I hadn’t been to the wetlands since December 31. That’s the date every year when I take a photo of sun setting directly behind the stand of trees on the west side of the lake. I’ve done it for three-four years. I like taking photos of the same place over time. I love to see the changing moods as the seasons roll by.
So it was March 10th and I found myself driving right past the wetlands’ little parking lot. I had a few extra minutes, so I pulled in and parked to get some quick photos. As I left, the idea came to me that I could take pictures on the 10th of each month to watch the changes.
To my surprise, when I noticed today’s date, April 10th, I remembered that stray little idea and went back to see how the wetlands looked today.
Here’s the result so far. Stay tuned. A May Edition could be rolling down the pike right now.
For some reason, I see the old guy down the road as someone Norman Rockwell would have painted, sitting there with his dog, talking to him.
You’re probably not old enough to remember finding a new issue of The Saturday Evening Post in your mailbox every week with a Rockwell illustration on its cover. But if you are, I bet you’re smiling right now as you think about it. Maybe you even have a Rockwell favorite or two. I do. But that’s a different story.
This story is how every now and then I’m lucky enough to see things through Norman Rockwell’s eyes. He saw things true. He didn’t try to pretty things up. He stayed away from the worst sides of things. For the most part, he just saw plain, ordinary people doing ordinary things. Some were touching, some funny, some heroic. And you could relate with them. And because Rockwell saw people through eyes of humor and love, you liked the part of you that related with his characters, you accepted your humanity with a little more lightness and grace.
What a gift, hey? To be able to draw people so truly that looking at them made you like yourself more?
What if we could do that for ourselves? What if we could look at the reflection in our bathroom mirrors with eyes of welcome and happiness and, oh, such deep appreciation—despite the flaws and faults and traces of sin. Appreciation means you see all that and it doesn’t matter or detract from the truth of you in any way. It means you’re seen and forgiven. I think that’s how Rockwell looked at people. His love and appreciation was so tender and deep that he found even the flaws endearing.
I suppose it’s asking a lot to be able to see all of that in the mirror. I don’t think that I could try it without laughing. But maybe laughter is exactly what I’d need. Maybe it would let me see that character in the mirror as somebody I knew, and forgave, and appreciated, and loved. I’ll try it. Only me and the face in the mirror will know.
Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to imagine that Norman Rockwell is standing behind me, smiling at me with his artist’s eyes. Maybe you could imagine that, too. Might be fun to try, hey? Maybe you’ll catch him winking at you. You never know.
Wishing you a week of brim-full appreciation, starting with that face in the mirror.
On the hill, in the rain, wild daffodils bloomed, sending their yellow light into the gray day. I took it as a note of congratulations. It was just two days past Christmas when I began this challenge, to add a piece each day for 100 days to these pages. “It will carry me through the winter, ‘til spring,” I hoped. And so it did. And more than that, it gave purpose to my days and kept me on the lookout for bits of beauty and delight to share, and that kept me afloat, regardless of the world’s cold and dark and sorrow. Always, there is beauty. Always, compensation. I will keep a ready heart and open mind, and write on.
Time, like an endless ribbon, has been unspooling now for nearly 100 days, and I, as luck would have it, rode each one on a highway of swiftly passing stories. And from each day I plucked one tale, and blessing it as best I could, sent it on, with love, to you, as I had challenged myself to do.
Now, look! Your eyes have come upon this one, this one before the hundredth. And as I reach that milestone I tell you that, from here, there appears to be no end.
That bare trees erupt with bursting buds simply because, so they tell us, the planet’s axis has tipped toward the sun, is one wonder. A larger one, it seems to me, is that we can walk past, hardly noticing, if at all. What a world, where miracles occur in such profusion that we barely give them a ho-hum!
When I was walking in the park last week, I happened across a young pine who looked so much like my dear old friend, Little Pine, that for a minute I thought I’d been transported back in time. That’s her, the new one, in the photo below. Today, the universe nudged me toward a file where I found, to my surprise, the original Little Pine story from March of 2010. What better love letter, I thought, could I send you today than to blend these two finds together and send them with a smile.
The little pine grew surrounded by mighty elders whose tops brushed the sky and whose branches were homes for squirrels and birds and bugs of every description. She loved the way the wind made music in their boughs, and showered their red needles at her feet. She loved the sparkling fireflies that came in summer to dance from the ground to the stars above.
But most of all, she loved the quiet nights when the elders would whisper the fantastic tales of The World Beyond that they learned from the visiting birds.
