Green

This blog sprang to life from a challenge:  a post a day, on no particular subject.  I hadn’t been writing at the time, and the pressure of a public statement of intent felt like a good/bad/scary/thrilling gauntlet to take up.  Now I’m writing often, with the novel inching along, and client work picking up. But I miss you, the old friends, doting relatives and occasional strangers generous enough to spend your time here. So: I’m setting a new challenge for myself, a daily post not to exceed five hundred words or one hour’s worth of writing, whichever comes first. My subject is gratitude. My intent is devotional.  In my writing practice, it is so clear to me that I am not the water, simply the hose. Serving the flow is a privilege.

Before I share moment of gratitude for today, a word from our sponsors, hollykania.com, my new enterprise/website, just launched this week. Here’s the elevator blurb:  Holly Kania offers inspiring communications solutions for your website: from simple tasks like choosing a template and uploading content, to a full range of strategy and creative services.  And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.  If you know anyone looking for help setting up a website, please send them my way. I’m an easy one-stop-shop for individual practitioners, partnerships, or families. Thanks.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program:

Gratitude #1

Today I have been feeling overwhelming appreciation for the color green, its hundreds of hues, the deep sense of calm it awakens in me, and the shade, Lord, the shade. It was over ninety degrees and humid this morning. Nonetheless, dogs must be walked, so at around 10:30 a.m., we headed out, me still clad neck-to-knees in lycra already sweaty from teaching class at 8:30. We crossed the street to visit our favorite trail, a windy path that loops lazily through woods, over streams, and past ponds, giving the dogs several opportunities to swim or to wallow in muddy streambeds. The quality of the light this morning was exceptionally clear, and the lenses of my polarized sunglasses deepened the tones of the sky, the ground, the dogs, the trees.  I felt astonished by the abundance of color around me. How could there be so many fine gradations of green?  Limey yellow-greens of younger bushes flickered throughout the understory; bright, bold, grasses lined the water’s edge in cartoon hues of kelly green, bursting with hydration, lucky streamside dwellers. In denser thickets, the hues deepened glossily, almost to black.  As I approached the first stream, the path, strewn with copper pine needles, curved through a V-shaped gate made by two tree trunks, perfectly framing a saturated explosion of bushes, trees and grasses beyond. I stopped before crossing this threshold to admire the scene. As a child, I would have believed a fairy land lay just beyond. The dogs bounded out of sight and I could hear them up ahead, crashing gleefully into the water.  I thought I might try to count the shades of green, hundreds if not thousands of subtle variations. Sweat tricked down my temples and a few mosquitos whined around my ears and neck. The birds were less chirpy than usual.  Perhaps the heavy air weighed down their songs, pressing the trills and tweets into the ground.   In the quiet, I swear I could almost hear all the greenery breathing, sighing, drinking in sunlight and water.  I felt the presence of a profligate vitality in all the green, those millions upon millions of leaves, weeds, grasses, mosses.

What have I ever done, I wonder, to deserve such unconditional generosity?

See you tomorrow….