Morning Rituals

This is the view looking out the office area window.

Like most people we have our rituals, those quiet intimate, patterns you fall into comfortably after some 27 years together.  In the morning when we get up, Phil always makes coffee and I take my cup over to the mini-office area facing at huge double window overlooking our south-facing yard.

It's kind of a multi-tasking ritual.  Phil, coffee and remote in hand, flips through the news channels (politely muting the commercials.)  And I, while half listening to the news, scan the emails with one eye while my other is watching the ever changing and amazing view of my own front yard.

Like some opening prayer, I slide the window open full to drink in the fresh rain scented air and listen to a virtual choir of many different kinds of birds.  Crickets may still be chirping along with a few lingering coqui frogs.  Throughout the year, different things are blooming -- this month it is the Nun's Cap wild orchids that I've planted in a large bed around the Ohia trees -- that are also in bloom.

There is a sacred awareness of the earth and all who inhabit here, and each day brings new discoveries.  Today's delight was an enormous absolutely perfect spiderweb backlit by the low sun angle at 8am.  So of course I trade coffee and computer for camera as I traipse out to get the best angle I can -- not easy to do in wet, waist-high stag fern.

After getting it into photo shop for a better look, I realized how much it reminds me of the broken automobile glass I am using for my current art series entitled "Journey."

Graditude and Latitude

It is quiet this morning; our friends and carpenters, Steve and Rob have finished our new deck, and we are enjoying a cuppa Haysmer Mud (coffee so thick and rich it has been classified as its own food group.)

Yesterday, while answering an email from a new artist and friend in Fiji, I noticed the first Lehua blossom on the Ohia trees just outside the window of the office area in our open house floor plan.  I was caught by surprise when my eyes teared up; what?!  Look-see-inside:  I realize it marks the anniversary of our first year.

And, overnight a second blossom has appeared and I am aware of new rhythms here on this new land.  On the summer solstice, I awake to find the morning sunlight streaming from the southeast counterpane across my bed, blessed warmth on my face. I woke early this morning to see the sun peak up, nearly half a year later, on the northeast side of the grandmother Ohia.  The light comes now at a different slant, crisscrossing it's earlier path to form an invisible "X" across the land and our hale.

There are new rhythms here (nu riddims) that only time will reveal, perhaps more subtle than higher latitudes, but waiting to be discovered by open hearts and open eyes. There is only gratitude - Ho'omaika'i.