Blue Hills: A Spiritual Perspective

by Margaret Lathrop


"I shall lift up mine eyes unto the everlasting hills."
I love that sentence. I love its musical inflection and its evocative beauty that conveys a sense of inner stillness and profound comfort.
The poet was not speaking about mountains, but rather he spoke of pastoral hills, gently undulating along the horizon like waves of a placid lake on a summer day.
Mountains are not comforting. They are awe-inspiring and fiercely beautiful, but they are also overwhelming in their majesty, and rather intimidating.
But hills hold their valleys cupped gently as a child holds a butterfly, protecting the valleys from the ravages of storm and tempering their climates in small ways about which we so seldom think.
These low, blue hills that surround our valley town are the sort of hills that the ancient psalmist had in mind, and no day passes that I fail to look toward them and marvel at their loveliness.
I think of these hills as the "blue hills," part of the ancient Niagara Escarpment that was built up untold millions of years ago by the skeletal remains of tiny crustaceans that lived in the shallow sea that once covered this valley. But their coloring shifts with the changing light and the revolving seasons. It ranges from sapphire to rose to indigo to muted violet.
Nothing on earth is truly everlasting but surely these encircling hills, ancient as they are, can give mortal man a sense of the eternal.
Once those hills were crisscrossed by small, forgotten back roads where it was safe to meander along at a pace of our own choosing. Often, my late husband would drive slowly along those roads, stopping often in order that we might savor the views of Lake Winnebago in the distance or breathe in the fragrance of the wild roses that cavorted so freely along the hedgerows.
Now those back roads have been altered to accommodate the increased volume of high-speed traffic of our present age.
When folks get into their vehicles and turn on air conditioners and soundtracks, they successfully insulate themselves from the natural world. They become as strangers in their own country, cocooned and separated from the very land that sustains them. There's a sadness in such purposeful separation.
Speaking only for myself, I can say that now more than ever I am wedded to the beauty of the world without which life would seem sterile.
From crimson sunsets to shimmering moonlight to the translucent light that pours itself across these ancient hills at dawn, I am sustained and comforted by the artistry of the Creator. In their constancy I find a spiritual perspective that allows me to let go of the heartache of loss and find comfort in knowing that long after my feet no longer follow the earth path, my soul will remain a part of this green valley and my spirit will become a part of the luminous light that flows across "these everlasting hills."