You cannot be in love with every beautiful thing you see

Here is the prompt: a write up on (sorry. the ethics of the site changed, precluding my linking to it).

You cannot be in love with every beautiful thing you see

I cannot be in love with every beautiful thing I see

why?

what is beauty?
what is beauty to you?
what is beauty to me?

I like the trees
I like the ocean
I like the dunes
I like the grass

They don’t lie to me

They don’t wear masks

If they gossip, I don’t understand
so it doesn’t matter

When birds sing
I sing back
I don’t know what they are saying
but I try

They sing back to me

My cat is here
talking to me
meow, mew
I can tell when she has a toy
or a mouse
(or a bat)
by her voice

The dunes will fall
in an earthquake

I may be buried
if I am on the beach

like lava eating houses
lava burying people alive
suffocating

though on the beach
I’d be crushed
it’s not like snow
our dunes come down with trees
when they come down

yet I walk the beach anyhow
go about my life

in love with every beautiful thing I see

beach tower

Sections of the dunes collapse. I stopped climbing them when I was sitting above my children and I was hit from behind by a collapse and pushed 5 feet forward. There was no warning, just sound and hit. I was not buried, but I realized how I could have been. I took my kids down off the dune.

There are sections of stairs left where the bottom sections have been washed away. Some days as it warms up, you hear sand sliding down, tiny trickles. I have a friend who saw a huge section collapse, all the way out to the water, with trees. He and another walker missed being buried by five minutes.

We walk the beach anyhow. This will collapse eventually but was standing on Saturday.

 

Rhody

We are in the week of our annual Rhododendron Festival. A tricycle race on Wednesday, run by my Sunrise Rotary. The Bed Race, the Pet Parade. Today is the Rhody Run, but I wore my feet out yesterday, with the Running of the Balls (one of our big Rotary fundraisers) and then the Rhody Parade. I walked to Monroe Street at 9:30 am and was not done until 3:00 pm. My phone went dead, but another person’s recorded 16,000 steps. I iced my feet when I got home, up on pillows!

And the local rhododendrons are gorgeous. Are they narcissists? Or just joyful?