Fifty-four frogs. I counted fifty-four pinky-nail-sized frogs on a single walk one day in a patch of woods near where I live. It began with catching some hardly noticeable movement in my peripheral vision – some strange small shift on the ground among the scattered pine needles, oak leaves, and gravel. I walked on slowly, winding my way among the trees, until I identified the little creatures. After seeing six or seven of them, I decided,  “I’d better keep count.”

Now twelve. Now eighteen wee hoppers. They just kept showing up along the way. Twenty… twenty-six tiny frogs!  Twenty six little bundles of DNA and some mysterious touching word from the Word himself whispered in a hidden deep beneath leaf-mould and swamp water.   

A friend of mine once said “there is a Person bigger than the universe.” And if he pleases he may peer through a single droplet halted for a moment at the tip of a leaf – to see, magnified in its clear convexity, the rich and secret world it windows out upon. He may even, if he pleases, send a peaceful army of frogs across a patch of woods for one person one day to count as they walk.  

Thirty! Thirty pebble-gray frogs!   

Dr. and Mrs. Walter Simmons donated the ten acres that have been cultivated into this little Arboretum just on the edge of a large suburban development nearby. It’s one of my favorite places to go walking in the afternoons. My dad is a tree farmer in rural Mississippi, and there is something about being in the woods that settles me. Something that grounds me. Humbles me in a way that is restful.  

The word humble is etymologically rooted in the earth, as in humus. It’s the same word as the food hummus, which tastes great, but kind of looks like mud. That’s why you’re being particularly humble anytime you eat pita chips and hummus. But, why is humility restful? Maybe because it is a return to the right-ordering of any thing within Creation. As a human, I am humus, literally of the ground, and called out of the earth by the loving voice of my Creator – Jesus.

My whole perspective on humility changed several years ago when I took a group of high school guitar students to a Phil Keaggy concert. I looked down the row to see their faces transfixed in wonder and joy as Keaggy played that night. Not one of those young guitar players felt threatened by Keaggy’s mastery; not one of them voiced an ounce of self-deprecation. On the contrary, the conversation on the ride home was overflowing with elation. We had all been ‘put in our place’ in front of a master guitar player, and the result of our humbling was joy. Humility frees us to take joy in the gift of life around us, to aspire, to shed the threat of competition, to “welcome all wonders”, to love.  

Just next to St. Mary Basilica in Natchez, Mississippi there are several oak trees more than two hundred years old. I’ve heard there is one around four hundred years old. It cannot be encompassed, though you try with all your might to reach your arms around. To walk among the trees is to be made small beneath their towering crowns, and to be glad to be so small. Humility and rest are interlaced. To know that you cannot encompass the world, yourself, or anyone is a relief. We can walk among the trees. We can lean against them and dally in the radiance of their in-lit green, and let ourselves be touched by the gift of our place beneath them.  

Now, thirty-seven frogs! Each one not much bigger than a pencil eraser. Little darkling droplet eyes and sinews knit intricately, taught for jumping along the forest path. Out of the corner of my eye: two more! Thirty-nine, as I round the corner where the path stems away and dips into the cedar brake.  

The Cedar Brake is not technically a part of the Arboretum, as far as I know, but folks have ventured off into this swath of fragrant cedar enough to wear a path through it. The footpath leads to a dead end at a small worn circle, where I imagine perhaps elves sup on occasion. There are smooth-skinned vines as big around as your arm that droop and sway from those branches, and in the Spring of the year, some kind of weed that flowers up tall and bursts into incandescent magenta like fireworks. The cedars themselves stand haggard with peeling bark.  

You might pinch a sprig from a branch, break it, and rub the bits with your thumb into one palm and breath in their freshness. If you do, I believe you’ll know something true about the cosmos – that, as Hopkins says, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Forty-three frogs! I’ve been walking for maybe an hour, and forty-three! I’ve been paying close attention, watching and hoping to see them. Ever since I was a little boy I have loved frogs. Did you ever have one of those ‘bug-boxes’ as a kid? It was about the size of a lunchbox, but shaped like a mailbox – the rounded roof made of wire-mesh like a screen door. At one end, there was an inch and half hole with a round door that swung on a single nail. Four or five-year-old me, would take my bug-box out most nights to the backyard to catch frogs. If I caught one, I would swing open the round door and slip him into the box, and trot to the porch under the light to get a better look.

Norman Wirzba said that “attention requires affection.” The willingness to pay the cost of attentiveness, starts with affection, with care. When I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, I get the sense that he is fond of the world. He sees it because he loves it. He’s willing to attend to it because it is dear to him. Care takes real courage, because it puts us in the place of vulnerability – the call to be responsive and simply receive, allowing another thing to be itself apart from our control. To love without possessiveness. In Matthew 21, Jesus says the Pharisees, like workers in a vineyard, would kill the heir in order to possess the vineyard. Ironically, they could have become co-heirs themselves – the gift was available, but their possessiveness was self-sabotaging. Control is easier than courage.

Fifty! Fifty fond found froglings upon the fortunate forest path!

Great Blue Herons wing over the water in slow flourish like enormous feathered calligraphers. There are boards missing here and there on the pier extending over the marshy water where the woods open onto a bay. I scared up some ducks who made a big racket before they hid themselves again in the tall water weeds. The cypress send up ‘tree’s knees’ around the water’s edge, and I wonder if there might be an alligator eyeing me nearby.

This spot is near the end of the walk. I’ll turn back toward where I parked and head home soon. This stepping away from home restores my capacity to belong to a home. This place, off of what Brian Brown calls the ‘conveyor belt of life’, has a way of gently cleansing the eyes of the heart to receive home as a gift.

I am wondering, if home is where our affections gather into attentiveness? If that’s so, I pray that my affections would be healed and led toward things that are actually good. In the end, I think, home is a truth outside of ourselves that eyes us tenderly with affection. We, at rare times, step aside and see, as in the periphery, what is really central – those eyes that look for us and give themselves to us as a gift.  

It may be that the quiet but incessant summons to attend comes as a bunch of frogs hardly noticed along the way. Sometimes it takes a lot of frogs for me to pay attention. But, I did pretty good today – it only took fifty-four.