“Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet, and your mind serene. Breath God’s air. Work, if you can under his sky.”  – Thomas Merton, Pure Love

I realized some time ago that I don’t have to go far to find a treasure – the beauty, goodness, and light all around me are just as present and available as the violence and anger and hatred that I can find on the news any time we let it into our heads.

What to look at is a choice.

Photography has helped me see the world differently – I never paid much attention to the sky or trees, or flowers before I started taking photographs. Now I am always looking for beauty, and I am always finding it.

Photography is, when it comes down to it,  a reflection of us and what we choose to photograph. I look out at the world and the world looks back at me.

Sometimes,  beautiful things were so close by that they helped me see that they are everywhere once I was open to it, not just under my nose.

I saw this light Saturday, I went out to the pasture to sit with Maria and the donkeys on a beautiful Spring afternoon.

I was startled.

She was sitting between Issachar and Fanny. This is not something sheep naturally do. Fanny was enjoying listening to Maria and getting her neck scratched. Issachar seemed to be whispering into Maria’s ear, trading feelings and secrets.

I had just been reading a Thomas Merton essay, “The Woman Who Was Clothed In The Sun.” Merton was writing about Mary, the Blessed Mother. But I thought of Maria, who is also a woman of the sun to me. She is not a Holy Mother, nor would she seek to be.

But sometimes she is a portal to me, a door through which beauty and love come pouring through.

Maria is empty of egotism, free from sin, sitting out there with Issachar and Fanny; she is pure as the glass of a clean barn window. Sitting there, at that moment, she had no other function but to let in the sun’s light.

At that moment, she was nothing but love, nothing but beauty, goodness, and light. We have a choice in this challenging world. We can either look for the darkness or look for the morning sun.

When I looked through my viewfinder yesterday, I paused to feel the sun’s warmth, the quiet of the woods, the peacefulness of the farm, and it seemed to my lens was flooded with beauty and goodness.