The oak above spreads widely, its crown uncommonly broad. Its branches are loaded with galls, ball-like formations common to oaks. The limbs are large and strong. Below, a row of graceful cypress trees stands by a pond, their younger and more vertical crowns offering another natural architecture to the observer.
Some wintertime trees make you wonder where the shapes came from. Those in the image below look windswept, and one can almost imagine the two of them being swept in different directions. Still, the trunks and branches bend in a way that to me feels and appears agile, harmonious. They could be dancers, holding their arrays of fanlike twigs at the end of their limbs. But in fact they are trees, and I appreciate them most for their tree-natures.
A few clumps of broomsedge, which move from green in summer to gold and orange in fall and winter, stand in the foreground of the photo below. They gain a kind of prominence against the less-colorful though serene background. (They look good against a blue sky, too, especially when whole fields of them are on display.) But they only get their standout color in contrast to what's around them when most of the green things are dormant.
When I left the house, moving out into the day at first seemed chilly and damp, cheerless and somber. After I'd been walking for a while, I found myself more and more interested in what was there, and discovered I'd become more present, more part of the place I moved through. The walking warmed me, as it always does. Looking at what was actually there, wanting to see the place as it distinctively was at that moment, focused my seeing, my attention, on what was in fact there, rather than on some "ideal" day I might have wished for. I often sense that wishing for ideal forms (sorry, Plato) is not only futile, but a failure to draw the blessedness from an already-offered abundance.
It was a good day, and a good walk.
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