I have a curious love/hate relationship with words. My favorite tools, they also wear me out. My mind is rarely void of language. Phrases, sentences, sometimes single words only, tumble around in there until I just want them all to go away. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve found relief when I immersed myself in the natural world. I love the sky, particularly when clouds of all sizes and shapes, cumulus, cirrus, cumulonimbus and whatever others exist, drift overhead. I don’t care whether the sky is blue or gray, pink or yellow. I find its magnitude soothing and a great help in achieving perspective, the lack of which disturbs me with its imbalance.
I also love mucking around in the dirt. I played in it a lot while I was a child, braiding necklaces of clover and dandelions, fiddling with caterpillars, beetles and grasshoppers, and observing the cooperative ant societies which were always hubs of constant movement and intricate patterns. During high school and college, I got out to the countryside when I could, feeling my brain relax in the wide expanse of fields and among the animals, domestic and wandering.
These days, I find the need to escape from all the twisty verbiage in my head more often than usual. The world is fraught with problems so complicated, so enormous and so frustratingly bogged down in effectual bureaucracies, that I’m driven crazy by my thinking. I spew the words out in my blog, in letters to my dead husband and too often, to people I sense would prefer that I zip my mouth closed. That’s when I know it’s time to head outside to look up, to look around and to look down. My garden provides months of pleasure, even in its fall and winter iterations. The sky is an ever-changing mystical delight. Loving what just silently exists has turned out to be one of my most effective coping skills. Tonight I’m sharing the beauty I’ve been lucky enough to capture just by paying attention to this free form of relief and the lovely thought-dissipating visual effects. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. For me, they’re the deep cleansing breaths that restore the weary brain.
Aah. A brief respite from the news of the day. All of that will be still be there tomorrow. For this moment, I feel quiet. And grateful. And relieved.