hippie child

There was a patch of yellow daisies I passed every day on my walk home from elementary school. As my small frame teetered under the weight of fifth grade textbooks slung over

 Just one

Shoulder (because that’s what the 80’s taught us)

I released the school day’s goods and bads, and was fully present to my surroundings.

I looked forward to the three and a half minutes my sidewalk coincided with these yellow daisies. Instead accepting the reality of the cheap flowers that were lining Avenida de los Arboles,

Which was, in fact, not lined with trees,

my mind took me to an imagined field of brilliant and explosive magic that went on for miles and miles, unobstructed by the hallmarks of Californian suburbia.

No curbs, no cul-de-sacs, no chain link fences or one-story homes leftover from the 60’s.

I imagined myself as Dorothy, laughing with her friends in the red and purple poppy field.

It was my imagination that transformed the mundane to the wonderful, that captured or even invented the beauty in the ordinary.  

While this imagining was always on my own initiative

(and can you really believe I got, ‘April’s such a nice girl, but tends to daydream a lot in class…scribbled on all of my report cards?)

I think God has found a way to meet me in its wake.

I think God finds a way to me through natural beauty.

It’s when I’m sitting in the drive-through at CVS, waiting to pick up that prescription with the car (literally) in park. God tries to get my attention by hurling dusk’s soft light through the cypress trees in the parking lot, entangling the sun’s rays in the Spanish moss that leeches on.

And I’m reminded of his luminescence.

It’s when I’m hurrying my toddler from the house to the car in the driveway (because, with kids, who really has room to park their cars in their garages?). God vies for a glance from me by using the wind to whip my hair out of place.  

And I’m reminded of his playfulness.

It’s when we fight and fight with flat irons and does-this-look-too-wrinkled’s and instructions for the sitter to get to a beach wedding just barely on time. And then the ocean, with her majesty and incomprehensible size, whispers to me of God’s

Godness.

I’m so thankful, amidst the busyness of life and my own self-imposed distractions, that God doesn’t go away.

That his Beauty always finds a way back to me.