I was in the garden the other day trying to find a beautiful flower that I could take a photo of. I snapped a few pictures, but none of them were doing it for me. The flowers didn't look nearly as beautiful in my photos as in real life.
Then I took one of this weed.
Holy smokes.
So pretty and fragile! As I finished taking the photo my leg brushed against it and the fluff blew away as if it had never been there.
As W.B.Yeats says so beautifully, the magic things are always there waiting for us...we're the ones that need the refining.
I find this takes time. And it takes intent. And sometimes a glass of wine.
Even though I'm all about going out into nature, I often resist actually taking the time to do it, and I resist even more having to wrestle my mind away from its musings to notice what's happening around me.

Today I finally did, albeit reluctantly, and here's what happened:
- a hummingbird stopped a foot from my face in mid-air and looked at me
- I found a baby squash
- hundreds of tiny frogs hurled themselves to the sides as I walked down a path in the woods, as if I were splashing through puddles and the frogs were drops of water
- two deer that had been standing just to the side of the path dashed into the woods as I approached
- a heron and I startled each other
- a cardinal swooped in an arc across my path in a dark stretch of woods
- mosquitoes picked up on my scent, passed the word, and swarmed in like a pack of heat-seeking missiles...oh yes, THAT's why I resist! Where the &*#$ is W.B.Yeats when the mosquitoes are out??

There are times when all the things you know to be true don't seem true anymore;
when beauty is elusive, and all lovely things drift you by, as if through a thick fog,
and the glorious tap tap tapping of rain on the awning,
and a yellow glimpse of finch
and the smell of coffee
are hardly even noticeable...muffled, like you're watching an old silent movie.
Still, something deep down in your brain, or more likely your heart, sees all those lips moving, and they are saying, “hey...hey...remember this?!”
And you do, you do.  For just a moment, for maybe only a second, you are pulled into the present, and their beauty is somehow familiar.  You know it.  
Then it's gone and the glimpse is so fleeting you forget you even saw it before the fog settles back in determinedly like a heavy wool blanket.

but your heart remembers.
even in the fog your heart remembers.

and I have to remind myself that my heart will remember.
today i can just be still.

Several people have looked at this card and asked if I was the one who painted the words.
I wish I had, but no.
These words were graffiti on a rock, way, waay up in a remote area of the mountains in California. I had been travelling on my own in my van for over a month, and was on my way to find hot springs. 
I was yearning for hot springs.
I needed hot springs. 
My map showed hot springs strewn abundantly, flagrantly, all across the states of Washington, Oregon, and California.
They were, however, proving much more difficult to access than I had hoped. This was my last ditch attempt, and believe me, I was going to soak that day or heads would roll. 
Unfortunately Google Maps had not received this memo and sent me off on a 3 hour expedition in the opposite direction from where the hot springs were located. It probably took me longer than it should have to figure this out. In my defense, I had no GPS or wifi.
As it slowly dawned on me that I was not even remotely where I was supposed to be, it also dawned on me that I was going to have to find a place to sleep. By this time I was high in the mountains, the ranger station was closed, and all I had was old-fashioned paper maps...and THAT, my friends, is when I came across this graffiti on a rock.
It was at a small suicidal pull-off beside a hair-pin turn. Other hapless travelers had felt the need to spray paint their names, their loves, and their grievances on this rock overlooking the valley. And some dear soul felt compelled to write "live wild - be free" right in the middle.

Photo #2 and 3 are the view, taken from the rock, looking back the way I had just come. Yes, those skinny ribbons are the roads I was driving just before sunset, lost and without a plan.

I'll skip to the end for you: all turned out well, there were several serendipitous situations, a crazy and slightly illegal camping experience, and a really beautiful drive. There was angst, stress, and possible heat stroke. There was fun, excitement, and some adrenaline. There were Mexicans with shotguns around a campfire. 
I may not have found my hot springs, but I think I can safely say that I was living wild and being free.

PS. to whichever Guiding Force is planning my journeys...wild, free, AND hot springs would have been ok. 
Next time.

For the whole crazy and humorous story of what happened on that trip, see my roadtrip blog at www.opentopossibility5.weebly.com/ojai-and-krishnamurti.html. 

One year, the year of this photo, I planted a row of sunflowers to hide the farm junk that was directly in my line of sight when sitting on the front porch. I spent hours digging up the rock hard ground in 30 degree heat, adding manure, planting seeds, and watering. 

Then I sat back, panting,and left them to do their thing. 
Unfortunately for me, it turned out that their thing was to remain dormant in the ground all summer. 

Meanwhile, back in the garden, hundreds of sunflowers began poking out of the ground where birds had dropped seeds the previous fall. In the middle of my potatoes, in the raspberries, between the squashes...sunflowers rose gloriously and majestically wherever they damn well pleased. Which did not happen to be in front of the junk heap that was in my line of sight from the porch.

Bloom where you are planted? Hmm.

Sometimes a worthy goal, no doubt, and I am not denying the wisdom in this pithy statement!

These particular sunflowers, however, seemed to be trying to teach me about how things flourish when they are in the right place. 
As great as my junk barrier idea was, the sunflowers knew that that wasn't the best spot for them to grow. In fact not a single sunflower that I planted grew that year, beyond a few sickly looking seedlings that soon withered away. 
Yet my garden was bursting with beautiful flowers in spots that I certainly never would have thought to put them.

We don't always have the conditions we think we need to flourish, but perhaps those conditions are not as complicated as our minds make them out to be! Our bodies and our spirits know what we need, though it's sometimes hard to hear.
Though my tendency is to replant over and over, gnashing my teeth, until the rotten flowers decide to grow where I planned for them to grow in the first place, I am going to try to keep my eyes open for beautiful things coming up unexpectedly. 
Here's to a summer of unplanned beauty!