We recently returned from a trip to the Pacific Northwest to visit our daughter and son-in-law (who are on Whidbey Island for a summer internship), to invite ourselves to dinner at the home of several other relatives :), and to see as much of the landscape as our nine days would allow.

We were taken aback by so much of the beauty of the area, especially the mountains. As I’ve gone through our photos since returning, I find that the words of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem run through my head over and over. Here is God’s Grandeur, written in the late 1800s:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings.