In my early days on the farm, I used to take the dogs – Rose, especially, and sometimes, Orson, Pearl – up to the top of the hill, to sit in the Adirondack Chairs, and look at the strange and beautiful new world I had come to inhabit. I took with them St. Augustine’s “City Of God,” a dense and difficult book I had come to love through my readings of Thomas Merton.

The book is a far cry from the angry, dark and fearful visions of the future that offer a new kind of spirituality today. It is not for me to judge anybody’s spiritual vision, only to pursue mine, and Augustine touched my heart and spirit with his powerful evocations of a bright and beautiful place awaiting those of us who wished to go look for it and inhabit it. He set me on a path in many ways, and the farm’s path, the path I have always walked the dogs, has always seemed a roadway to a place of hope, light, love and beauty.

It has become for me, my own pathway to the City Of God, a place I have walked with the dogs, seen the seasons changed, come across the carcasses of stalked creatures, fallen trees, old stonewalls, fallen trees, a witness to my life, a place I go hand in hand every day with the true light in my life, Maria. This is also the place I took Rose on our last walk, and it was not a dark walk at all, but a place of great beauty and light, my highway along the Hero’s Journey. Somewhere out there is the City of God, and one day I will come across it, if I have not already.