Do you ever lose your center, thrown off balance by a story on the news?  By an angry message? By a bill you hoped would never come? By a family member you can’t really connect with? By work you don’t love? By something that breaks? It happens to me often, as it happens to you. I got off center early this evening, I could feel it, right as some big thunderstorms raced through the area, after I heard another story about the children in Oklahoma, I’m not sure what it was, maybe it was removing Ma’s bloody bandages.  Or my hour-long interview for a documentary on animal grieving (a good interview.) Maria was not home, and I just felt off center.

Our lives are distracted and sometimes tense, life occurs again and again, it is my challenge and my work to find my center and return to it. I lost it all the time, I think everyone does. The spiritual life for me is finding it, again and again.

So I did this: I took Red and Frieda and Lenore and packed all of us in the car, I decided to drive until we saw something beautiful, and then I would take a photo of it and I would walk the dogs there. I didn’t have far to go, and I took my weekly shot of the corn field growing down the road, I love the lines. The rain had just stopped, the sun had just broken through, the mist was on the hills, the shadows on the cornfields. I took this shot and then walked the dogs in silence. Then I came home and went out into the garden by the bird bath and I did Tai Chi for ten minutes, aware as I moved of the leaves in the trees, the birds in the air, the geese in the field, the deer in the outer pasture, she sheep and donkeys grazing below me. Red lay down next to me, and if the donkeys were my spirit guides in the morning, Red took the job in the afternoon.

Then I made dinner and sat on the porch and listened to some music – Laura Mvula, I loved it, and I went out to check on Ma and the donkeys and close up the chicken coop. I offer this photograph to share my love of the light and the lines. I got myself back.