I’m at a minister’s retreat, which is being held in a camp and conference center located on a steep ridge forested with second-growth redwoods, California bay laurels (Umbellularia californica), and Canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis). Two moments from today:<\/p>\n
As I was walking along an old logging road cut into the steep hillside, with a precipitous drop on my right side and a vertiginously steep slope on my left side, I startled a big brown juvenile bird hawk. It flew quickly and efficiently through the redwood trees, out over the valley to my right, and was gone in less than a minute. I can’t tell you what kind of hawk it was (Accipiter cooperii?), but I saw it for just long enough to give me a new understanding of the topography of the landscape: the hawk was not limited to roads cut into a hillside otherwise too steep for me to walk on; it wove through a band of tall trees into the open air of the valley.<\/p>\n
At tonight’s worship service, I could not pay attention to the sermon. I heard enough to know that it was a pretty good sermon, but that’s all; the words were gone before my tired brain had time to recognize them. I sat there watching other people listen to the sermon, and from their reactions — their bodily stillness, their facial expressions, their lack of fidgeting — I got some of the meat of the sermon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m at a minister’s retreat, which is being held in a camp and conference center located on a steep ridge forested with second-growth redwoods, California bay laurels (Umbellularia californica), and Canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis). Two moments from today: As I was walking along an old logging road cut into the steep hillside, with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5106,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101\/revisions\/5106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}