blessings.
very small ones. but they're the ones that keep life beautiful.

the cop who pulled me over today not giving me a ticket because he was able to confirm that my expired registration is in fact in process.

spending 45 minutes with caroline and baby E and the sheer delight of smiling baby babble and chubby legs and the easy acceptance and support of a friend.

king louie howling because of simultaneous phone ringing and piano playing, which in turn made tasha and i laugh in the middle of a rather teary conversation.

little m's face lit up with pure joy as she runs from one end of her house to the other with her little sister.

bickering birds on my mama's backyard bird feeder.

the blue-gold of twilight on a warm summer night with air so gentle it feels like a caress.

surprises.
here are a few of the beautiful things this week has brought me:

i love green flowers. when i was at virginia, i would often visit jefferson's gardens when i needed a little stress relief or just a quiet place to sit and soak up some beauty. in one of the gardens, all of the flowers are green. there's something magical about green flowers, something a bit mysterious. last week, RAF sent me home with these gorgeous green orchids that were growing rampantly in his yard in the shade of the most beautiful avocado trees i've seen.

my sisters helped provide some spots of beauty this week, too. they each sent a package. just something small. but i love getting packages in the mail, even when i know what's in them. and they sent lovely cards which made me miss them and wish i could live close to them, but which also made me happy that my sisters are my best friends. i don't know what i'd do without them, and i hope they know that.

and every day this week, i've left home and seen all of the new growth on my mom and dad's roses. i love that new growth on roses is red, as it is on some deciduous trees. it's almost counterintuitive to look at springtime plants and see the same shades of red that mark the coming of fall at the end of the year. and all of that red new growth on the roses promises abundant color and heady fragrance for the weeks and months ahead.

spring is almost here and the world is beautiful.

rain.
last night it rained. with thunder and lightning. i love the world when it rains. everything seems clean. the grass smells alive. even the asphalt smells good. and the lightning amazes me. reminds me of how miraculous and wonderful our world is. even if we do understand the phenomena we see in it. and because we understand them.

i know i shouldn't, for the sake of those living on hills, but i hope we have another wet winter.

harmony.
i was home last week, in california. a chaotic place but oddly beautiful. so strange. in one yard a sugar maple's leaves are brilliant red, suspended somewhere between living and dead, half of them fallen and the other half obstinately clinging to the tree. around the corner the decorative fruit trees blossom in mad profusion. it is december. these transplants from other climes cannot make sense of the balmy weather, the lack of definition.

when i get on the freeway, i am struck by how confused the humans are, too. i accelerate until i match the pace of others. classical music bringing peaceful beauty into my car in counterpoint to the frantically frenetic pace i am keeping while trying to follow the wildly eratic lines on the freeway. such stark contrast--beautiful and dangerous. the world on the brink of spinning out of control. there is no order to the place. but its very chaos creates an ordering principle of its own, one that liberates so that one being exists independent from the next. one holds on tightly, lagging behind normal. the other dances crazily, absurdly ahead. both beautiful; neither right; but harmonious.

realize.
yesterday i watched a fly die. it was strange. he crawled up in front of me on my desk and tipped over. he stayed there, off kilter, one wing in the air the other under his side until i flicked him off the back edge of my desk. he seemed so big, sitting there dead on my desk. much larger than the pesky nuisance i would have considered him had he been alive, buzzing around my head. somehow his death made me realize how real his life was in a way i never could have had he been his normal buggy self.

sometimes i have moments like that--realizations of how incredible the world and life are. strangely, many of those moments involve insects. lying on my back on the grass, looking up at the trees thinking that this must be what a beetle sees. standing in the dark face to face with a hovering fire fly the summer I first discovered them. finding two beautiful fuzzy, black & white, striped and spotted caterpillars crawling their crazy crawl along a fence post. i don't care about the science of insects, about how their lives work biologically. but the facts of their lives amaze me.