My morning walk is often my total-immersion-in-the-landscape time. I’m usually very visual as I walk, taking in the colors, shapes, light, sparkle, and shadows. Today, even though we had the most colorful sunrise in weeks, well really, the only sun appearance in weeks, I started noticing the auditory landscape. First, it was the gurgle of…
Early morning disturbing dream: black smoke is billowing from somewhere in our front yard. I don’t want to jump out of bed and take care of a fire first thing in the morning, but of course, putting out the fire forces a higher priority than anything else. That’s the nature of putting out fires, and…
Ha! Home making tea after my morning walk, I peek at the quote on my teabag: “Earth laughs in flowers. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.” I laugh out loud. I’ve been tripping out on flowers all the way up the hill and back. I’m awed by the miniscule, yellow blossoms, less than a millimeter, on the…
I’m outdoors, and noticing windows…of time. It’s a windy, rainy, March morning with occasional rainbows. Each time I reach for my phone to take a photo, the light changes so quickly that I miss some of the brightly illuminated moments. The wet madrone bark is still orange, but not glowing, the full arc of rainbow…
Thoughts on Aging A few days before my birthday, a couple of months ago, I wrote about reaching seventy five years. I am aware of the passage of time. So much of it seems cyclical: watching the moon move through her phases, the replacement of the toilet paper rolls, the milk in the carton….
A few years ago, I started to visualize my life as an 80-year-old: vibrant, healthy, strong, engaged in meaningful projects, enjoying life. It wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine this glowing future. My life is pretty much that way now. But at the time, I also realized there were some elements of my lifestyle that…
When I was a kid, there was a feature on the comic pages of our local paper titled There Oughta’ Be a Law and one of the common themes used was someone “unclear on the concept.” It influenced me lifelong to notice when human behavior doesn’t match the prevailing understanding of an idea. Those were…
One way to take care of the environment is to hang out my clothes on the line and use free sunshine and and air to get them dry. Yesterday, I hiked up a butte, swam in a lake and drove 2 hours home. No, I’m not training for a marathon, I’m training for LIFE. A recent…
Picking raspberries this morning, I was thinking about the kind of people who understand how to pick berries. It takes “listening to” the readiness of the berries, that is, sensing if it’s ready to let go of the vine. If it’s necessary to pull hard, then the berry won’t be sweet. Is that a personality…
