Every morning is new

Watch for silhouettes of wild geese at around 0:09

Where my heart is / "... so happy just to be alive underneath the sky of blue ..."

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Your feet will bring you to where your heart is.

(Irish)

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Whatcom Falls Park restroom mirror self-portrait (-:

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The Canadian Cascades are visible through the trees at the top of the hill on this unusually clear day.

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Art that appeared along the trail in the past few days.

Dome spider web

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Looking up to the left of the trail 

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Cooling my feet in Lake Whatcom at the end of the walk

It's been a long journey, 73 years in early October.  Although I'm healthy, I'm putting my affairs in order, as they say.  A few days ago, I signed up for a pre-paid cremation.  It was sobering and liberating at the same time to give information that will appear on my death certificate.  

My friends are close to me in age or older and now that I have a reverse mortgage in place as well as other fairly simple but time-consuming financial complications, I'm updating my will and making a trustworthy local company my Power of Attorney for Finance as well as the third party to contact if neither of my first two executor choices are available.  I've had a Power of Attorney for Healthcare in place for some time.  My parents put their affairs in order long before they died.  I deeply appreciate that they did that.  I am single and have no children or close family except a dear first cousin, born a month and a half after me, who lives locally.  I have a photo of us in 1950 in Minneapolis.  My parents drove from California for a rare visit with my father's family.

I'm grateful for a few good friends near and far.

Every day a gift.  That's for sure.

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I dreamed last week that my father came to my door with a message.  He was younger than I ever remember him being.  He was clearly who he was before he was my father, probably in his 20s.  He was 35 when I was born.  He looked as if he had come a long way with his message.  Slightly out of breath from exertion and a little disheveled, he told me that life goes by very quickly and that one must be kind, especially in the last years of life.  Having said that he rushed off to the right and disappeared around a corner wall.

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Can't resist posting this song about being happy to just to be alive. Bob Dylan's music has been in the background of my life since I first heard his voice on TV on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when I was 13-going-on-14-years old.  He's "a man of contradictions," "a man of many moods."  He "contains multitudes."

Grateful to be alive and listening to one of our young people carry the song forward / Confident as the ocean and stardust / Beloved Community

Crepuscular rays at dawn.

Spring in this northwestern corner of Washington State is more often an experience of greening and flowering and birdsong under sublime grey skies, and there is still snow in the hills.

The cattail marsh fills with the song of birds all day long.  Soon the Canada Geese flock will return to this cattail marsh, announcing their arrival with loud honking.

Carmel Point 

Robinson Jeffers, 1887 – 1962 

The extraordinary patience of things! 

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— 

How beautiful when we first beheld it, 

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; 

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, 

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads— 

Now the spoiler has come: does it care? 

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide 

That swells and in time will ebb, and all 

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty 

Lives in the very grain of the granite, 

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us: 

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; 

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident 

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

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Side by side is:

"... There is an old African proverb:  "When you pray, move your feet." As a nation, if we care for the Beloved Community, we must move our feet, our hands, our hearts, our resources to build and not to tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to love and not to hate, to heal and not to kill ..."

(John Lewis, Walking with the Wind:  A Memoir of the Movement, published 1998)