Nature is My Sanctuary

KATHRYN JONES

March 24, 2020

I kneel at the altar of beauty and truth

worship within walls

made of infinite grains of sand

baptized by the stream 

hanging gardens of fern clinging to rock ledges

the turquoise sky lit like a glass dome

inner sanctum presided over not by angels

but by cicadas singing a universal hymn

glorifying creation with no religion 

measuring eternity with the churning

of the sun, moon, and stars

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.