I set up the camera, readying myself for the morning. It was still dark. I ran through my settings and decided they would do for low light. Sunrise seemed awfully early today. We threw our bags in the jeep and were off, cresting a small hill shortly before the sun came up. Our guide told us we could get out of the jeep up here, a sort of unlikely predator zone. We were in Africa on safari. I felt joyous to be walking on tierra firma on this little hilltop in southern Kenya.

The Masai Mara is a wild place. A stretch of land known as the Mara Triangle was the part of the Mara we visited in 2019. Rolling hills, savannah, marshes, and river banks on the Mara River, filled with zebra, leopards, elephants, giraffes, cape buffaloes, wildebeest, and lions make up this place in the Kenyan wilderness. It was there we watched a cub emerge from its whelping den for the first time and come close to death his first day out in the world.

The water was cold, ice cold in fact. We dipped our feet back into our socks almost as quickly as we had shed them. Rocky Mountain spring water at its best! We had been hiking several miles, and our feet were hot and sticky. We were a sight to behold, wading into the stream, and then flinging ourselves onto the sand. The cold was astounding! Mountains in summertime hold traces of winter.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. I feel the call to wake up. I stumble out of bed, head for the bathroom; I wonder why I am up at two in the morning. I had been in a deep sleep. I climb back into bed, but something is niggling at me. I close my eyes, but it won’t go away. So I tune in. Nothing is in my mind. I tune into my heart. There’s a message there, a message that someone needs attending. I tune into my spirit. Suddenly it is crystal clear who needs my prayers. There are two in fact. I pray for them, listening to the words of spirit that are needed.

The wall between this world and the next is really only a very thin veil. Spirit dwells in both places. The veil is thinnest about three o’clock in the morning. The other side can reach us most easily at that hour. It is the hour of encounter.

How was I to know that things would turn out the way they did? Sometimes we can predict; sometimes we cannot. I was eleven when my Grandma died, suddenly, without warning. I was devastated. My siblings also grieved. No more weekends with Grandma. No more of her kindness and love. No more of her dinner table side-splitting laughter. In an instant, my life forever changed.

The world began, so I am told, in wonder and awe. Can you imagine a primordial universe, a mighty gaseous nursery spewing forth light and power, a blaze of galaxies hurled forth to the ends of time and space? Can you imagine the light of creation, how impenetrable it would have been, how unreal to our eyes?  What if you could glimpse a tiny fraction of that light?  Our forefathers were treated to such a glimpse most nights of the year.

How does it feel to be loved? It feels like slipping into something silky, like slipping into honey, like slipping into a deep breath of fresh air, like slipping into wondrous warmth. I began my life with my mother’s tender love. Her face was soft, curved, smiling. Her hair was brown, lighter brown in fact. Her smile could render all that was wrong, right again. She made me glow inside.

The clouds covered part of the sky in Likely, a small town on the Modoc Plateau where we stargaze every year. Once in awhile, nature intends a different display. We were listening to a fascinating lecture about star formation projected onto a large outdoor screen at twilight. We had been treated to pictures of star nurseries ejecting volatile gases in unstable regions of space, whirling stars from the raw stuff of nature.

First Story in The Rivers of Our Delight Stories Collection: At six o’clock in the morning, I wonder if I will be able to turn off the alarm fast enough to not awaken my husband. Nighttime is a tremendous comfort to me, so much so that I would sleep an extra hour in a heartbeat, given half a chance. I slip from my slumber into endless reverie about the night’s dreams. Who was in that dream? Why? What snatches of truth do they bring me from my soul?

The Flow Stories Collection No. 3 — Life on the Danube drenches the soul in our eternal joy, the joy that emanates from quite literally going with the flow. The day was dark with heavy rain clouds when we boarded the bus that would ferry the four of us from Vienna to Melk Abbey. Well, technically from Vienna to the port where we would pick up the riverboat.

When the alarm clock goes off at five o’clock in the morning when evey brain cell and muscle in your body is sleeping soundly, you have to remember why you have to get up at this perilously early hour.

How shall we reinvent ourselves when life’s troubles surround and engulf us? Splash in a wild mountain stream, caress your soul beneath the stars on a desert plateau, wander amongst the aspen with the wind drifting among the leaves golden and fluttering, search for the flitting yellow swallowtail butterflies in meadows lush, and behold the setting sun across the water. The glow of wild places inspires profoundly.

So we may be sure in the face of total astonishment which thrills us, nature really is that beautiful!

Once in awhile nature simply takes our breath away. We found the entrance to Lower Canyon more easily the second time around. A narrow crack in the sun baked earth, astonishingly small, marked the spot where we would descend. I liked the coolness on my brow, quiet relief from the desert afternoon heat above. I had been dreaming about returning to the quiet for two years since last we emerged from the belly of Mother Earth. I needed to hear myself think. I needed to soak my soul in these canyon walls aflame and burnished by the Arizona sun peaking through the crevices above.