My wife, Patty, and I are just back from a week along California's Big Sur coastline, one of the most astonishingly beautiful places on earth. Just type Big Sur images into your web browser and see what I mean.

Nature is God's art and it nourishes something deep within us.

Today I stumbled on a piece by Daniel Ladinsky who's spent his life writing contemporary renderings of the ancient mystic poets. Here's what Ladinsky says about nature; his description gets at what I feel when I am drawn into the vast, Divine canvas:

"Nature and art are sacred breasts we can feed on to grow. They are vital to our evolution. They offer a jailbreak or leave from the madness and demands we can get caught in. Of course love does that, too. Love dissolves boundaries and ultimately removes any contour that is not luminous."

For more on the nature of nature and art and love, and especially poetry, see Ladinsky's full blog post on Huffpost here.

Go there, because if you can't get to the Big Sur coastline or any other place of extreme beauty, you can pick up a poem and it might carry you into ecstasy. (And Ladinsky's got a couple great poems in his essay, especially the spiritually flirtatious poem by Rumi, The Body is Like Mary).