart climb over itself. For the way it paralyzes you and also mobilizes you: praise's overwhelming paristalsis.

You can live, in your starstruck finitude, forever a handmaiden to the Mystery.