I am celebrating, this August, the 4th year of #NewThisDay, writing my daily blog, every day. Haven’t missed a day of posting my pictures and writing from them for four years. That’s 1,460 days. Wow. How grateful I am to all of you, my readers. I began this blog without a follower. I probably wrote for months without much being read. Here’s where I was four years ago, on August 30, 2016, on the Charles River, in the woods of home. Out walking, appreciating nature, and writing some thoughts about my day, my pictures. Habit? Discipline? Daily practice. It feeds me. It’s what I do to be present. To be here now. And to stay connected to my writing life, my creative life. Today, I walked a bit later than usual. Charlie was patient. I wanted to write and send my weekly Aim for Astonishing Blog, and I wrote about the “marrow-bone,” Stanley Kunitz writes about in his poem, “End of Summer.” And I wrote about kindness, a quality in my marrow-bone, and how I want to be even more and more aware of the practice of kindness into this new season of September and fall. So, I thought about kindness, quite consciously today. Wondering what it really means to be kind. How, to be kind, is many things and many ways of being. Here’s what the poet Naomi Shihab Nye says about kindness in her poem by that name. She connects kindness directly to the experience of grief, and how grief is what teaches us compassion:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness. . .

Naomi Shihab Nye

Of course, I understand very much what Nye is saying. But, I am thinking, tonight, more along the lines of what William Wordsworth says:

The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”

― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

The sky was flawless, even when I woke. Stayed flawless. Charlie and I were surprised to find so much wind and whitecaps on the Sound: rough surf, as rarely happens here in summer on this side of the Island. As I walked along the cliffs over the rocks I felt the pressure of it and the beauty, but the anxiety of it, too. The sense of being swept out into it, although, of course, that was not likely to happen. But I felt it, and we were glad for the reassuringly gorgeous sky and kept going into this new day. And on, later, to the beach on the Atlantic, where it was also windy and rough surf and my daughter got stung by a jellyfish, but it wasn’t bad, but it was too rough to swim and the sun was a burning one from the blue. Because we have time to relax in conversation, and because we are on this shift of season, I ask Frank what he is most looking forward to this fall, but, really, I know what he will say, and he does: the baby. The moon almost full tonight, rising into the sky. We walk a little around Edgartown Harbor, in masks, of course. Oh, this moon, it’s going to be full so soon. How bright it is, this almost last day of August. And because I have written about it, I have been here in this day not once, but twice, to feel it grow even fuller, like the moon.