Reverence Considered Along the Cascade Range

Wendell Berry would like a word

When we turned left off the Pacific Coast Highway at noon yesterday, we began the next chapter of our coddiwomple. It was pouring, and the driving was iffy as we made our way inland on the six-hour drive to Bend.

There were moments when the rain rested, even brief episodes where patches of blue sky revealed themselves before being covered by drenching gray clouds again. Such moments always remind me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words in The Oversoul: “Our faith comes in moments... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.”

I’ve always found these seeds of hope sustaining in dark times. Yesterday, I read so much dire news in only 30 minutes that I required those brief glimpses of blue skies as if they were drops of water offered to a man crawling across the desert.