It’s the last day of March. All of the snow has been gone for most of the month and the landscape has been an unremitting brown and gray. Looking up I see bare trees and bushes. Looking down I see muddy ground. One of my friends calls this season, “the season of mud and sticks.”

Stumbling Upon Grace

As I gaze out the window it seems like an apt description for what I see. But if I look more deeply I find myself stumbling upon grace.

All the plants are getting ready to burst into leaf and bloom. You can feel it in the air. There is so much going on inside those bare twigs and under the muddy ground, it fills the air with prana.

Some of the earliest flowers have already sprung up and bloomed. Buds are swelling on my lilac tree, tiny leaves are showing on the rose bush I planted last spring, and on the bushes that grow wild in parts of our back yard.

The wood ducks are patrolling the pond. There are at least a dozen of them swimming to and fro in pairs, leaving v-shaped ripples behind them in the water. One of the females sits on top of the wood duck house across the pond that our neighbors built. It looks like she’s staking her claim on a piece of prime real estate.

A pair of mallards swims among the wood ducks, their loud quacks a contrast to the haunting warning cries of the female wood duck when they are startled. Two Canadian geese have been wandering through our yard leaving behind lots of fertilizer—talk about stumbling upon grace ( 🙂 ). And two painted turtles are hanging out on the branch at the edge of the pond sunning.

Grace is everywhere.

It’s not just this time of year that I feel that I’m constantly stumbling upon grace. My work as a photographer makes me notice beauty in unlikely places all the time. I see shapes, lines, light and dark, colors, and stories of hidden grace. The miracles of nature and the seasons turning never cease to fill me with wonder.

How about you? Do you see only sticks and mud or are you stumbling upon grace also?

May you walk in beauty.

Not just sticks and mud – invisible growth inside all those bare sticks