It’s already the 19th of December!  What a shocking number to behold!  In a couple of days, the winter solstice will fall upon us — the longest and darkest night of the year.  It is hard to believe that the days will grow longer after that!  All things under the heavens will quicken in their rhythms according to the drawing long rays of day.  The hens will prepare to lay again, I can nearly taste the bright orange nature of their fresh eggs as I write this.  It all seems too soon.  

There has been a steady quest for gold here lately, the sort that is found up in the hills under the waver of hawk wings and wending about the muddle of mule deer trails.  Winter has such a sweet disposition, regarding its offerings of light which fall at such tender angles onto the floors of the world.  There seems to be no moment in the day wherein I would label the daylight as harsh or overly direct.  As a result, I strike out with a dog or two nearly every afternoon to photograph the girders of gold as they do their streaming through the wild leafing of the sagebrush.  Even the cottonwoods, willows and scrub maples in the mute creek bottoms are struck alive by this buoyant, seasonal light.  High up in the nude branches of the forests, something auspicious is spinning frail poetry.  Down below, I watch the ribbons of winter  rhymes flutter in the breeze.  Oh my soul!  Oh my soul.  And when those light songs tumble across a snowy surface they do not lay prone for long.  Though snow is water, solid state, the world is full of reflections, shivering and waving as softly as a distant mirage or underwater plants at a shore edge.

I don’t know where to look, the seeing is so divine.

I don’t know how to feel, in this glorious wash of gold.

So I don’t think too hard.  I don’t walk too fast.  I simply keep up my rambling gait and claim each stride as my own, in a perfectly lit space, with a full-reaching heart and wide open eyes.