As consciousness seeps into my mind, I listen to the world and remember where I am. The sounds in this place are different than home. They are different from any place that I have lived. I’ve known the sound of the wind in the pine trees for decades now. Wind blowing through these tress, however, sounds much different. The sound reminds me of the season. It is autumn. There is a rich carpet of fallen leaves coating everything several inches deep. The dry leaves swirl and blow around in the wind. There are, however, still plenty of leaves on the trees. I grew up with cottonwood trees and their sound, but the cottonwood trees carry their leaves higher off of the ground and those leaves are relatively small when they fall. Here, in a grove of oak and maples and several other varieties of trees whose names I do not know, there is a sense of being surrounded by leaves. There is a constant pitter patter of leaves falling, softer leaves landing on the crisp, dry leaves that occupy the ground. Other sounds creep into my consciousness: the thump of acorns when they land on the roof of the camper; the crunch of a small animal crawling across the ground. We’ve seen both raccoons and opossum exploring the area in the dusky shadows.

I have to concentrate to tell whether or not it is raining. It is not. The sounds mostly have to do with leaves.

There is an abundance of leaves in this forest that reminds me of the abundances of other signs of life in other places. Nature is generous with its quantities.

Knob Noster State Park is a tranquil retreat of open oak woodland with a few patches of prairie along both sides of the meandering Clearfork Creek. The park has many different trails for day hikes and plenty of space to spread out and enjoy the tranquility. We’ve stayed here before. The park also features an oxbow slough, which has been officially designated as Pin Oak Slough Natural Area. 

The sounds of nature aren’t the only sounds of this place. Although we are set back off of the highway far enough to be removed from its constant whine of tires on pavement, we can occasionally hear a particularly loud car or truck passing. In the night I woke to the sound of the giant jet bombers taking off from Whiteman Air Force Base which is just a short distance east of our campsite. In a couple of hours, reveille and first call will sound from the loudspeakers at the base and we will hear the bugle sounds from our campsite. Most evenings we are out with our daughter and son in law and arrive after taps have sounded, but we’ve heard that evening song as well when we’ve camped here before.

Knob Noster is a bit of a funny name. I guess it means “our hill,” but it is a jumble of a colloquial, folk name for a hill, “knob,” and the formal Latin for “our.” There are a couple of somewhat prominent small hills northeast of town, and I suppose that it is from one of those that the town took its name. Settled in the mid nineteenth century, the town was mostly a small farming community until the construction of Whiteman Air Force Base. Begun during the buildup to World War II, the field was originally named Sedalia Army Air Base and was a training ground for glider pilots in an area known as blue flats because of the color of the soil. Sedalia is the name of the large town to the east.

Knob Noster State Park sits down a bit from the town in an area that probably wasn’t very productive for farming and was left forested as settlement surrounded it. We have tended to stay here in the fall, so we don’t know all of its seasons, but one can imagine that there is rich soil under the carpet of leaves. It probably doesn’t have the blue color that lent its name to the natural prairie fields where the base was located. I imagine rich dark loam, the product of years of decaying leaves. It provides for healthy trees and supports a community of wildlife that includes deer as well as several different small mammals. When we walk about in the day, we can hear frogs singing in the wetlands as well.

The land we set aside as parks is one of the treasures of this nation. We’ve found state parks to be good managers of land in general. As we’ve traveled around, we’ve learned to look for state parks as places to camp. We’re not as attracted to the modern camping resorts with all of their amenities. We don’t seem to need swimming pools, playgrounds, activity buildings, mini golf and wagon rides, though we understand their attraction for families. We’re happy with a little more space between campers and the sounds of nature to surround us.

Camping barely describes our experience in our current camper. We have a comfortable bed that says made up as we travel down the road. We have ducted air conditioning and a furnace that takes the chill off as well as a complete kitchen and bathroom. It is a far cry from our days of sleeping in a tent and cooking outdoors with a pit toilet a short walk away. This campground has modern toilets and warm showers available in several locations. Even tent camping is pretty comfortable in this setting.

It is a fine place for a bit of vacation. The gentle sounds of the trees and leaves are soothing and the quiet affords us time for contemplation and reflection. The closeness of our family nurtures our spirits as well.

