The sea makes itself at home in my office … the skin of maroon and pink seaweed, kelp with rectangular puckers into which my finger reflexively probes, a tangle of sea plant with a thick stem; these remind me of their origin by the thick scent they release as they dry out on a rag atop my journals.
Sunset on my birthday calls me outside three times … first, lines of light striate the high western sky; a while after returning home, the striations morph into color and I’m out in the front yard gazing toward the Sound; a searing orange blaze then wakens me from my inside reverie and I rush toward the window made by trees across the street and raise my hands in gratitude for the sunset’s final gift of the day.
The tree boughs curl into vertical waves through the dripping windowpane of my office in the still-darkness of this nearly winter sodden dawn ... it reminds me of the blocky black cow at the edge of the road who caught my attention as I slowed toward the red light, grateful that I had a minute to pause and watch him.
On a fast road, I suddenly slowed down as my mind said, “Orange!” to the spread tail feathers of a flicker landing on a fence post … as my eyes and heart eventually captured the image, I realized that the color was more like robust peach, deep apricot, a tangerine creamsicle – fruity colors at the base of a sitting woodpecker.
I quietly walked the high tide line as a gift to myself … stooping to find pebbles as round and smooth as marbles, I also found my hands achingly cold with the sheets of sea vegetation flat across my palm, bed for the delicate crab shell I also brought home.
* * *
It is just so easy to find a gift, small but enduring, each day in the more-than-human world. The small examples above are only a sampling of the dozens in the past thirty-six hours that made themselves available to anyone who would notice ... I was the one who happened to pay attention; who noted in my journal; who passes these along to you now. When fear, despair, or grief for the world threaten to drown us with their claws, we are given that next new breath of peace, soul-nourishment, in the form of Nature. Each one of these Earth-given presents is a call to presence. Though they are good markers of time, and opportunities to reflect and move forward anew, birthdays and new years and holidays are not the only chances we get to begin again … we need only look, step out into, and touch our breathing sister soil.
(Originally posted six years ago today.)
