When I was at Indian Wells, California, last month, two friends took me on a hike through Painted Canyon which was about an hour’s drive away.
It’s a fun hike if you’ve never been there!
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| Entrance to Canyon |
You get to venture through a deep canyon with towering sides all around. A few sections test your nerves as you see super narrow ravines ahead to navigate. You have to suck in your gut, turn sideways and pray you don’t get stuck in the walls of the canyon and have to wait for someone to rescue you!
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| Narrow path |
The trail we chose to walk greeted us with a foreboding entrance, up behind the rocks you see below.
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| Trail chosen |
But we scampered over the boulders and headed into the unknown with a bounce in our step and a joyous sense of adventure.
Our expectation of fun and adventure was not disappointed.
It was a beautiful canyon. Something different greeted us at every corner. Whether another twisting ravine, a tree growing out of a rock, heights of stone aspiring to the reaches of heaven, a sudden drop off to skillfully circumvent, a dead end to avoid, a mysterious formation to study or another rock color to admire, the variety of nature’s formations to marvel at was endless.
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| Salton Sea, the view from the top |
As I trekked the path and registered all the new scenes to appreciate, one right after the other, I thought, “This is the way life should always be. Full of variety, anticipation, discovering something new and different at every turn.”
Life is not meant to be dull, routine, and boring. Life is God. God is infinite variety, and that means the life God has given us to live is filled with variety, too.
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| Painted Canyon |
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| More Painted Canyon |
The canyon was called “Painted Canyon” because of the extensive variety of rock colors you see while walking its paths. The greens, oranges, reds, yellows, blues, grays, are like I’ve never seen before. They are surprising when you see them, because from a cursory look at the canyon at the beginning of the trail you expect dull and boring browns from one end to the other. But this is not the case. The rocks surprise you. They are filled with a myriad of colors that change as you walk from one corner to another. (Sorry I couldn’t capture the colors with my point-and-shoot camera, and the mid-day sun to wash out my camera views.)
Anyway, if your life is looking dull and boring, take another look! Take a more inspired look, from God’s point of view. Put the dullness of mortal mind aside, and let in divine Mind’s point of view. Right where you thought all was brown and gray, there’s likely to be some red, orange, yellow and blue to appear!
God’s variety is all around to see and experience, if we keep our eyes wide open.
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| Evan on trail |
“It is Love which paints the petal with myriad hues, glances in the warm sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with starry gems, and covers earth with loveliness” Mary Baker Eddy (SH 247:24).
I’ll appreciate S&H Page 247 more and more because of Evan’s blog today. No matter how tempting to accept boring, to keep S &H Page 247 in your thought immediately wipes out the temptation to be bored. Here I am, bed bound to others but adventurous to me to explore with my IPAD and to summit comments. I had never had such excitement such as this. I am grateful to God for it.
Thank you, Evan, for this post! It makes me think of another sentence from Science and Health:
“From the infinite elements of the one Mind emanate all form, color, quality, and quantity, and these are mental, both primarily and secondarily.” (S&H, p. 512:21)
I just love this!
Thank you so much!
Béatrice