I sleep well in this place even though the sounds are not completely familiar. And if it takes me a minute to become orientated when I wake, that is a good thing, too. It reminds me that I am not at home and each day is a new adventure. Soon enough we’ll head back and put the camper in storage for the winter. For now, I am grateful for the luxury of this place.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

I don’t read much of the print newspaper these days. I get most of my news from websites, many of them posted by newspapers.When our print newspaper arrives, I scan the headlines, usually having read the articles online. I read the obituaries and the comics and occasionally something else catches my eye that I had missed while reading the online articles. I can remember when the Sunday newspaper was a big deal in our house. We’d read a bit of it before worship in the morning and then save it for reading later in the day. Some weeks, we’d have bits of the paper around for a couple of days while we finished reading and passed articles back and forth. There just isn’t that much in the Sunday paper any more. I usually have seen all I need before breakfast and it is in the recycling bin early in the day. The magazine in our Sunday paper is called “Parade” and it used to have a few articles worth reading. I also would have a couple of cartoons and I got into the habit of paging through the magazine each week. These days the magazine is very short and mostly advertisements. Most weeks it is not even sorted out from the other ads that make their way to the recycling bin unread.

However, someone commented to me about an article in Parade this week, so I fished it out and read the article. While not great journalism, it did provide a starting point for a bit of reflection. The article was about the health benefits of feeling awe or being awestruck. Based on a project of the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Interaction Lab in which researchers have discovered that shared awe strengthens relationships, the experience of awe soothes frayed emotions, people gain fresh perspectives, and happiness and joy increase.

Researchers documented a decrease in cytokines, a marker of inflation, in those who frequently experience awe.

I don’t mean to be condescending, but . . . duh. I don’t think it takes a Templeton grant an three years of study to state the obvious. I’ve known instinctively the positive effects of the experience of awe for most of my life.

Read Psalm 8. The power of awe has been noted in literature for thousands of years.

Sometimes, however, we have to re-discover things that the ancients understood better than our present generation. Because it is difficult to quantify and explain in mathematical terms, religious experience has been discounted by some scientific investigators. I don’t really mind the fact that the researchers in Berkeley are reluctant to describe their research in religious terms because I know what they are talking about whether or not they are comfortable with theological language.

We are made for relationship with God - with that which is beyond.

I had a few moments for recreation yesterday and, as is my custom, I was sitting in my kayak at the lake. I was listening the the geese who are noisily forming their flocks for migration, and looking at the colors of the shoreline. I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures. The source of my awe at the moment was the visual tricks being played by the reflection in the water. It was calm and the glassy surface of the water was producing a visual image of the trees and hills. Except the trees and hills are three dimensional. They have distance and height and depth. The image on the surface of the water was flat. In my kayak, I sit almost exactly at water level, with the boat only a couple of inches below the surface. From where I sat to the shore was completely flat, then the shoreline rose toward the hill beyond. What I saw, however, seemed different from the reality I knew existed. My eyes wanted to report that the boat was pointed uphill, not level and that the inverted images of trees in the water were somehow upside-down.

As I write this morning, I know that I am not able to describe the feeling. That is the thing about being awestruck. You have encountered that which is beyond words and though words are the tools of description that we have we know that there is more than we will be able to say.

As I went through the rest of the day, enjoying yet another gloriously warm and bright fall day in the hills and appreciating the brilliant colors and fresh smells, I kept remembering the feeling of sitting on the lake in the morning.

I have friends who are accomplished with mathematics and theoretical physics and other scientific pursuits and though they do not use religious language in describing their professional studies, there is a tone of voice I have heard when they describe some of their discoveries. Mathematicians are, from time to time, awed by the beauty and precision of complex formulas. Physicists are awed by the intricacies of the inner workings of the universe. I can hear it in their words as they speak. And I know that they, like me, are unable to find words to describe the experience of beauty they experience. They have encountered that which is beyond and experienced that which cannot be described.

There are many different ways to experience the in flowing of sensations that overwhelm and cause awe. Hikers achieve a particular vista and see a fresh perspective. Astronauts look back at the earth and see its wholeness. Whale watchers experience a sudden breach of the magnificent mammals and are impressed by their size, power and agility. Firefighters experience the raw power and life-like behavior of flames. Pilots watch a rainbow form above the clouds. Doctors marvel at the inner workings of the human body. Parents and grandparents are overwhelmed at the sight of a newborn baby.

