Together, we stand before nature not to conquer or understand it fully, but to be shaped by it. The cottonwood’s strange beauty doesn’t need fixing or explaining. It simply is. That truth—its unedited presence—has more spiritual clarity than most theology. Nature teaches without effort or ego. It reveals a God not obsessed with flawlessness, but fully present in complexity. That challenges our assumptions. It pushes us to question how we assign worth and who gets included. Divine perfection is precisely the ability to include what seems like imperfection. Nature, in its wild dignity, tells the truth: everything belongs. When we pay attention, we are taught. When we slow down, we are changed. When we accept what is, rather than what should be, we finally touch something real. God is already speaking.
May we go forth trusting that
nothing needs to be perfect to be holy.
(inspired by Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ)