#AdventWord #Mother

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We were traveling by pontoon boat down the Sierpe River that flows through the largest mangrove swamp of the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica into the Pacific Ocean. Me, several other photographers and our boat captain and a guide were all scanning the shoreline for birds, crocodiles, iguanas, snakes, monkeys–you name it. The Osa Peninsula is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. I’m not sure who first spied the baby Green Heron (Butorides virescens), still covered with down, struggling among the mangrove and ficus roots along the bank. But no sooner had the shout gone up and…

#AdventWord #Declared/Sha’ir

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At the edge of the swamp, drink in the mundane beauty of tall grass, green and gold in its dying, a lovely copper choker of dead plants around its throat, all the more color full against a monochrome backdrop of nude limbs and twigs and trunks. Will we ever learn to cherish this divine home? “Sha’ir” is the Arabic word for “declared.” It is used to speak of Sufi poetry using earthly metaphors for spiritual experience. A Divine Invitation You have been invited to meet The Friend. No one can resist a Divine Invitation. That narrows down all our choices…

#AdventWord #Deep/Profundo

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16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?17 Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this.”–God, speaking to Job from the whirlwind. “Profundo,” the Spanish word for “deep,” rolls off the tongue with such a… well, profound tone and feel–especially if you can roll that “r” a bit like native speakers do. Both words, profundo and deep, send my mind immediately to the oceans…

#AdventWord #Truly

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Today I stood in the exact same spot I stood in seven years ago to make this photo of a White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). And today, like then, I was standing in that spot as a participant in the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. That December day in 2018, we counted birds from dawn to dark and saw probably a dozen white-throated sparrows, plus several individual birds of several other species of sparrow. Today we counted birds from dawn to dark, covered the same ground, and did not see a single sparrow! Do I need to repeat that? Today my…

#AdventWord #Robes

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In the biblical story of the prodigal son, the wayward boy returns to his father straight from feeding leftovers to pigs in a field. We are not told what he was wearing, but… my sibs and I did that growing up on an Iowa farm. We called it “slopping the hogs,” and I assure you, we wore our crudest farm chore clothes to do it. It was as dirty a job as it sounds! We are told that the loving father greeted his son by immediately commanding a servant to bring the finest robe and put it on him. Maybe…