I Love the Same Things...

November 9, 2018 from Vera Road

Coming home at sunset on a November night, I stopped to take this photo of the moon. It almost impossible to see the tiny sliver of moon but it is there. In person, it was singularly beautiful.

This is a view I have seen a thousand times since I moved here. Sometimes it is the Evening Star adorning the fading day with a brilliant diamond point, reminding me that Heaven will not be more beautiful to me, I swear. How difficult it will be to leave this earth behind when the time comes...

January 7, 2019 from I-70

I drive my daughter crazy - well, not just my daughter - but she does not understand that the same old things feed my spirit. I will listen to a CD a hundred times, each time falling deeper into the energy and artistry of the music. I am not a musician so I do not hear music the way a musician hears it, I assume. It is like falling into a mandala or sinking into a dream for me. I listen until I can feel exactly what the artist meant. It is the only way to listen to Bob Dylan. I had to get old enough to hear some things in his music. The first time I listened to "Going to Acapulco" I heard he wished he cared. I guess a good song is like a good painting - you live with it and always find something new in it. The ordinary is anything but ordinary.

I have a deeply held appreciation for the sunset behind the hills in my valley, especially the clear evenings when the long shadows of the hills and the waning light hide the twenty-first century disturbances that erode the natural beauty of this place. The Native Americans lived here for centuries and this valley was untouched in its pristine beauty for all of that time. A slow lowering of the light brings a timelessness to the valley that resonates in my spirit. I love it every time. I always pause, memorizing all of it. The Buddhists say we die and go into the bardo where we await rebirth. Our memories are lost between lifetimes, except for the tiny spark that carries from one lifetime to the next. I do not want to forget these things though I assume it is a mercy that we cannot recall one lifetime to the next. The longing would kill us.