Collect your journal, a pen and a coloured crayon.
Take a walk outside into the garden or your neighbourhood park and take a few deep breaths in and out. Stand for a few moments and savour the beauty of God’s creation.
Look around you at the trees and their different leaves. Admire their shape, feel their texture, inhale their aroma. Choose for yourself a green leaf that you like the shape of. Find a comfortable place to sit down and examine it closely. Trace the fine lines of its veins with your finger. Feel its texture and rub it against your skin. Smell it and sit for a few moments in quiet contemplate of its beauty.
What is your response?
How would you describe your leaf? Is it strong, fragile, think or brittle? How is it different from the leaves of other trees, or even from the other leaves on its own tree?
What does this small piece of God’s creation tell you about God’s creation.
What does it tell you about the Creator?
Write down what you are sensing. Take time to express your reflections and discoveries through a prayer to God.
Place your leaf behind a clean sheet of paper in your journal and create a rubbing impression of your leaf by shading with your coloured crayon. Be gentle, but press hard enough that you begin to see the outline of your leaf’s shape, stem and veins.
What is your response?
What does this aspect of God tell you about yourself as a created being? Consider writing a poem or taking some photos that express what you are sensing.
Now watch this short reflection from the naturalist artist Andy Goldsworthy.
https://youtu.be/_opAMkK95gE
or if you have time watch the full length video about Andy Goldsworthy’s life and art.
What is your response? How does it inspire you to care for God’s creation in new ways?
2 comments
Poets and writers often think that “being imaginative” is required, but imagination needs to be grounded in what’s real or it can easily become nonsense! Observing the variety and wonders of God’s creations is such a blessed way to write from a fresh perspective. Thanks, Christine. I’ll highlight this on the Christian Poets & Writers blog – http://www.christianpoetsandwriters.com – and pray God helps each of us to truly notice the amazing life around us.
Blessings Mary. I get so much inspiration for my own creativity from nature that when I came across Andy Goldsworthy’s work it was like one of those amazing moments of revelation