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THE HOLY LAND IN YOUR HAND


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The Story of the LOGO

The Story of the Logo
There are some impressions that never leave you from your childhood, for better or for worse. I grew up on a model wildlife sanctuary, originally built by the chairman of Ornithology at Cornell University. I loved it and in a million small ways it made an impression on me. It spanned 90 acres that included 9 ponds, meadows, forests, and everything in between. Living in such a rural place growing up I learned to amuse myself with pond life, how the grass grew, the perfect time in the season to twist a cattail frond to make it "explode", how to catch those giant tadpoles that would grow to be huge bullfrogs, and generally how to squeeze every minute out of a day to spend it outdoors paying attention to the huge world of big and small things.
God the Artist
by Angela Morgan
God, when you thought of a pine tree,
How did you think of a star?
How did you dream of a damson West
Crossed by an inky bar?
How did you think of a clear brown pool
Where flocks of shadows are?
Because there wasn't much I could share with my mother as I watched helplessly as Alzheimers took her away so slowly, there were still a few things she gave me that influenced me. One such thing were the times she spent reading to me from a worn and tattered book titled, "The Best Loved Poems of the American People." She would read and I would listen to such a variety of topics. I found encouragement and fun and imagination from those poems she read, over and over and over. As I type this from my apartment in Tzfat, Israel, that book sits on a shelf across from me, still tattered as ever, its pages yellowed, and its covers held together by rubber bands now.
When she came to this poem, "God the Artist," it was a moment of epiphany as I considered for the first time that this great God actually saw the smallness of my world - and in fact thought about it to such degree and in such detail and in such ways that made no sense other than that He too saw such beauty in small things.
God, when you thought of a cobweb,
How did you think of dew?
How did you know a spider's house
Had shingles, bright and new?
How did you know we human folk
Would love them as we do?
God, when you chiseled a raindrop,
How did you think of a stem
Bearing a lovely satin leaf
To hold the tiny gem?
How did you know a million drops
Would deck the morning's hem?
It's that opening and closing line that truly strikes a chord for me. There IS something special about gazing at a pine tree at night with a star just over its silhouette. The tree is so dark and the star so bright. The tree is massive and the star seems so small, Yet, in truth that star is more massive than the whole of the earth on which I stand gazing at it- a pine tree shouldered by a star. They do always seem to show up together.
Our lives are so full of missed-perceptions. I have learned that when I feel down, I can no longer claim I'm too small to count. And when I am too proud, I know I'll never again miss the chance to see the magnificence in small things.
We're only here for a little while. I said a final good-by to my mother when I was barely 20 and laid her to rest. but I remember her reading to me this poem. So the logo has for me a double meaning. While I'm reminded that there is a greatness in small things, the tree with a star over its shoulder reminds me of the precious time with my mom when she couldn't do much more than read a poem out of an old familiar book.
This logo also reminds me that something as small as a bar of soap in hand still counts and can, in fact, change lives. And that star as a Star of David, makes me realize that a country no bigger than the state of New Jersey in the USA, is great in the eyes of the One who never looks away from it.
Why did you mate the moonlit night
With the honeysuckle vines?
How did you know madeira bloom
Distilled ecstatic wines?
How did you weave the velvet dusk
Where tangled perfumes are?
God, when you thought of a pine tree,
How did you think of a star?



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