The gift of awe is readily available for those who take time to ponder this world. Not every gift of awe, however, demands words. While we may try, with prose and poetry to say something significant, there is yet another response to awe that is very appropriate: silence.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

It is possible that my digital photographs are slightly better organized than was the case when I was dealing with negatives and prints, but the improvement in organization is only slight. Some of the organization is technical. With GPS capabilities in my cameras, I can do a quick sort by location, which helps me find the pictures I’m looking for. Face recognition technology is also improving and works at times to help me find particular pictures. But the problem that I had before, clutter, remains. The bottom line is that I take a lot of pictures - perhaps not the number of those who are constantly taking selfies with their cell phones, but a lot.

The recent rebuild of my web site has sent me looking through my photos for images to use in the headers on the site and to place in other strategic locations throughout the web documents. What I have discovered is that one of my favorite locations for pictures is seated in a canoe or kayak. In the past three months, I’ve taken quite a number of pictures of the sunrise over Sheridan Lake with the bow of a canoe in the foreground. Since I’ve built my canoes and kayaks, I recognize individual boats with ease so I also know which boat I’ve paddled the most in recent months.

Of course there are plenty of other pictures. I’ve got pictures of family events, of our grandchildren, of some of the scenery from our travels, of events at the church. It surprised me how many pictures I have of stacks of split firewood. I guess that the Woodchuck project is something that captures my eye and my imagination.

As I go through the pictures, I realize that I have a whole lot of pictures that bring back pleasant memories to me that won’t show up on my website. I take a lot of pictures of other people. And, for the most part, I don’t have permission to publish their pictures in any way. I know that there is an active debate among people who use the Internet a lot about the ethics of posting identifiable pictures of other people. I’m not sure that I have any overarching ethical rules, but I simply am aware that pictures tell stories and not every story is mine to tell. Children attend Vacation Bible School at the church. I take pictures. But I don’t feel comfortable publishing pictures of other people’s children. We do post a few pictures of children on the church web site, knowing that it is important for potential visitors to understand how important children and children’s programs are in the life of our church. But we are careful to obtain permission and we never provide direct identification of the children. When it comes to my personal web site, I’m pretty careful about which pictures I choose.

What you won’t see are pictures of myself. I don’t have very many. I’ve got a few pictures taken by others that I like. Interestingly, my favorites are of me paddling boats (go figure!). I do have a couple of formal portraits that I’ve used on the church web site and in other locations. But I have no intention of getting a selfie stick and starting to post pictures of myself all around the Internet.

The thing about it is that I kind of like some of the selfies that other people take. My niece is constantly posting pictures of herself with her friends doing interesting activities and as an uncle, I enjoy seeing the pictures. They give a report of what is going on in her life and how she is connecting with others. It helps me to feel close to her even though we live in locations separated by more than a thousand miles.

A couple of years ago I read a report that people upload an average of 1.8 billion digital images every day. That’s 657 billion photos per year. To put it in a different perspective, every two minutes humans take more pictures than ever existed 150 years ago. There are more pictures loaded onto the Internet every day than the total take per year at the height of the film camera business.

The large number of digital images on my computer is small in comparison to the total of digital images. My problem with photo clutter is small in comparison to the rest of the Internet.

In place of photo albums, people pass their cell phones around the table to show off pictures of their grandchildren. The world is changing and part of that change is instant access to images. I celebrate that change. I love receiving pictures of my grandchildren every day. I watch every video sent of them multiple times and I’m as likely to whip out my phone to show pictures to others as any other grandfather.

In general, I have found that most people would rather look at pictures of my grandchildren than pictures of my canoes. Still, I’ve chosen a picture of the sunrise over the lake as the banner photo for the home page of my web site. It doesn’t show any people, but I believe it says something about who I am and how I seek to become centered in the world. The banner photo for the blog is of the same lake but taken from a different angle on a different day. It also speaks of my connection with nature, something that is important for me to convey.

Today I am feeling grateful that I have had the opportunity in the last month to rebuild my web site. It has been quite a bit of work, but thinking seriously about what to keep and what to discard has been helpful. Looking at my pictures, even the ones that I choose not to publish, has reminded me of what a wonderful life I have and how many terrific experiences I and blessed to enjoy.

And once in a while I choose another picture to publish. Chances are pretty good there is a canoe in the picture.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!