All the Birds of This Day

So for a while, after i gathered myself many hours later and realized that I'd sent out into the blogosphere that I was really sad, even crying, I was petrified and embarrassed that I'd let people know.   I thought of several recants in my head, wanted to erase it quick, wanted to explain that no! I am happy, always happy!  but alas, i was in the middle of san pete county, without a computer anywhere, and so i left it.  But also, it's made me think a lot about what is okay for us to share with one another, what we can ask people to share, literally, with us.  

Yesterday Zina and I went hiking, we didn't use a path, just meandered upwards, in and through the forest.  We stopped at a tree and I reached out and touched it, then sort of petted it and felt it's soft needles in my palm.  I wondered when the last time that tree had been touched,  maybe not for a hundred years.  We came to a meadow full of sage and yellow and thin blowing weeds.  Further up we found a small cove in the tree branches,  the long grass was broken down and lying flat,  like something had been lying there.  I pictured a deer with a baby.   We passed the stream, I walked in the mud.  

We stopped again to look up, with every calm wind the colors on the leaves seemed to change.  Red and oranges and yellows like a sunset.  It seems silly to even describe it, but I got the feeling I do every september,  the one that makes me so excited that my stomach gets nervous. 

Mostly now I remember the greens, how bright and proud they seemed, perhaps because they were the ones who seemed most common, but had still been changed by the season.  By the simple need to change with the rest.  

Zina and I talked about how we feel something different in nature, closer to God perhaps, because there everything is obeying simply because they are asked to.  I wish I had more of this simple faith.  To change simply because I was asked to.  I wish someday someone would find me in a meadow, imperfect still, but changed and content to continue the evolution.  But then I realized I would never be able to change out there alone in the forest.  I would hike back down and I would need people.  And I guess that's why I feel okay about saying I'm sad,  I won't always be sad.  Spring times come, and I hope when they do, the fruit and blossoms will be all the sweeter because we saw the winter together.