How to Create a Day of Yes

Lately, in the garden, the face of god is vivid through nature's explosion of beauty. At some point each day you can find me stretching across plants searching for the best light and background to capture the colors of a butterfly or flower. Spending time in nature creates a Day of Yes for me.

In addition to putting the images on social media, I share them with my students in assisted living who aren't getting outside due to the heat. Their delight triples my joy.

Poet, E. E. Cummings, found a way to put this experience into words. He was a Unitarian, like me, who believed in the oneness of god, of which nature is a part. This is the poem that I read at my brother's life celebration.

“i thank You God for most this amazing”

by E. E. Cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Cumming's poem was originally published in Xaipe1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), reissued in 2004 by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company.

You can learn more about E. E. Cummings at the Art and Theology website where I found this poem. www.artandtheology.org