For those of you receiving this when it originally posts:

Christ is Risen! . . . Alleluia!

Welcome to Day 40 of the Wonders of Worship (WOW) series. Today we ponder Ordinary Time.

“I’ve come to believe that our beholding—seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment—is no small form of salvation.” -Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh

It seems fitting that the final image I share from this series is an inchworm and a trillium — a creature of transformation inching her way toward a flower whose community my dad used to love to proclaim, with hands outstretched, as “trillions of trilliums!”

That memory recalled and your presence realized make me so very grateful.

“Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” —Mary Oliver

Yes, they are, so with a hand over my heart, I bow and say thank you.

To download the black and white image for personal use: on a computer, click and drag the image to your desktop; on a phone, press on the picture until it gives you the option to save it to your photos. The image is formatted to fit on an 8.5″x11″ piece of paper, but feel free to print it whatever size you’d like.

Background: I created a series of forty 5″x7″ watercolor paintings inspired by the elements of worship. It was work commissioned by a project with Nourishing Vocation with Children at St. Olaf College, a program funded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative.

As the paintings are shared, you may notice a pattern:

• Music = Songbird
• Prayer = Seed and/or Fruit
• Word = Leaf
• Order of Service = Element of Nature
• Season = Insect with a Flower

One final creative invitation for this project remains for me: to paint a Tree of Life holding all forty elements. I plan to share its progress here.

For this series, I am grateful to have used handmade paper from White Dragon Paper and watercolor paints from Natural Earth Paint.