"We are only dancing on this Earth for a short time..."
This line from a favorite song of mine, by Cat Stevens, came into my head as I was driving down to North Carolina with my family when I got the news from my Dad that his sister has passed away. I was trying to make sense of it all...life and death...when the age old realization that we are here for a fleeting moment of time reiterated itself.
I had taken some pictures prior to leaving for our vacation that I wanted to use in a Blog while away. I had wanted to chronicle the progress of all the wonderful growth that was happening in the garden and with the fruit trees. It struck me though that in order to take those pictures, something I would not have taken the time to do prior to blogging, I had to slow down enough to walk through those areas of the yard with a different perspective. I was looking for beauty and reveling in it at the same time. I crouched down low to the ground to get some of the pictures of the budding growth. In the normal course of a day, the only crouching going on would have been accomplished while furiously pulling weeds.
The only walking around the Farm would have been at a clipped pace to assess what needed to be done while trying to accomplish the tasks at hand. It struck me that by taking the pictures, it was forcing me to slow down and enjoy the sights that I had so often walked right on by without a fleeting glance. I felt the warm sun and saw how it splayed itself through the branches of the peach tree heavily laden with ripening fruit. Usually, when I was out by the fruit tree I would have been frantically picking the over ripe fruit from the tree with my kids before the deer ate it all without one taste of the juicy sweet meat.
The same sunlight that had dappled through the leaves of the peach tree shone hard on the fruit of the pear tree, causing the pears to begin to ripen, as well as the grapes, the lettuce and all the other incredibly miraculous occurrences that occur each and every season, year in and year out.
The only problem is that we might not be here to see them next season. While we are dancing on this Earth for our short time, do we ever really SEE them? Do we let our senses take it all in? Do we live fully in the tangled web of life or do we watch it from the periphery? I am hoping that in my Aunt's memory, I will continue my dance with my eyes wide open and my arms outstretched to take in all the miraculous occurrences of each day.
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as everything is."
Albert Einstein 
