Good morning! Welcome to "Morning Musings".

Musings: to meditate, think, contemplate, deliberate, ponder, reflect, ruminate, reverie, daydream, introspection, dream, preoccupation, brood, cogitate.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Feeling Alive



"When I think of the moments I have felt most alive, they all have the quality of joining all-of-what-I-keep-inside with everything-outside-me in a way that makes me forget myself....[like] moments of being immersed in great music or great open spaces." --Mark Nepo

Mark Nepo's statement explains why I could not get enough of this scene this past weekend as I took Gabriel out for his morning walk just before sunrise....

We'd rented a house right on the Chesapeake Bay and the view from the 3rd floor balcony stretched even farther....

And if you stood farther back in the house in the living room you felt you were out to sea on a ship....

Nepo says Joy is the feeling of the Oneness we experience when we get in touch with that inner self...."it is the risk to be fully present that opens us to the Oneness that flows through all things."  

Expansive views have a way of making one fully present!  It is why I also love the views from mountain tops just as much....

Nepo notes that as infants we are one with everything and that in time we learn how to distinguish between ourselves and others, between the world we carry inside and the world we move through.  Then we spend a lifetime trying to get back in touch with that primary state of Oneness.  This makes me think of a quote by Charles Dickens and illustrated by Mary Engelbreit....

May you find Joy in the aliveness of your moments!

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Beyond the Garden Gates - 2013


Every Spring Frederick, Maryland has a weekend-long tour of several private gardens in the downtown area.  This year's tour opened the garden gates to historic townhouses as well as individual homes.  It was a lovely day to be outside despite the overcast skies as we walked through these 11 gardens....

Sunday, May 19, 2013

The Lesson of the Bee and the Flower


The flower doesn't dream of the bee.  It blossoms and the bee comes."  --Mark Nepo, "The Book of Awakening"

Mark Nepo goes on to say, "At times in my life, I have wanted love so badly that I have reimagined myself, reinvented who I am, in an attempt to be more desirable or more deserving, only to discover, again and again, that it is the tending of my own soul that invites the natural process of love to begin.....By attending our own inner growth, we uncannily become exactly who we are..." and we attract "a host of loving others more real than all our fantasies."

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

A Foggy Morning


I don my slicker and garden shoes and head out of doors.....the slight mist does not put me off.  With camera in hand I want to capture the moody morning....