Avram and I are living a scant half mile from The Harvard Museum of Natural History and pass it when we walk almost every day.

It is open 361 days of the year (closed New Year’s, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas), has free admission always to those with Harvard IDs and free admission Sunday mornings for all Massachusetts residents.

It was increasingly embarrassing, therefore, that we had not yet gone. So yesterday morning we packed ourselves up (hand lens in tow) and trekked down for a late morning’s entertainment.

You have to hand it to the museum. It knows how to make an entrance. Or at least its architects did. The building is set 200 feet back from the road with an unimpeded view from street to stair. The walkway is like a teacher’s stare, holding you fast to the path to be trod. The visitor has a long time to contemplate what is on the inside by being gradually overwhelmed by what is on the outside.

(I can’t tell you more about the building, though, because while the keepers of the museum clearly have great regard for nature’s history and achievements, they seemed to give scant attention to human history and achievements. That is, there is no mention on their website, at least none that I could find, about the age, materials, construction techniques, architecture, or history of the building in which they are housed. It is as if the building is accidental and disconnected from their medium, as if nature is someplace far out there, exotic, distant and removed from what we build, live in and live on.  That is a pity and a gulf which I imagine will be bridged over the next decades as they continue to refine their message and purpose.)

The exhibits, however, are extraordinary. At the very top of the stairs is the Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, displaying case after case of precision replicas of flowers and their various parts, exquisitely designed and created by Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolph (heirs to a magical family of glass-makers) made entirely of glass. The Blaschka’s are the Audubon of flowers, only offering their creations in glass and 3-D. The artistry defies description and it exhausts the mind to think how they did it all. Just the two of them.

Next to that is an equal display of nature’s creative prowess in The Mineralogical and Geological Gallery. This room has something like an acre of cases of the magic and variety that nature creates in more durable forms. The expansiveness was, unfortunately, a bit overwhelming if one attended to the details. (That is a critique of this human mind, not of the exhibit.)

But taken as a whole, as a celebration of the awesome variety, agility, responsiveness of nature to the opportunities and demands it faces over time, it was absolutely invigorating.

Then imagine our surprise when, as we were trekking along miles of aisles, we lit upon this display: two rounded columns of deep-hued stone, looking for all the world like tablets ready to be etched with God’s sacred charge.

They are elbaite, we were told, a crystal of the tourmaline group which can sport any number of vibrant colors. (Even more suggestive is that the crystalline structure of the tourmalines is powerfully reminiscent of a Jewish star!)

Perhaps the Ten Commandments were not carved on simple stone slabs, after all, but emblazened on glorious technicolor crystals?

The world does offer endless possibilities - and it is so very good for us to be reminded of that, as often as we can.

(Photo of elbaite crystal at the Harvard Museum of Natural History)