SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT PARADISE is a place, but I disagree. To me, it’s an idea, a state of mind, a delight that you can visit occasionally, when you want to. “The path to paradise,” said Dante, “begins in hell.” And we have all been there, the pain, the missed diagnoses, the hospital bed, the return to surgery. But fortunately, a side trip to paradise is always available with a little will and a bit of imagination. I was there just this morning, in fact, during my walk in the dark. I thought about the beach just over Blind Pass on Captiva Island and all the shells I collected there that are displayed now in a glass vase in my house. It was high tide and the miniature conch shells were abundant in three feet of warm Gulf water as a light breeze stirred the branches of the Australian pines. The great thing about paradise is that it can be there when you need it, just for a few minutes while some sadist dentist works on your root canal, or as a passing fancy while you suffer a humdrum day, or even in real life when you sip your coffee and realize, a smile of satisfaction on your face, that ‘it doesn’t get any better than this.’
Actually, there is a real place of paradise: Heaven. And Heaven is real, God is real, and will give you comfort, peace, and healing through hard times and do beyond what anyone can imagine or even comprehend. In my life, God has worked miracles in so many more ways than one; even doctors have been stumped and said that shouldn't be possible. How did that happen? One answer: God. That's not a state of mind or a made-up paradise.
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Paradise is in Newfoundland, Canada... a real town... 12 minutes from where I was born in St. John's, aka God's country.
Well, Sally, I must disagree! My dad always told me that Ireland was God's country. You're telling me I was lied to all these years! LOL. Then again, when my parents spent time with us in California, we would regularly drive down the Pacific Coast Highway (The PCH for locals), just for fun, no particular destination in mind, just cruising. There is one particular spot, about 30 miles down the coast, that always brought a huge smile to his face. You crest a really steep hill that rises above the coastal hills. At the crest, you suddenly see the wide-open country spread out before you, rolling hills covered with waist-high grass, brown in summer, bright green in "winter" (it's never really winter, really). Redwood forests, oak-filled grasslands covering rolling hills as far as the eye can see. As this beautiful vista fills the senses, the salty smell and taste on your tongue (windows must be open to really experience it all) of the salty Pacific Ocean mist blowing up and over the beach cliffs overwhelms the senses. With the beautiful, pristine white beaches on the right, the grasslands on the left, my dad would sigh with that really contented expression on his face. "Ahhh... God's country," he would almost whisper in reverence to the beauty of the vision of unspoiled nature that surrounded us. The beautiful tiny lady in the back seat, my 5-foot-tall mom, would be huddled down to avoid the sight of the coastal cliffs. She would peek out the left window and nod her agreement. My mom hated heights and had a passionate fear of large bodies of water and crashing waves. This was their paradise, and my own... on that particular day.
When flying over Ireland to land in Dublin, the plane flies over my hometown on the edge of the West Coast, and it is a spectacular sight on a clear sunny day. The green irregularly shaped (almost no square fields) fields look like a patchwork quilt with every patch being a different shade of green, from slightly golden, muted green to a shade of green that is so vivid it looks like a color-enhanced computer simulation. (The color is related to the underlying rock, limestone, granite, glacial till makes for more or less vigorous growth).
"Aaaahhh... God's country," my dad would sigh as he stared at nature's beauty from 15,000 feet in the air. My wonderful mom would take a quick glance out the window and nod in agreement. "God's country," she would say.
So, I guess paradise can be more than one place, more than one state of mind if it gives you that really satisfied feeling deep in the gut... when it feels like
... "I'm home," and that can be more than one place.
Magoo