Bookmarks -- Come Climb My Hill

I ran across this volume browsing in the library in Royse City. Normally, such a book turns me off, but perhaps my recent reading and commitment to walking has awakened something in me where I could not help but smile with this quaint poem and delightful pictures.Come Climb My Hill is about what you might expect, a call to wander in nature and seek what you may not even know what you need to find. But the poem avoids the polemic and sermonizing about finding God in nature (though it admits the possibility). I love the way it begins, saying to the open reader:

    because--

      you have listened

          to the heartbeat of the earth

      you have been invited to --

Along the way, the reader is reminded "only a Master Artist/can create a meadow." Okay, that line is a little hokey, perhaps, but Mr. Abbott manages to show its truth, not by argument or shouting to just look at nature, but by describing the details and delights of simply walking where nothing distracts the eye and ear.

Bette E. Bossen's drawings are more than complementary to Mr. Abbott's verse, but I think an integral part of experience of reading the book. They encourage the reader, like the words, to take forward steps to on a simple, but transformational journey.

The verse and pictures of Come Climb My Hill don't come close to Wordsworth, but they doesn't need to. This little book is an invitation worth accepting.