My World Tuesday

Perfection in the form of an apple pie.

For more images from around the world:  My World Tuesday

The sun tried to come out

SkyWatch - Part 2

The sun is setting over the duck pen around 3:15 p.m. today.  A bird flew into the picture and even though it's blurry, I left it in.

Gray skies today

Even the dog wishes it would stop snowing!  We got another foot last night.

For more colorful skies, check out SkyWatchFriday.

Christmas Morning

Notice how dark it is outside!

Amber

Alyson

Where's mine?

Got it!

Hey, that's not yours!

My World Tuesday

Prayer flags we bought in Bhutan grace our property and send out good wishes to all sentient beings.  

You can see more wonderful pictures from around the world here.

Dazzled by a brilliant act of civil disobedience

An amazing 27 year old University of Utah student did something incredible on Friday and we should be shouting from the rooftops.  

Tim DeChristopher single-handedly stopped some major BLM oil and gas leases from being sold by outbidding serious buyers.  He admits he doesn't have any money but he wanted to stop the process and it is stopped until February.  You can read about it here and here.   He won bids on 10 parcels around Canyonlands and Arches.

He explains why he did it in his own words here.  He's going to need a lot of support in the future for taking a huge risk to protect the lands we love.  

I just love creative audacity.

Almost Christmas - Winter Solstice

No longer feeling like the grinch, I succumbed to peer pressure and put up a tree and outside lights.  I do enjoy the lights, especially on this shortest day of the year.  My presents are wrapped with care and we are all anticipating the opening ritual that will be upon us soon.  

Weather Pixie

Today's fresh snow with BLUE SKY!

"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. "-- Dorothy L. Sayers

OK, so maybe I'm not always having original thoughts, but these are original photos.  And, occasionally I do post an original thought.......for whatever that might be worth!

Skywatch Friday!

Except it's not Friday yet, oops!  I hit the return button by accident.  At any rate, I'll be ready for Skywatch when it IS Friday.  I spent days waiting for a colorful sunset and was rewarded with these beautiful shots of "our" mountains.  That's what I get for being a little antsy and impatient at heart about posting.

For more beautiful shots, check here on Friday!

Freedom

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."  --Soren Kierkegaard

What is freedom, really? 

I looked it up and it is defined as a lack of constraints, or as freedom from something, like fear, want, hunger, pain, depression and/or addiction.  Who wouldn't want that?  But how do we get there?

Hint:  it involves the loss of ego; hence the dizziness.  

It's a spiritual pursuit and it requires a lot of work to live in freedom from constraints.  There is also freedom to be joyous, freedom to be yourself, your truest Self, to just Be. That's another challenge.  Life seems to be full of them.

I think that the path to freedom is through spiritual practice.  What works for me won't necessarily work for someone else but we all want the same thing.

Arlo

"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats."--Colonial American Proverb

"Cats are smarter than dogs.  You can't get eight cats to pulled a sled through snow."--Jeff Valdez

Abstraction

"I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract.  No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it."  --Stephen Wright

On such a gray day....

"Flowers are for our souls to enjoy."

--from the Sioux tribe

Skywatch Friday!

Clear blue sky to the southwest

Only ten minutes later the sun has lit up my world!

Sunday Stroll on the Flume Trail

How lucky can I be to live so close to such a beautiful trail?  

The landscape is spectacular. Every day, every season, it looks different.  Today was a late fall/early winter day.  The snow on the trail was like a soft cushion.  The temperature was in the low 40's which was quite pleasant for a day in December.  The sky was partly cloudy, sometimes a dull gray, sometimes a brilliant blue.  

Dogs are hikers too

The sun shines from the west in the afternoon on to the eastern rock formations.  Usually I walk this trail earlier in the day, then it's the reverse.

Snowflakes or dried flowers?

It was a little over three miles round trip

A bridge to somewhere

The grass dried like this, it's not the wind blowing it

Silhouette against the sky

Happy dog at the end of the hike

You can always find someone to blame....

Spud....

Skipper....

"Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog." --- Doug Larson

Skywatch Friday

St. Paul's church rooftop

Last night on the way home from work

Early this morning 

Check out other cool sky pictures from around the world at Sky Watch Friday.

There are new posts every Friday.  Submit your own!

Moon, Venus and Jupiter in the night sky

A rare moment in time and space occurred tonight.  Too bad I don't have a lens with more power, but it was worth the effort.

Ice

"Constant kindness can accomplish much.  As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate." --Albert Schweitzer

No ice here!

John Muir's thoughts on one of my favorite activities

"In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks."

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

Happy Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action." --W.J. Cameron

Things I'm thankful for:

My family

My friends

My health

Chocolate

Coffee made from fresh roasted beans

Great food

My house and bed, warm and comfy

My beautiful surroundings

Music

Movies

Books

Beautiful art work

My camera and computer and the internet and emails and blogs

Birds, ducks, cats, dogs, llamas and mostly all animals

Curt and his yurt and our meditation classes

My little red car

Travel

Fires in the wood stove in the winter  

Air conditioning when it's really, really hot

Lakes, oceans, rivers, tiny little streams where the fairy winkles live

Magical realism

The miracle of healing

Love

The Beatles

Blue sky, sunsets, sunrises

The absolutely breathtaking beauty of 

the moon and stars and planets and galaxies

and the mystery of life and the spirit

A beautiful fall morning

"Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees."

