Introspection

Life must be seen as a preparation for succession and renewal rather than a journey to extinction. The divine circle of life is thus described reminding us that we move from life to death to new life. Joy comes to us when we move beyond despair and the fear of death and grasp the notion that the spirit of life persistently manifests itself anew in unexpected form. The spirit will always push up and out, taking the materials at hand to draw attention to its secret power.

The mushroom continues to remind us of this power as it pushes up with the spirit’s energy to announce new life and beauty in the presence of decay.

The land is the key to our inner nature, its beauty and its violence but a mirror of the light and shadow in the human soul. Landscape then is a revelation of the Self and a key to our own moods and inner changes. Each landscape asks the same question, “I am watching myself in you - are you watching yourself in me?”
— A Passion for this Earth, Valerie Andrews

In the presence of one wild bluebell I am humble and joyful. If I were given all the learning and all the methods of my race I could not make one of them or even imagine one. Solomon in all his glory was no arrayed like one of there. It is a privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speck into the unspeakable.
— Traveling at Home, Wendell Berry

But God’s own descent into flesh was meant as a demonstration that the supreme merit lay in risking spirit in substantiation.
Spirit enters flesh and for all it’s worth charges into earth in birth after birth ever fresh and fresh.
We take the view that its derring-do thought of in the large is one might charge of our human part of the soul’s ethereal into the material.
—“In the Clearing,” Robert Frost