God's mighty creation

In the early 1980's I lived in Europe for three years, to be exact in southern Germany in the state of Bavaria, southwest of Munich, in an area known as Vierseenland (four seas or lakes land), in a town called Wessling beside a small lake (Wesslinger See). I was learning the trade of cabinetmaking and early on I did not know too many people there except the friends of my parents I was living with. I would not say it was a rough time in my life but there were days when I was a little lonely. Anyway, one day, around this time of year, I decided to go for walk after having studied my cabinetmaking theory for several hours. Wessling lies just on the northern edge of a huge but shallow valley which extends pretty much all the way south to the Alps. At the very time I came upon this scene there was a moment of twilight magic. About seven or eight years later, when I was living in the Lower Mainland, I woke up suddenly with all the ideas for a poem fresh in my mind. I had to get pencil and paper right away or my flash of insight would have been gone forever, or at least in the way I had "heard" it. I am not joking when I say this: I literally woke up and each and every word of this poem came crysal clear into my mind in one contious stream before I got up to write it all down.
Here it is:

  Distant Spires

   The evening light warm did fall

slanting slow through beechwood 'halls'.

Ancient images I beheld

as I did see a slaten spire shining fair

miles off, standing high of dusk befallen air

creasting high on a distant darkened hill

proud upon it's Alpen sill.

  There, further past a dimmer, orange, snowy range

it seemed to me

that I could look  upon a far-off

warm blue sea.

   Felix Hayo Scharnberg

It is a short poem but it is also an explanation of the singular beauty of God's creation in nature.

The beechwood trees I was walking through were so dense I could think of them like an outdoor hallway.

The ancient images were connected to all the activities of people living in this part of the world for the centuries gone by. Slaten spire refers to a fairly well known church known as Kloster Andechs, by the way they make very good beer in this tiny hamlet if you are into that sort of thing. To explain the whole scene some more: from near where I was standing all the way to the Alps over 100 km away the valley was in evening shadow. The exceptions were this Kloster Andechs with its slate tower still in sunlight and then the entire north wall of the Alps with colours of yellow to oranges on it's snowbanks to blues and darker purple on the rocky parts. Then, with this side of the Alps still being  in a sort of wintery state and having been in California and Mexico a couple of times I could imagine the warm Mediterranean Sea south of this impressive mountain range. Of course, the darking night sky leads into outer space and the vastness of all the rest of God's mighty creation! Here also is a photo of this Kloster Andechs that was taken at a different time during my stay. It is a very idyllic place, of which there are many in Europe.