Really...what is Life all About anyway....

Find beauty and you find joy, peace, happiness, contentment, meaning, and even purpose.....no matter what fires may be raging in your life..let your sight be set upon that which surpasses, that which continues and even endures....beauty..... peace....love.....

A Matter of Perspective

Sometimes I need to scale down the view to keep myself from over focus on things I can not change. Things that I am not at all in control of in any way shape or form. Finding amazement in that  flowers continue to grow, bees pollinate....even as helicopters dip down right in front of me to scoop a bucket of water to bring to the fire burning just a scant distance away.... this keeps me sane, even joyful. The buckets on those helicopters really do appear to be minuscule...but then look at the legs on those bees...and they keep working  whether or not  fires are flaring...however teeny their efforts might seem....they keep on...they visit blooms, take pollen, nectar...go on with the business of being alive. And so we can...no matter what fires rage in our lives....nectar is around us....all the time....

Looking for Beauty

A compulsion to walk out to the garden and look at the orange trumpet vine in profuse bloom came to me yesterday afternoon. I picked up my camera and went to sit for a while by a large old vine at the edge of the garden. The hummingbirds were fighting over who gets to drink of her sweet nectar. I counted four and snapped photos of all of those I saw zooming in and around radiant blooms.

Joy began to creep into my heart once again. The simple (?!) act of focusing on what is good and true and beautiful shifted my vision from the smoke plumes, where the latest fire front is ravaging the forest, the engines coming and going, the terror of
back burning or back firing or firing or whatever new term is used to set the mountains on fire in an experiment to contain large scale fire events that won't be extinguished until large rain events occur....whenever this may be in a decades long  drought trend in California....to sit, to notice, to FOCUS on beauty is a choice which brought an enormous measure of relief to my heart. This is something I CAN do.