Full Moon and Snow on Coneflowers

****How the snow piles up on every available surface mounding higher than seems possible.

I've had a few thoughts about how we perceive the world and how we automatically ascribe "good" and "bad" to some situations without really giving it thought.  Take "cold" for example.  You go out and it's cold and you clench up, grit your teeth and call it bad.  A judgment is made.  However, if you can leave the judgment out of it and unclench, just feeling it, the cold just IS.  It can be invigorating and feel tart against your check....but not necessarily bad.  Last week, during the bitter cold, I had a different thought.  There was no denying that to be out in the cold was brutal.  There was nothing Zen about it.  It was freezing!  My coat felt like a cotton shirt.  So!  Maybe this is the clue.....what you wear.  If you have on enough layers and those layers are heavy enough, the cold is not such a negative.  Surely the Eskimos don't go around clenching up and cursing the cold all the time.

 STILL!  I don't want to go to Minnesota in the winter.

A couple of others:

****The slippery sweetness of mango as it slides around in your mouth.

****The line of blue neon light outlining a guitar seen though the windshield in the rain.  Slowly the bright blue line dissolves as the windshield becomes streaked with drops of rain and at some point there is no outline of a guitar anymore, but a field of electric blue dots slowly dripping down.

Cross-section of leek

Everywhere I turn there's something going on, something extraordinary to see or hear or feel.  My list grows and grows.  I wonder will I ever run out and start repeating.  Would that even matter if you can take pleasure in something again and again, new eyes fresh each time.  I think the important part is the noticing.

****Cross-section of leek.  Working on a soup for the soup contest, I was astonished at the beauty of the inside of that leek.  All those dots!  The color shading.  OH LA!

****Rosie's little grunts of pleasure as I'm giving her a good rub under her chin, neck and chest.  She half closes her eyes absorbing absorbing absorbing the love.

****Steve and I walk to Doughsie Dough every Sunday morning and on the way back we always walk down Broad St.  Frequently we pass an elderly, cigar-smoking  man who always likes to stop and give Rosie a pat on the head and wish us a good morning.  The other day, as we again walked past this man, he stopped and we got into a conversation about dogs and how wonderful they were.  He started telling us about dogs of his childhood.....the headstrong doberman and the saint bernard that he slept with in the back unheated room of the house where he grew up.  As he was talking a tear started rolling down his cheek, slowly making it's way past the wrinkles of his face.  Maybe it was the cold, but I really think it was the sweetness of those memories of his boyhood and his animal friends from that time long ago.

ENFUEGO!

ENFUEGO!  ON FIRE (In Spanish)

Yes!  This Little Fig, Figster, Figgy, Figlet is quite the maniac!  Driving us crazy; keeping us entertained.  And certainly a grand subject for mindful contemplation.......

****The ears!  Just look at those ears!  Little twitching radars.  The tawny middle highlights the curve....and makes those ears look as though there are lights inside them.  The camel color of the tawny shades to black upper and lower.  And then the edges are lined in white.  Amazing coloration.

****The Fig hangs out between the shower curtain and liner on the rim of the tub when I take a shower.  Sometimes just sitting, sometimes peering around the edge of the curtain, but if it's ENFUEGO he's madly dashing from one end to the other.  Or he leaps in at one end of the tub and flies to the other end leaping out and doing it again.  I see him through the shower liner, this amorphous and blurry body zipping through the tunnel of shower curtain.

****I cannot get dressed with the Fig in the room.  He chases, bites, bats, attacks anything moving (and many non-moving objects as well).  Try putting on shoes and socks with a dervish working on your feet, socks, shoe laces.  So he does his attack-work outside, sending mouse after mouse through the crack underneath the door.  It's hilarious to watch these little cloth mice (the same ones found floating in the water dish every day) zoom under the door crack.  And then to watch the paw scooping, reaching under the door trying to retrieve that mouse.....oh gosh, it's ridiculous!  Most days I find a mouse or two waiting when I get up.....a mouse mine-field in the dark of the early morning.  

****Since the Fig attacks anything moving......your feet, your legs, your low-hanging hands, your moving lips!....I was gratified and delighted to see a photo included among the best of the year of National Geographic.  It was a picture of a mother cheetah and her cub.  HA!  The cub was attacking the mother's face....hahaha....biting his own mother! on the muzzle. OK, this behavior is only natural.  Fig is so normal!

****Yesterday I received a package in the mail from Ariel's boyfriend.  It was a framed photo that Ariel took over Christmas....or maybe it was copied from one of the hundreds of photos I've texted to the girls since Fig arrived on the scene.  Ha!  That photo now sits proudly on the shelf  among the girls' high school senior pictures....just one of the gang.  (Yes, this is a joke, certainly.  One doesn't want to be seen as a crazy cat lady.  I'll put his photo on a lower shelf soon.  But for now it makes me laugh).

****The Fig's little snores when he's asleep and not ENFUEGO.  Tiny tiny little squeak....puff, squeak....puff, squeak....puff, squeak.  So dear.  So calm.

OK, OK, enough of the Fig.  I had imagined only making comment on beautiful and serious things, but honestly, why not include the absurd or quirky, funny and entertaining?  For heaven sake!  Everything is worth paying attention to.

The Glow

I'm enjoying the fuzzy slow-shutter-speed photos!  Heading back inside after the early morning meditation.