As It Were, It's a Bit Like Heaven

It is Wednesday.  I am tired.  I’ve had three cups of coffee today, so the fact that I am tired doesn’t seem quite right.  (Can I have four cups without impairing my health?  What about five…?  Is this an addiction?)  I haven’t even done all that much schoolwork.  I did have to sit though an entire class on Byron, however.  Byron.  Sometimes I am envious of the way he gets to be extremely cynical and overly-dramatic and self-pitying in such a creative manner that people love him despite his faults.  Other times I just have no patience.   Whiny and childish.  Oh please give it a rest.

My tutor in the Byron class has a favorite phrase.  (I love those overused favorite phrases/words of my tutors, professors, or teachers.  Every time they pop up, I smile.  It makes class a little more interesting.)  This particular tutor always says: “As it were”.  As it were, what?  “And Byron, as it were, thinking that life ended with the tomb, though despairing…”

Yesterday I went for a three hour walk up that big hill again.  The entire top of the hill is designated “the Prestbury Reserve”.  I wish I could describe it with justice—I already tried and failed.  The best I can do is to say it was exactly what I hope heaven is like (minus the two huge telephone poles).

Up there, the horizons play with your mind.  People strolling in the distance look like they’re walking on the edge of the world.  There’s nothing behind them but hazy blue.  When you get to the crest where they had been, you realize that it's not an edge, but the brim of a slope from which you can see miles of wild grass crisscrossed with paths of greener grass.  There are little shrubby trees in clumps.  There are taller trees in groves.  There are trees on the edges of true precipices that have been bent in right degree angles because of the constant wind.

The wind is nice—it’s enough to fill your ears and to make your hair get wispy and go all over the place, but it’s not difficult to walk into.  It’s enough to make you feel alone, but not lonely.  It’s the kind of a wind that you could imagine God in.  (Am I the only person who feels God in the wind?  That sounds very Pocahontas-esque.)  Sometimes when you walk down a slope, the wind instantly stops, then there’s silence. 

There’s sheep on the top of one knoll (yes, a knoll), and behind them is a town I’ve never seen before.  I can see the tower of a church.  There’s cows in a valley.  There's a rider on a dark horse.   There's a wriggly black lab that wants to be friends.  There's a crunchy apple to be munched...

If this sounds too perfect, it can’t be helped, because it’s all true. 

What a precious gift of a morning.