This is the time of year when everything outside is fat, ripe, and exuberant. Everywhere I look there is something growing, flying, feeding, swaying, crawling; the natural world is full of infinite possibilities for exploration.
A few mornings ago I took a hike through a patch of forest near my home that I hadn’t yet journeyed. I ended up in some neighborhood and then wound back into the sanctity of the trees.
Dirt, mud, pine needles underfoot. Even a few of last year’s fallen leaves, in various states of decay: skeletal remains of those most deteriorated were also those that most captivated me … beauty incomparable.
Another morning this week as I waited for the vet to arrive, I spied the first swallowtail butterfly of the season. Then a second one appeared and I was lost in the colors, shapes, textures of fluttering wings on petals and that hairy half-caterpillar body … and then wings on wings as the two butterflies posed one atop the other for an instant that seemed too brief to be reproduction and too elegant to be a quarrel.
And a third morning carried a thunder- and rain- storm that pummeled everything … and then stopped as abruptly as it had arrived. The scent of rain was a powerful aphrodisiac: head over heels smitten with and beholden to the lover in every living nonhuman being.
But before all of this is the dawn.
That still-magical moment when the trusty ol’ sun – as fat, ripe, and exuberant right now as everything-nature on the Earth below – just does what it does: rotates into view, an apparition of beauty divine standing up behind the façade of horizon with head aglow.
Dawn: the serenity of human quiet before the day’s din forces its way in.
Dawn: the musical performance of birds, breeze, breath giving thanks for the day.
Dawn: hope and light, expansion and possibility.
Dawn: to be cherished.
(Orig. posted June 2018.)
