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Welcome! This is a place to share how we celebrate & deepen our relationship to Nature. Here you will find stories, images, & ideas about wilderness, human nature, & soulfulness. Drawing from the experiences of everyday living, the topics on this blog include: forays into the natural world, the writing life, community service, meditation, creativity, grief & loss, inspiration, & whatever else emerges from these. I invite you on this exploration of the wild within & outside of us: the inner/outer landscape.



Friday, May 12, 2017

Ordinary/Extraordinary

The singing robins in my yard; the city park with trails near rabbits and herons, a path next to sapsuckers crafting perfectly round pock marks in pond side trees, and the osprey atop his towering nest; the dripping coastal forests and perpetual waves on the shore; the simple ritual of a quiet cup of coffee in this overcast island’s spring and summer light; these are the ‘daily-nesses’ that help us feel fully alive and vibrant. They are not the exclamation marks in life. Rather, these beautiful offerings are the foundation of an earth-based existence, those which give voice to the ordinariness as a human; they are commas and periods, semicolons and dashes. Without this common ground with all other beings in our everyday landscape, we become disconnected, cut off, incomplete. These ordinary aspects of life provide constancy: sustenance. The other experiences—the green flash at sunrise over a Baja beach, a wild pony’s mane brushing my mother’s cheek when he put his head inside our rental car window—are woven in as the exclamation-marked, bold, and highlighted paragraphs in life.

We need both: the daily-nesses to remind us of our rightful, still, quiet place in the whole fabric of being; and the marvelous, to make tangible the divine in a world that so very much needs the peachy-mauve glow on the snowcapped peaks at sunset.





(Adapted from a post on July 8, 2011)



All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2017 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."