"Keeping It Simple..."

"The moment one gives close
attention to anything, even
a blade of grass, it becomes
a mysterious, indescribably
magnificent world in itself."

- Henry Miller

And so I began this post after yesterday's serious, technical nightmares at News 14 Carolina's "command central" in Raleigh...not to mince words, it was a brutal day for any and everyone that had to surmount catastrophic systemic failure across the 3 broadcast offices in North Carolina, which lasted close to 12 hours. Supposedly, the ship has been righted...let us all hope so.

Didn't get Mercy into the woods for her overdue romp until 1pm...by then, the sun had been out, all was dry, and I was degassing as fast as possible. The woods, by now, a quilt of tans, browns, and grays, spindly branches reaching out as if to try and grab back the covering leaves that have been long gone....and as we did our little bushwhacking thing for our sense of pseudo-adventure, I was about to put my foot down and noticed the small spiderweb on the forest floor...with my camera almost always with me, I thought I'd look a closer look at it...

(Now would be a good time to re-read the above quote if it has slipped your mind...)

I constantly find some of the most wonderful, cool, beautiful, and healing things right under my very nose, even in the middle of chaos and our overly busy lives...it can help you become one of Life's Peaceful Warriors when you are able to stop, be thankful, and simply marvel at even the smallest gifts which are everywhere all of the time...to make the choice to simply stop...and enter a silent, mind-full (mindful) state and let the world temporarily whiz by.

Just a litte web, or remnants of one, with unevaporated raindrops still clinging to the silky threads...(you should be able to click on each picture and enlarge it to see more details)

Moving in more closely, you feel this wonderful sense of suspension, as if the water drops were miniature marionettes being held above a leaf stage...

And in moving yet closer you see wonderful mini-beams of reflected sunlight, the rounded drops of cohesive water molecules...these little guys above look like little creatures with their paired 'sun eyes' refracting through the curved lensing field of the drops...it is an easy thing, and a good thing, to detatch mentally from Life's "noise" once in a while and just lose yourself in such tiny worlds...I highly recommend it, on a daily basis...

So, go find your little pocket of beauty and enjoy it...it's always closer to you than you think it is...and because a dear friend ended an email with the following applicable quote, I'll end with some of Thoreau's far-reaching wisdom:

"As a single footstep will not
make a path on the earth,

so a single thought will not
make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path,
we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path,
we must think over and over
the kind of thoughts we wish
to dominate our lives.

As you simplify your life, the laws
of the universe will be simpler;
solitude will not be solitude,
poverty will not be poverty,
nor weakness weakness.

Our life is frittered away by
detail... simplify, simplify."

- Henry David Thoreau


(One last little picture of water drops on a White Oak leaf from yesterday...)