I was ready to go out to the Farmer’s Market and I couldn’t find Maria, so I looked out the rear window, she was sitting in the sun with Minnie reading a book.

“You know what?” I said as we drove into town. “The world is your desk.” And it is. The woods are Maria’s desk, her studio, the back yard, front yard, tree stumps, meadows, the pasture, the front, and rear porches.

I have medieval ideas of the Horizon.

Our horizons define us, I think. Horizons are internal and external, they are the maps of our own vision, our own boundaries and ambitions.

A horizon is a line at which the earth’s surface and the sky appear to meet. Another definition I like of horizon is this; a great circle of the celestial sphere, the plane of which passes through the center of the earth and is parallel to that of the apparent horizon of a place.

To me, a horizon is the limit of a person’s mental perception.

Even though I don’t see my desk as the world, I do see the world from my desk in a sense. I don’t just write about me, I write about the world beyond me, the people I meet, the places I go, the ideas I read about, the music I see, the books I read, the ideas I  have, my search for spiritual life.

I’m realizing living with Maria that my horizons – my sense of space in the world – is smaller than hers in a physical sense. I always write at my desk, I always read in bed or in a living room chair.

I am pleased to see that the range of subjects I wrote about is wide now. This is no longer a site just for cute animal photos, although there are plenty of those.

One woman complained the other day that  I used to write only about animals, now I do a lot of rund-raising. After much deliberations, I suggested she get lost.

She was indignant announcing that she was storming off in a huff. She said she felt sorry for me, I replied that there was no need to be sorry, just be gone.

She had no clue as to why her message was so offensive to me.

I wonder at Maria’s open sense of what a horizon is. She might be found reading anywhere. I never know where she is, there is no one place to look for her. She almost always knows where I am.

Our minds are a different story.