Oh How Lovely Was the Morning

 "On the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring" of 1820, a young Joseph Smith retired to the woods near his home in Palmyra, NY to pray. The result was a vision of God and Jesus that initiated his call as a prophet and eventually the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Recent analysis of weather patterns and other evidence suggest that that early spring day may have been March 26, Palm Sunday and the first day of the season when temperatures in the area rose into the 50s.

To mark the anniversary of this "First Vision" I headed over to the Sacred Grove at the Joseph Smith Farm and spent a few hours walking around in the cold, overcast, and snowy morning--not as clear or warm as the day in 1830. But still signs of spring were in the air, including over 20 bird species seen or heard in the grove (eBird checklist).

All in all a nice walk in the Sacred Grove, though not as remarkable as the experience of Joseph Smith. In his own words, because he couldn't decide which church to join:

"I at length came to the determination to “ask of God,” concluding that if he gave wisdom to them that lacked wisdom, and would give liberally, and not upbraid, I might venture.

So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.

After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.

But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!"

Early morning sun in the Sacred Grove

Deer in the Sacred Grove

Pileated Woodpecker workings.