I can contemplate peace endlessly and never know it as much as when it takes me by surprise.
It’s a beech tree in a wild blueberry patch at the east side of the front yard. The tree and I have a long history, as with everything in the picture. Everything. Long. Deep. Immersive relationship history. Yet on this mid-June morning, they all greeted me as if for the first time. I’ll just share the new part of the history that began at that moment.
I don’t feel that there is anything especially fantastic about what I saw. It was the peace it wrought in me, and I’ll never be able to share that except as a mention, with this souvenir of it.
It was damned silly of me to rush back into the house for the camera. When I got back out there, the light had changed, as rising suns do, and kept changing by the second, and none of it was as beautiful as when I first saw it.
This picture can never be more than a souvenir, especially because it is not a picture of the peace that caught me by surprise when that light and its verdant subjects first poured themselves upon me, into me.
The Balsamean 