Espiritu Santo

Espiritu Santo Ascensor in Valparaiso, Chile, built in 1911. The narrow little doorway, the obscure sign marking the door. The great and spacious buildings. The shanties; the squalor. The steep ascent. The distance to climb. 

I love the metaphor.

I recommend James Talmage's Articles of Faith chapter on the Holy Ghost. Intriguing doctrine including:

"The Holy Ghost may be regarded as the minister of the Godhead, carrying into effect the decision of the Supreme Council.

In the execution of these great purposes, the Holy Ghost directs and controls the varied forces of nature, of which indeed a few, and these perhaps of minor order wonderful as even the least of them appears to man, have thus far been investigated by mortals. Gravitation, sound, heat, light, and the still more mysterious and seemingly supernatural power of electricity, are but the common servants of the Holy Ghost in His operations. No earnest thinker, no sincere investigator supposes that he has yet learned of all the forces existing in and operating upon matter; indeed, the observed phenomena of nature, yet wholly inexplicable to him, far outnumber those for which he has devised even a partial explanation. There are powers and forces at the command of God, compared with which electricity is as the pack-horse to the locomotive, the foot messenger to the telegraph, the raft of logs to the ocean steamer. With all his scientific knowledge man knows but little respecting the enginery of creation; and yet the few forces known to him have brought about miracles and wonders, which but for their actual realization would be beyond belief. These mighty agencies, and the mightier ones still to man unknown, and many, perhaps, to the present condition of the human mind unknowable, do not constitute the Holy Ghost, but are the agencies ordained to serve His purposes."

Well now. My poem from twenty years ago calling Uncle Eldon's "water witching" ability a "gift from God made manifest," was right in line with Elder Talmage.

Is my love of nature, my feeling of wholeness in the wilderness, one of the "gifts" of the Holy Ghost?

Clattering up the hills of Valparaiso or Santiago on hundred year-old funiculars invented and built by enlightened men, or rapturously experiencing the forces of nature beside a pounding ocean or rustling cottonwood trees, or hearing screaming hawks.....could these experiences be as truly spiritual as they feel to me?