You know how you’re out taking a walk and your mind is on a million and one things, when out of the corner of your eye you catch sight of something intriguing, but then you are already past it. Your brain, however, that amazing creation, scans through thousands, maybe millions of images and presents you with the one it thinks most closely resembles what you almost saw: a bronze/gold rose.
Now your rational mind, another part of that splendid organ, says: Not so fast. It’s the end of January at 6,000+ feet altitude in Colorado on a sidewalk between two rows of trees. A rose? I don’t think so.
So you’re hooked and you turn around to go back to see what you almost saw (all of two steps … this has all happened so quickly), and you see not a rose bush, but at shoulder height the rosette of a cone on a Pinyon pine. Much more appropriate for the locale and the time of year, you muse; yet you see how the eye, never having seen a Pinyon pine cone, might come up with the image of the rose.
Now there is another image among tens of hundreds of thousands of others for the brain to select from if a similar occasion should occur.
God’s creation: Pinyon pine cone, eyes that see, a brain that processes it all and remains open to what is new along with the curiosity that makes it possible to just keep learning. What gift.
– Blog entry and photo by Sister Joyce Lehman
Love it! Good thoughts!