Thoughts

"But Alma said unto him: Thou hast had signs enough; will ye tempt your God? Will ye say, show unto me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also all the holy prophets? The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator."

-Alma 30:44

I've been thinking a lot lately about the way that nature affects me. My mom taught me, from a very young age, to love and appreciate the world around me, to view it as a gift from God. It was an easy lesson to learn, growing up in a small town called Woodland Hills. Our backyard was a mountain and we had groves where most people have grass. From our living room window we could see the whole valley, laid out before us. At night thousands of lights glowed in the neat rows of the cities. When I was little I tried to imagine a person for every one of those lights, I tried to picture them sitting in their houses, like me, or driving around in cars. The very thought overwhelmed me. In my childish innocence I couldn't imagine that there were that many people in the world, let alone in my little valley.

I spent much of my childhood outside with my sisters, imagining we were indians gathering roots for our dinner, or trying to catch sight of the fairies that we decided were living in the trees. In the spring yellow wildflowers grew like carpet on the "island" of trees that stretched from the mountain to our deck. I loved trying to walk through it without smashing a single flower.

In fall the mountain was a blaze of colors reaching up to the sky. From the deck of our house I had a perfect view and loved to see the orange and red of the maples weaving into each other, with the occasional burst of bright yellow from an aspen grove, or stroke of dark green from the formidable fir trees.

Then winter would come and it was all sledding and snow caves. I would gaze in wonder out our sliding glass door at a fresh blanket of white, now perfectly smooth, without a trace of the many footprints and angels we'd left there the day before. On sunny days a million shards of light would dance across that white expanse, gluing me to the glass pane.

But perhaps my favorite season was summer, when we could play outside all day, and sleep outside at night. My sisters and I would gather blankets and pillows, dig up a flashlight, and slip outside, taking care to turn off all the houselights behind us. We'd then troop across the backyard, set up our beds in a row on the trampoline, and spend a sleepless hour or two gazing in awe at the milky way. We'd try and find the constellations we learned in school, and, more importantly, made up our own. As I grew older I tried to imagine each glowing speck as a sun, the size of ours, with as many planets twisting around it. I tried to imagine people on those planets, billions of people for each and every star. And then I thought of God, and felt His love for me. I knew that somehow He knew and loved and each person on every populated planet, revolving around each of those stars. Even now when I think of that I feel like a little girl again, trying to imagine that there could be as many people in the world as lights in my valley. The thought overwhelms me, and will, I'm sure, until I gain a greater perspective than this world can give.