2.1.13   Wonder,  Rendered Over and Over and Over 

     Everyone has such different lives. Filled with such different moments and habits and cirucmstance.
      All week long I have the nicest ,most appreciative people come into my office, one after the other, Prepared to ask questions and listen to observations and Health Education when it comes to healing their blood pressure or diabetes or bone density or painful neck or insomia or complex kid or what not.
      I listen all week in confidence and have some slight idea of what it's like to be other flavors of people, listening to people and having some conversations over many many years, sometimes 25. But still, we are all so individual in what we encounter in our days, and how we feel about it and what we choose or by default end up filling our days and nights with.
      For me, beauty in nature is as essential as food or air to breathe, and since childhood, is something that glistens, that calls, that waves its arms as I try to drive somewhere or focus on a task or get ready for dinner. It's remarkable and endless wonder awaits any moment in time when one stops and stands, watching, or listening to a tree or the birds overhead, or watch the changes in wildlife families and generations, or hike by a stream and get to know it, in silence, in all seasons.
     Knowing and seeing the evidence of so many other living beings in their habitats is profound. It enables us to be reminded that stuff happens. That we are not alone. That since the beginning of time, stuff has been happening to humans the world over, and every other species and every other living thing. When something difficult or even untenable happens, when we have this awareness of others, we can rest in the knowledge that we are in good company of others who have struggled and managed or not.
     Today on Fall Over Friday, I drove K. to work, catching sight when turning a corner of this field and this stream, a small universe that I sometimes visit and often glance at with tenderness and longing. After dropping him off, I rushed happily to  return to this swampy stream area .
     The rain had flooded us for a few days, followed by a deep freeze, and then receding of waters. In this low lying area, as I left my car and walked down the dirt path, was the flooded field, the mounds of grass plants wearing intricate skirts of ice, the water filled land warming in the early morning sunlight on still a freezing cold day. The ice remained, precarious, suspended a foot above the actual  levels of water beneath. All around me was creaking and cracking and smashing and popping as branches of trees that had been caught in iced over temporary lakes were released like small budded balloons into the air, frozen areas becoming thinner and falling under their own weight down to the surface of frozen soil or water below. 
     The hills of iced grasses stretched out before me, simply luminescent in the sunlight, the  abstruce patterns of ice in grass and soil, on closer look, like thousands of remarkable paintings, the stream rushing past and pressing into all the frozen areas around trees and stumps and small waterways, almost simmering with life and movement and loveliness. 
     Like a stalker or a devotee, I strolled around and around and around, unable to penetrate the depths of the small forest and swamp, but able enough to catch hold of the quiet, largely overlooked wonder of this ecosystem, with all its inhabitants, on this the first day of February. 
     Which is why I fall in love with people's stories and family photos and reminiscences and drawings and why I love one and then another and another photo of a beautiful place that I simply cannot rend into something that stays within me to any degree of satisfaction, which is why myself I love small videos of one place, just as if you are standing there, just standing and listening and watching, as the car drives by and the earth shifts a bit on its axis and the two redtails get scoulded by the huge flock of young crows and the small mice that migrated out of the flooded area slowly move themselves back in. And later, I get to watch little videos like ...these. Getting rendered, over and over and over.