Much of it was beyond the understanding of the little pine, and she had no way of knowing whether the stories were make-believe or real. But they were grand stories either way, and as the seasons passed and her understanding grew, the elders were able to explain what the fables meant, and stories took on great beauty and increasing meaning.
The stories the wrens told differed somewhat from the ones the robins told, and theirs differed from the owls’ version in many details. But one year a great eagle had built its nest in the top-most branches of an elder who dwelt high up the distant slope, and it wove the bits of the birds’ stories into one magnificent piece.
Counsels of elders had studied the eagle’s tale through the ages, and passed it down as clearly as they could to the all the trees in the forest.
Just as each tree was a distinctive expression of life, they said, with its own sap and wood, its unique pattern of bark, needles and branches, all together the pines and their leafy cousins were part of a larger community of life known as a forest. And beyond the forest lay other communities, known as plains and mountains and deserts and seas. And altogether, they made up a whole called a planet, and her cousin was the moon, and her mate the sun.
That was all the eagle knew for certain, from its travels. But it believed, the elders said, that the sun and moon and planet were part of yet another whole that was part of another and so on, forever. And its nature was joy, for the space that bound it all together was made of love so vast and deep and all pervasive, that even the tiniest ant who crawled across the pine’s needles felt its power. And every bit of it mattered and was needed to fully express love’s song.
That, the elders told the young pine, was the importance of being exactly who she was. She was needed for love to express exactly the note of joy that she embodied, and in all of creation, she alone could sing it.
Mimicking nothing, following nothing but its own inner song, trusting that being is its own reward, reaching only toward fulfillment of this moment’s highest possibility, it unfolds in exquisite perfection.
From the west, low peals of thunder announce the coming rain, its scent perfuming the air that wafts across the spring-green fields. At their edges, maples lift red buds skyward like children sticking their tongues out to catch the rain’s first drops as they fall. You can feel the wanting and waiting of it, of its joyous anticipation, and hear it breathe in whispered song, “We’re alive. We’re alive. We’re alive, my dear. It’s spring, and we are alive.”
The Yes, whose merest spark of thought creates whole worlds within worlds, whose living laughter flows endlessly between and around and within them, whose joy knows no bounds, whose life force flows in our blood, whose light illumines our souls— that Yes—is alive here, right in the midst of this moment in Spring.
I can’t, of course, put the whole experience into today’s one bottle. The temperature and moisture of the air alone would take up probably a third of it and there’s still the lake and pines and sky. The best I can do is tuck in a couple glimpses. So that’s what I do. It takes more than the hour I thought I’d spend when the whole thing began. But every minute of it is rich, given that it’s a gift of love.
I leave it in the hands of the universe to get it to its final destination, to those who need exactly what it brings. My only job is to make sure I send something, that I choose what to enclose in the love note each day. To be honest, I’m not even sure I’m really the one who does the choosing. It feels more like listening for a hunch sometimes and going with that.
I like hunches. I like their spontaneity. They’re like a small bell ringing, right over there in the clearing, or like a kid tugging at your shirt tail. It’s easy to disregard them, to brush them off. It took me years to learn that hunches almost always take me to the exactly right place. Now I turn where they direct with a kind of eager anticipation to see how things will turn out.
Sometimes you have to make a leap of faith in order to follow a hunch. It can feel scary to do something you’ve never done before, to take a turn down an unfamiliar road. But if you have no faith, you miss out on a lot of life’s fun and adventure, to say the least.
Besides, the same agency that sends out the hunches sends out alarms if the risk is something you need to weigh with a measure of care. Over time you learn what level of risk you’re willing and confident enough to take. It’s a kind of skill you develop with experience.
When I’m out taking photos, for instance, I get a hunch that if I stood over that way about ten feet, the angle would be fabulous. But then an alarm goes off and cautions me to note the slippery mud on the rocks and to test their stability as I make my way along.
From a certain point of view, all of life is a risk/reward proposition. You take the risk of drawing your first breath, letting out your first scream, and you’re on your way. Everything from there on is a reward, even if it takes you a few lifetimes to see how that can be. It’s all a gift. It’s all benevolent in the long run. Even the parts that hurt.
Next Saturday, good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, I’ll complete my 100 day challenge. It’s been interesting to see how it’s evolved. It’s an established habit for me now, finding something to send out, in love, every day. I think I’m just getting started.
And next Sunday, you’ll have another letter from me, sharing whatever observations my hunches lead me to find.
