Patrick Gordon-The search for meaning on the Nolan Trail

As I drearily put one foot in front of the other on the Nolan Trail, I search (to no avail) throughout the creation there to find meaning. Everywhere I look, the trail’s surroundings seem silent; almost as if it were a lock box of secrets. I stop this awry approach and read Annie Dillard’s Interrogation of Creation again for inspiration. Once finished, like a lightning bolt from the sky, I understood what I had to look for. My search is not tangible; it is an exploration of an idea! This idea is a way of life, a symbolic word that is even used in our great country’s Constitution: Freedom. I started my search anew, determined to find examples of this idea, when I suddenly began to hear the sounds of assorted matter falling from trees and elevated bird songs. This is when I come to realize that freedom cannot be found in any one being, all the life on the trail (flora and fauna), as a whole, must work together to represent this idea. While loosing myself in these revelatory sounds I reached a downward slope in the trail, I looked lakeside and noticed a turtle sunbathing nonchalantly on a log. I began to think about how wonderful it could be to be a turtle; no real natural predators, swimming all day, and sunbathing; when suddenly a cardinal caught my eye. I began to follow this cardinal down the trail, watching it flitter and fly from tree to tree. When it suddenly cut off its original path to fly in a circle around me, I then immediately switched gazes to the sight of two love bugs that crossed my path and were floating through the air. I followed their majestic trail (like a toddler) to a tree; where I found a trail of ants leading downward from about half way up, to the ground, and then off into the sundry leaves. I say aloud “this is it” and with the turtle, cardinal, love bugs, and ants in view I was truly seeing for the first time. In this intensified view of creation, I found that all of it is not a series of well calculated behavioral patterns and systems for survival, but a symbiotic sense of freedom. All the lazy turtles, frisky cardinals, and methodical insects “flow freely” around me. Not because they are a part of any scientific idea or because they are all a part of God’s plan, but because our God is a great lover of freedom and our creator loves pizzazz.