COLORFUL CATHEDRALS

Scenic Overlook, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC
Natural Color Filters, Price Lake, NC

We human beings are continually evolving and those beings that adapt and reproduce will pass along the traits that have enabled their survival. Endless spirals of DNA molecules contain the elaborate and awe-inspiring language of God himself in every creature that has been created in his image. I’m intuitively certain that one of those critical traits is the innate ability to sense the changing of the seasons and make the appropriate preparations in time to survive the next one. The season of Fall seems to trigger deeply known warnings that the cold and desolate season of Winter is imminent.

The October sky is pattered by high flying wispy circus clouds occasionally highlighted in the late afternoon by colorful fire rainbows as the setting sun reflects their embedded ice crystals. The night air turns cooler and begins to restrict the flow of life-giving nutrients that sustains all living plants and trees. Green chlorophyll recedes from the tree leaves revealing their true colors of red, yellow and orange at the extreme tips. The subtle transition isn’t missed by the human beings that scurry beneath the wide-ranging tree top canopies of colorful leaves. The trees relish the opportunity to show off their new colorful garments to the wondering creatures below.

The air temperatures at the highest altitudes are the first to grow colder, so they become the “canary in the coal mine” to sound a quiet alarm that the leaf shackles of the mother trees will soon be broken. Mankind constructed paved pathways among the colorful trees long ago to enable travel in the high-country mountains. Now the multi-colors that were painted with a broad brush across these hills and mountain peaks are in full splendor. The embedded DNA of the human survivors attracts them to the colors like a moth to fire light. They begin to drive, ride and hike along the winding paths under the filtered sunlight in the woodland forests as if they were experiencing a walk through one of the grand stained glass cathedrals of Europe. But these places of spiritual worship are not man made; rather they are fashioned every year by the loving hand of a God that has never stopped creating.