Neal A Maxwell: The hippie of the spiritual giants

Good news everyone!  After a little over 7 weeks (more like 6 due to pneumonia or something of the like plaguing me for 1 of those weeks), I feel semi comfortable (what?) as a full-time, speech teaching, schedule planning, meeting attending, classroom leading Speech-Language Pathologist.  I'm finally able to complete most of my paperwork, planning, and scheduling before or after school and still get home to make dinner at a decent hour.  Unfortunately, because I come home so exhausted, I turn on the tv and veg until I realize it's 11pm and I should probably go to bed.  (Getting cable was not a good thing for me, apparently...)  Yes, this may be an exaggeration, but in retrospect I know there are so many better ways my free time at home could be spent.  Thus we reach my new personal goal: Read all of the uplifting/spiritual/revelatory, scripture-supplementing books I have always kept on my reading list, including but not limited to The Collected Works of Neal A. Maxwell, Jesus the Christ, Preach My Gospel, The Screwtape Letters, etc. etc.

I started Volume I of Neal A. Maxwell's Collected Works and have had a great (but weird at times) experience.  The first book in the volume is called "...A More Excellent Way".  This is about leadership.  While it was interesting to parallel his thoughts on leadership to the upcoming election, but it felt sort of outdated and not really applicable.  So I skimmed it.  Now I'm in the middle of the next book, "For the power is in them..."  I love how Maxwell finds a way to be poetic and straight forward.  I also love his interesting and unusual comparisons to spirituality and doctrine to make his point more clear, relatable, and memorable.  I have also been surprised by some of his interests and passions that peek out every now and then.  For instance, I found his tree-hugging, Al Gore side today!

"Man is acquiring a new respect - almost too late - for the wondrous order and ecology of nature, in which the relationships of organisms and their environments reflect natural cycles and rhythm.  The pollution of our atmosphere and streams, the denigration of nature's mountain wonders, and the general loss of man's direct interface with nature (which may be greater a spiritual need than we of the asphalt age realize) have suddenly shown us, more clearly than many of us have ever known before, that the order of nature is violated at our peril, and that man may not walk on earth without interruptional impunity...This concern with man's developing a more harmonious relationship with nature by abiding by its physical laws that are as immutable and as inevitable as those breeched laws of nature for which we now beginning to pay a terrible price."

Basically, I love Elder Maxwell.  I love his eloquence.  But most of all, I love that he's a nature lover.