Blog Recommendation

This comes highly recommended!

http://tullaiaspicturesandpoems.blogspot.com/

February Wind Ridge

Silence and solitude were overdue. And the weekend had a fresh layer of snow to tromp in.

Waiting.

I am more apt to act.

Forcing things.

The door,

the drawer,

the vacuum back in the closet.

Reconciliation.

I saw and heard 4 Red-Shouldered Hawks doing crazy acrobats in the air and disturbing all with the sound of it (whatever "it" was). And later in the day, one perched in the tree outside my hermitage. I watched it for quite a while until i embarrassed it by staring.

Others heard/seen:

Red-Tailed Hawk

Pileated Woodpecker

Barred Owl

Eagle

That evening, while i was cozy in bed, i heard coyotes on the prowl. They sounded close. The next morning i followed tracks through the woods and meadows around my hermitage. Because of the fresh snow, i was able to see all the details...snuffling for a treat, scratching for a smell, squatting for a poo. I wandered and ambled wherever they took me. And it was easy because all the trees and bushes were bare. I never knew until recently the difference between coyote and dog tracks. I do now and i am happy about that. (Dog prints are often erratic and more splayed out and coyotes are slender and also more in a straight line.)

I watched drops of water slide slowly down the warmed branches of evergreen trees. I listened to the plip plop trickle sounds.

I sobbed and mourned loss. Losses i have not known for myself. Grief i never want to experience. Sorrow that should never be known.

I am thinking of the

sinking feeling

Pam felt as she realized

her daughter was missing.

And knowing the brutal end

a child suffered at the hands

of an evil man.

I feel sick,

I am angry with God,

that this is allowed.

I read Finding My Way Home by Henri Nouwen

This bit i needed to soak in.

"It is through total and unmitigated powerlessness that God shows us divine mercy. The radical, divine choice is the choice to reveal glory, beauty, truth, peace, joy, and, most of all, love in and through the complete divestment of power. It is very hard-if not impossible-for us to grasp this divine mystery."

I walked all day until my nose turned red. I laid in snow drifts until my ears ached with the beautiful sounds of so much nothing. It is always a gift.

"Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, i love you too."

Elissa

A friend recently witnessed the execution of the man who brutally murdered her daughter. I have mourned the loss of this little girl so many times. And i never even knew her.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/article_fcb05ab5-596a-59d3-9f49-3ecf8c0393eb.html