--Faith Baldwin

Nothing Gold Can Stay

"Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold,

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay."--Robert Frost

Still Life

"Spiritual joy and wisdom do not come through possession but rather through our capacity to be open, to love more fully, and to move and be free in life."  --Jack Kornfield

Happy Holidays or Bah Humbug?

My Christmas cactus starting to bloom got me thinking about the holidays.  As someone who no longer celebrates the birth of baby Jesus, I suppose I'm missing the "reason for the season." That's ok. What bothers me is the crass commercialism surrounding the event.  Before Halloween was even over, there were decorations out.  How did giving a nice orange and some nuts a mere 100 hundred years ago develop into the custom of spending massive amounts of money on people and decorations?  

I appreciate the generosity of spirit that is being practiced and I think it's a good thing to give to others.  I am guilty of training my kids to expect a lot. I got them hooked on loads of presents for Christmas.   It was easier to do when they were little, of course.  How do I now extricate myself from the expectation of generosity?

I do miss the absolute magic of the Christmases I experienced when I was little.  After what seemed like an infinity of time waiting for THE DAY, we would get up in the morning and open presents at home and eat waffles for breakfast.  That afternoon it was off to Grandma's house we'd go where there was another full Christmas tree and stockings.  We would eat our traditional dinner there.  Now that I have had to cook some of those huge meals, I really appreciate the amount of work and love Grandma put into her dinners.  When the girls were little, the magic returned because they believed in Santa Clause and were so excited on Christmas eve and in the morning.  I loved hiding the presents and digging them out to put them under the tree.  I wasn't as fond of hauling everything up to Wyoming to spend Christmas with Gary's family, but I did enjoy the happy chaos of the day.  

Now my grandmother is gone and Gary's parents are gone and we stay home.  I like staying home.  I like sharing meals with our friends which is probably why I actually prefer Thanksgiving as a holiday as opposed to Christmas.  There's not all those weeks of shopping and wrapping that end in 10 minutes.  There are still those hours of cooking that end in 10 minutes with more hours of cleanup.

Maybe I'll just have to wait for grandchildren before I experience the magic again.  In the meantime, I'm back to working on my attitude of gratitude for family and friends who take the time to pick out something to give to me and wrap it with care, just as I will do the same for them.  I will focus on the bright colored lights at night that I love.  I will look below the surface of my antagonism and remember the love I feel towards the special people in my life.  

And if I want magic in my real world, then I'll just have to look a little deeper.  The miracle is always there, even if it's not Christmas.

It's all in your perspective

"We observe the great expanse of creation through the narrowest of portals and attempt to understand it.  In a universe whose dimensions in time and space are inconceivably vast, we apply the constricted logic of hours and weeks, inches and miles, to matters that are spawned in the vaults of the Infinite." -- John Niendorff

"Nobody really knows why we are here, obviously.  There are big pieces missing from the pictures offered us by science and religion.  Based on our present knowledge, the whole thing doesn't make sense.  But what's so wonderful is that we want it to make sense, and our need for meaning drives us relentlessly to create."  --Anne Rice

Brogan of the Pines

"i Thank You God most for this

   amazing

day for the leaping greenly 

    spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky

    and for everything

which is natural which is

    infinite which is yes."

--e. e. cummings (again)

Musings on a Saturday walk

This morning I went for a walk on Pine Ridge with Skipper and Brogan.   I had my camera with me so the pace was slower than my morning walks with Kaye, but that's a good thing.  The air smelled good, especially when I could catch a whiff of pine.

I started thinking about change.  There are big changes, obviously, like what happened this week nationally and there's plenty of commentary on that.  

There are seasonal changes.  Today it is late fall, almost winter, so the leaves are off the trees and everything looks brown.  There has been a little snow and there will probably be a whole lot more this winter.  Hopefully there won't be as much this winter as there was last winter but that's out of my control.  

There are daily changes, like the sun rising and setting, the lunar cycles, the light changing as I walk.  

There are physical changes that I experience in my body.  I have to wear knee braces now when I walk to avoid the pain of chondromalacia, runner's knee, even though I don't run.  I could call it "Bhutanese Knee" since that's when it became problematic.  There are other inspiring age-related changes I'd just rather not dwell on.  

There are mental changes.  My memory, always questionable, is less reliable.  On the plus side though, there are some changes related to gaining Wisdom!  The multitude of life's experiences help me to make wiser choices sometimes.  

There are emotional changes.  Being ever so wise and mature I'm less volatile and erratic.  

There are spiritual changes.  I have evolved from my early Episcopalian upbringing through some interesting phases into a place that combines different spiritual practices into one that works for me.  Quantum physics, buddhism, pantheism,  and recovery all blend into some kind of uniquely-mine-mix.

So, as I was walking along, taking pictures, admiring trees and rocks and sky, I thought about the fact that every step I took involved change.  I changed my position, my perspective, my views.  I thought about how on the molecular level I am constantly in motion along with the planet and as always wondered why we don't just fly off into space.  Then, thinking about space reminded me of the how big the universe is and how small I am.  That used to bother me but it doesn't any more because I realize we are all ONE and I am part of the oneness, a little speck of consciousness manifesting itself.  

Then I thought about how difficult change can be and how resistant I am to it when I am not practicing acceptance.  It's an emotional pattern to fight change when in fact everything is changing moment to moment.  The antidote?  Live in the moment!  Easier said than done, but it does work.  Dwelling on the past and worrying about the future won't change anything.