Treasure

Gold in the meadow

You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure.  It all depends on how you view your life.

~ Paulo Coelho

Morning stroll

I could be wrong but I believe that sometimes things happen for a reason.  If we’re lucky, we get to know what that reason is.

Rubies

While out on my walk this morning, I started peering through the brush and the trees.  Now that most of the leaves have fallen, I can see into places I haven’t been able to see into before.

Blue sapphires and rubies

There are treasures hidden in the depths of the brush along the sides of the trails.  Red and blue berries hanging out together.

A ring

Seed pods sculpted into fun shapes.

Long earrings

Deer trails, and the occasional deer herself, white tail flashing as she crashes through the reeds into the marsh.  Or birds looking back at me.

A little bird in a sweet gum tree

But in among the treasure, there is the trash.  The discarded tires, the large black bags filled with household rubbish, the plastic and more plastic, the leftover building materials, and the ubiquitous Coors Light cans.  (Someone drank a lifetime’s supply of Coors Light when they were living here.)

More rubies

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

~ Ray Bradbury

I took photos of some of the trash, but I’m not going to show them to you today.  I’d rather concentrate on the beauty, on the treasures.

A cluster of jewels

I don’t know for sure that M and I were meant to find this house and this property.  I don’t know for sure that we were meant to clean it up, to restore it, to be the caretakers for a while.

The stars of the show

But I do feel as if we are meant to be here, for reasons mentioned or for other reasons I have yet to discover.  I can almost feel those other, deeper, inner reasons.  I will have to wait and see if they will reveal themselves.

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth.  We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it.  We may not be suited to it, but here we are.

~ Steven Jay Gould

Hello!

We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us.  A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ available to us is to take care of those things.  We have no need to contrive and dabble at ‘the future of the human race”; we have the same pressing need that we have always had — to love, care for, and teach our children.

~ Wendell Berry

The backyard

Be good, be kind, be loving.  Just Be.  🙂

Today’s joys:  The beautiful song of a hidden bird.  The flash of a white-tailed deer.  Jewels in the woods and meadows.  The time to take a slow walk so I could truly appreciate all that I saw or smelled or heard or touched.  The strong rhythm and beat of my heart.