It's a Fine Life: Thy Power Throughout the Universe Displayed

"All things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth and all things that are upon the face of it." Alma 30:44

The past two weeks, I have seen the power of god manifest through nature like I never have before. Our BYU group has an interesting tendency to break into song everywhere we go, but it's quite telling that when we are at the summit of a mountain or the thick of a forest, those songs are always hymns of praise. How can anyone who has seen and felt the glory of nature doubt what Alma testifies, that all things denote there is a God?

We spent several days this week in the Lake District, the northern England paradise where Wordsworth spent most of his life and where he wrote these immortal words:

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As Wordsworth laments, I think it is one of the great tragedies of human life that we often spent our time "getting and spending" and not appreciating the beautiful world we have been given. Hiking around Ambleside and up Arthur's seat in Edinburgh (where Orson Hyde prayed and dedicated Scotland for Missionary work) has inspired me. There is natural beauty everywhere in the world, and I have made it one of my goals this summer to discover what Utah has to offer.

And it's not just the natural beauty that has inspired me. I have found that natural beauty combined with man-made objects is perhaps the most stunning. The old stone walls of the ruined Fountainhead abbey we visited are made more beautiful by the moss and grass that covers them. The carefully planned landscape at Stourhead gardens (planted to look natural, or "picturesque") mixed with quaint cottages and a classical-style temple have a charm that only human influence could create. (you know the scene form the recent Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Darcy asks Elizabeth to marry him the first time - I sang in that building. Best acoustics ever) People often complain about the destructive influence of humanity on nature, but out of destruction, new beauty finds a way to spring up. I'm sure that when Henry VIII destroyed fountainhead abbey, everyone thought that the beauty of the place was lost forever, but now the place is simply beautiful in a different way. Maybe beauty is just one of those things that can't be beat, or perhaps more likely, it is human nature to see things as beautiful. But there is one thing I'm sure of - as the great romantic poets believed, we have to look for beauty if we hope to find it.