Yellow Flash in the Madness

As I move in to the main part of the semester, I find myself spending more and more time studying and doing school assignments and less time reading personally and just being. I find it really funny how learning is stopping me from actually learning things on my own. With assignments, papers, and book reviews piling up I have been finding it more and more difficult to be quiet, be still, be contemplative, and just be.

Last week, as I was realizing this and being very frustrated by it, I decided to spend about a half hour of going to a small wooded area on campus and just sitting and listening. With all the noise in my life my spiritual life had come to a stand still. As I sat and just rested, I saw a flash of yellow in the trees out of the corner of my eye. When I looked, I saw that it was a Hooded Warbler, a bird I was not expecting to see in the middle of the city. Just this one sighting, along with the appreciation of nature and Creator that came with it, was able to comfort me somewhat in my struggle to find peace.

I am still struggling at times to reconnect with God and to wrestle with hard things (hence my lack of reading and blog posts), but I still find comfort in being able to have encounters with very simple, beautiful things, like a Hooded Warbler making the journey to campus to look for some food.