One of the many things I love about my wife is her passion for nature, her never-ending wonder at it. She will stop to touch and listen to a tree, carry a newt across a busy road, carefully re-home a spider from the bathroom to a tree. “Will you kill the spider?,” she asks me. “Sometimes,” I say.

And so she will make sure it finds a new home. Walking in the woods today, she exclaimed in wonder at some fuzzy green matter floating by the edge of the pond. “Oh,” she said, “these are frog’s eggs,” and she paused in the afternoon light and knelt down and watched them for five or ten minutes.

Fate rushed up to see what was going on, and Maria carefully explained to her that these were frog’s eggs, please be careful. Fate stayed away from them.

I love these moment, sometimes she is self-conscious about them, not too many people care about frog’s eggs, but we are both grateful to be living in nature, we never take it for granted, never stop wondering at the way in which it reveals itself.

“By the appearance of light,” wrote the mystics, “the universe expanded. With the concealment of the light, the things that exist were created in all their variety. This is the secret of the act of Creation. One who understands will understand.”