Seeing

I go out to the same few acres of woods and down to the same point along a river nearly every day now.

This is worlds apart from the last five years of expat living and exotic travel.

We can be lured into thinking that all the most wonderful, mysterious, astounding, and beautiful things are in far away places.

And they are.

But they are also here, wherever here is for you, me, or anyone.

To continue to experience awe and delight, in what to us in our everyday experience becomes mundane and dull, is a skill.

Perhaps it is not what surrounds us that has dulled, but our vision, our way of seeing or not seeing what is there.

Perhaps we have lost some capacity to wonder.

I went out today and greeted the trees. They are bare and mostly clothed in brown. But each day I am captivated by how the light is landing on them, the moss, fungus, shades and textures of bark, their uniqueness, their scars.

If I look with eyes of wonder, awake to mystery, eyes that are tuned to discover the rich depth of each day, I know what joy in life is. Joy in life is not shallow, nor is it hidden. It is revealed when we soften to know it.