#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Mindful Morning Brook

The cold was a shock! What a surprise return to freeze! The ice was back on the river’s edge and in the wetlands. What whiplash of weather, of course, it’s March. And moody, and me too. Happily, I found a photo in the brook, and then I went in to warm up, and going up the yard to the house, I felt how much finding the photo of the person meditating peacefully in the brook ice was settling my spirit and helping me connect with gratitude. I thought, the photo is the prayer. That finding a photo each day in nature, it’s a way of asking for what I need: a change of heart, a recognition of what’s important, a call to the here and now, this moment of being alive. I don’t know if others see what I see in my ice images. So, I will say, I see a figure, on the left, a person in mindful meditation, floating in the blue of the brook where the leaves go to die and be reborn with a new life. Later in the day, I have an app on my Iphone and it shows me, randomly, photos from my photo stream over the years. Tonight the app gave me the birds, the gulls I caught in flight in the blue of the sky over the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, in Longboat Key, and these gulls were so gorgeous in this photo I wanted to place it here tonight as a bookend to a blue day, blue in a good way: prayer answered.

Gulls over the Gulf of Mexico, Longboat Key, February 2020