"Nature as Church"

Subtitle: Dazzling....and Sacred

Just yesterday as I was reading Dotty Seiter's blog post titled Nature as Church....I got a little emotional. Dotty is an artist and a poet...and she featured Bessie, the hackmatack tree I keep an eye on....and her toddler pinecones in a poem that I wrote about last May. Dotty used the poetic metaphor of nature as church...with the pine cones lined up as church choir. I hope you link to the post to read the entire poem...but it starts like this:

don'tcha just love
how a row of seeds cones
on a branch is a church choir,
ever' sunday mornin'
gettin' ready to give each voice 
a way to rejoice?

https://dottyseiter.com/2025/09/26/nature-as-church/

I spent most of my childhood going to a small church with my mom and siblings.....and most of my adult life active in the churches where Paul was serving as the pastor. But as of late...I find I'm drawn more and more to nature as my church.

After I read Dotty's post yesterday....I walked to church to visit Bessie and her choir. She's kind of scruffy....and the owner of the adjacent driveway keeps lopping off her branches completely unaware of how sacred she is.

I expected to see full grown pine cones....singing like a chancel choir....but only found a few tucked  here and there. Where did they go?

But what I found instead was a million tiny little beads of light from the dew and  raindrops. It was dazzling....and sacred. 

And as a punctuation point on this post....late this afternoon Paul and I went to a concert actually IN a church. 

It wasn't a church choir...but four incredibly talented faculty members from Berklee College of Music playing jazz and Americana. 

It was dazzling....and sacred.