Mystical Response

I have been reading so much about the mystical 'way' of responding to God or encountering God through beauty, that this little formula for a mystical 'limbering up' or practice came to me yesterday.

Gaze at the stars and marvel at their beauty;
Ask the darkness to enfold you, and feel its velvet embrace;
Let your heart dance to the flames and sparks of a fire:
know that the warmth you feel is from the dance and from the fire.
Do these steps again and again, until you are the dance and the fire;
Do them again and again until you are the stars and the embrace
And the beauty.

St Augustine said something a little bit along these lines, but in more length and greater detail and much more gloriously:
Question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air amply spread around everywhere; question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars, question the sun making the day glorious with its bright beams; question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays;
question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on land, that fly about in the air; their souls hidden, their bodies evident; the visible bodies needing to be controlled, the invisible souls controlling them. Question these things. 
They all answer you, 'Here we are, look; we are beautiful.'  Their beauty is their confession.

That's a wonderful confession!

The image is of water patterns in the sand on a beach on North Ronaldsay, Orkney April 2010.