New Year's Eve reflections

Would you care to join me on the bench for a moment while I reflect on the passing year?

I always enjoy this particular bench. The huge tree in front of it looks different to me each time I encounter it as the ever changing light, seasons and moods create new feasts for my eyes to contemplate.

It is always the same tree...yet always a different experience.

Parts of the tree have grown apart, then rejoined together, making frames for the views beyond.

Life is like that, no?

Overhead I sometime see jets streaking across the sky. I tip my fingers in a salute...these trails are from our military; the pilots keep watch overhead. As I trod the forest floor I feel just a bit safer for knowing the jets have flown by silently overhead.

And I count it a blessing that 2007 was a year of peace in my land.

A million leaves budded, unfurled, provided shade, colored, and silently drifted to the earth while I walked. A handful of those leaves I captured with my camera, the rest have returned to enrich the soil unheralded.

The bayou reflected the sky and the trees whether I was there to see it or not. Yet when I see the beauty, I count it as a gift to me from above.

Beneath the still waters fish swim, and crawfish crawl. The cypress knees grow; and the scene changes color throughout each day.

Across the lake the scene has gone from bare limbs to vibrant green to rusty reds and back to bareness again.

Moss has crept between the plates of the pine bark, weaving colored patterns as it grew.

Fungus has another form of silent beauty as it feeds upon the fallen trees.

Rosy mushrooms erupt from the mulchy pine needles that blanket the forest floor.

When I get down on my knees with my face near the earth, I look up at the small things and see wonders unfold.

These were a few of the treasure of my world this year. My path has taken me far and wide.

I've had a year like no other in which I embraced and appreciated nature; the flowers and the leaves, spiders and snakes, raccoons and opossums, rainbows and snow flakes, alpine meadows , swampland, red rock reefs and glaciers.

Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Canada have welcomed me.

Minnesota, Colorado, Utah and Louisiana have enliven my soul with vistas and sounds found no where else.

I really don't want this year to end.

As I click through the thousands of pictures that I took this year, I am in awe of the beauty of my world.

I am in awe that more beauty displays itself in every part of my planet in places that I will never see.

I am dazzled by the changes of seasons across our lands.

I want to thank you all who stopped to see what I have seen, and read what I have lived through.

And I especially want to thank each of you who also treasured your world and life enough to seek out the time to take pictures and to write words that allowed me to enjoy the treasures that you found in the place where you live.

Please keep seeing and capturing the moments.

Please keep posting them on your blogs.

I love that you do so.

And pray that next year will be a year of peace and beauty in your life.

May God bless you in the new year!