Paths Taken

Images of paths - whether forest trails, dirt roads, sidewalks, or highways - always make me think of paths taken, or not taken.

Some Days are Special

Some days your sweetie tells you - out of the blue - that most beautiful women have plain or even downright ugly noses, not a cute one like yours...

Some days, your son volunteers to collect you at the train station...

Some days, your brothers and your friends send funny greeting...

Some days, you send your mom flowers - because this is the day she gave birth to you...

It is my birthday today, and it has been filled with small moments of joy and sweetness and mirth.

I am blessed.

Catch a Sunbeam!

After a long and tiring (but extremely satisfying!) day gardening and catching up on chores, a walk at sunset thru our quite "pocket wood" is a welcome respite. Here, I watch cardinals dart and dance amid the brush, and rest my computer-weary eyes with green foliage and dappled forest light. I have claimed Thursdays as my "at home" day, but sometimes it just doesn't feel like enough...a feeling I am sure most share with me!

But if I rise above my self-pity and look around, I see so many blessings in my life...

 ...and so I will spend my sunset catching sunbeams!

Raindrops: The Only Jewels I Need...

Today is the sort of chill, grey, drizzly rainy day that makes one wish one could sit all day by a cheery fire, sipping tea and reading a great book. Its the sort of rainy day my garden loves: a slow, deep, gentle watering. And its the sort of drear grey light that converts droplets of water into flashes of quicksilver and sparkling diamonds.

Truly, plentiful and clean water is a gift. 

When my garden is so thoroughly irrigated by nature's gentle rains, I think on those who live in places that do not receive this gift... lands of drought, desertscapes, areas of toxic desecration - where there may be water but it isn't life-giving, lands of harsher seasons where life teeters on a sharper edge.

It is so easy to ignore the gift of generous, gentle rainfall - how often do we curse it as inconvenience? or wish for sun? yet all sun and no rain is drought...

We have become so far removed from life, from cycles of nature, from "where my food comes from", that we scorn what makes the farmer and the gardener rejoice.

And so I remind myself of the preciousness of each dazzling raindrop today!