Wouldn’t it be nice if nature presented us seasons like the calendar does: On this day Fall begins. On this day, Winter arrives.
But it doesn’t happen that way, of course. Some days she feels like warm weather and zephyr breezes. On others, she pouts behind fog and rain.
And on some days she refuses to make up her mind and splits the difference!
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
~Rumi~
I love that exact moment when a wild creature acknowledges my existence. They look at me, and for a moment time is suspended and one species recognizes the other.
Trees, of course, are also aware of our being. Mere plants as well.
Okay, then, what about the rocks. Do the rocks know I exist? Can they speed up their slow lifespan to mine for just an instant to say, oh, there’s another one of those human things? Or are they just too busy in their rock world to care?
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim,
no meaning, and yet I’m happy.
I can’t figure it out.
What am I doing right?
~Charles Schultz, cartoonist~
Sometimes I trip over my own feet, because I am staring at the sky.
This day, the clouds were giving some very clear signals. The background white ones were fair-weather clouds saying don’t worry, everything is fine. The lower, darker clouds, rapidly moving in, were saying, don’t believe those guys. You are in for some baaad weather ahead!
I’ve learned to pay attention the clouds. The weatherman may sometimes be wrong, but the weather never is. You just have to know where to look.
You can’t be
what you can’t see
~Gloria Steinem~
I love old doors! When I found these two in an ancient house, I was hooked. They have weathered time and hardship and still are standing with a special beauty all their own. They remind me of family.
My sister and I have had our differences over the years, and our moments of joy together. But as we grow older, it is our shared history that becomes especially precious to me. Just like these old doors.
We know what it’s like to experience South Dakota thunderstorms, and steal apples from the neighbor’s orchard, and make snow angels in chest-high blizzard snow. No one else in my life, no one else in the world, can do that with me.
Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver and the other gold.
~Girl Scout singing round~
In the summer the sun rises early in New Hampshire. I knew there would be something to see if I set the alarm and rose to greet it. But I’d flown across country the day before and spent a good part of the evening catching up with family happenings.
I didn’t want to get up. Even so, I stumbled out and discovered this.
Beauty will sometimes allow us to share in its fullness if we do the hard thing, the one thing we really would rather not do. The reward becomes worth the effort.
We live in a moment of history
where change is so speeded up
that we begin to see the present
only when it is already disappearing.
~R. D. Laing~
I’m a Weather Channel junkie, and this week I’ve been glued to the screen watching rivers overflow, highways flood, people rescued from rooftops and attics. Water at its most destructive.
Yet I am reminded that it isn’t always this way. In the Arizona desert, water is precious, every single drop. On the trail around Courthouse Butte near Sedona, this little pothole has always been a favorite of mine. It’s not big–maybe a foot long and less than that deep.
But long after the monsoon rains have departed, it will hold water which sustains the desert animals: deer, javelina, coatimundi, rabbits, and pack rats. Reaching for the last drop, they will travel for miles to visit it. Water as precious as diamonds, life-sustaining.
We live on a planet of paradox!
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
As time remains free of all that it frames
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
~John O’Donohue, For Equilibrium~