The Unexpected

     When we took some visiting friends to Red Rock Crossing, near Cathedral Rock, we walked a trail to a place called Buddha Beach, which has lot of little stone pillars which I call "Prayer Pillars." I have included some pictures of them in former blogs.  This picture is a closeup of a little stone pillar right in the "V" of a tree---something unexpected which our friend photographer Gary Jones captured on film.  Most people would have just walked right by it and never even seen it.  

     Since being out here, I have gone out hiking a lot, and occasionally gone back to a place I had already been.  I could not believe how much I missed the first time!   It made me realize how much every one of us filters out of what we sense each day.   There are so many sights and sounds and smells we just miss, especially if we are in a hurry.  It takes a special kind of alertness and mindfulness to fully experience life each day.  

      Of course, there is such a thing as sensory overload too.  And our society does that number on us a lot!  It is wearing on the psyche, and is another reason why our souls need times of silence and limited sensory input.  Although the overload of sirens, traffic, horns, blaring music, loud talking, airplanes, lawnmowers, motorbikes, etc. are obvious sources of overload, even nature can sometimes be too much.   Some people I know of have moved away from living on Lake Michigan because the sound of the waves got to be too much for them.  Just now, my friend Sharon, who is visiting us for a week,  came in from lounging on the deck chair outside because, she said, it was "a bit much."  The wind is blowing hard through the pines, sounding like ocean waves roaring.  The birds in the trees and at the feeders are all chirping at once. The quails are running here and there, calling out in a way that almost sounds like a cat meowing.

There is a lot going on out there!

       So once again, its about balance--a balance of sensory input, and silence; of making haste and slowing down; of screening stuff out, and being really alert to take in what we might otherwise miss.  Would you say you're in balance?  Like those little rocks balanced just-so in the V of the tree?