Dawn sky swirling with the tattered remnants of last night’s storm, clouds capturing and defining color, space, distance.  Light, that voluptuous Sonoran storm light perfusing morning chores.  Flash of black and yellow, liquid trills of bird call from the corral fence.  A welcome pair of new visitors, meadow larks have arrived to announce the morning.  The mountains are backdropped in virga black, a rainbow arching across their face.  Soft purling of wind flutters the pine needles.

     Every day, I hear the earth screaming in pain at the senseless, and unrelenting destruction of her nature.  Glacier National Park, soon to be nothing but a historical reference of what glaciers used to be, and the elephants, the elephants keening their death knells, estimated to be gone in 30 years absent radical intervention.  These things haunt my waking moments, and writhe through my veins at night.  And yet nature is endlessly generous, providing daily moments of precious beauty.

     Why write about a shaft of light, a flicker of wing in a world gone mad?? When lives are being lost, when anger and hatred seem to have become the norm.not some unusual rendering of the fabric of society, but every day bread and butter, what does it matter, the chiaroscuro rendering of a morning’s cloud painting??  Why pay attention to a moment.

     Because moments matter.  Because these fleeting moments of beauty remind us of the integrity of nature, of its intrinsic value.  They are a snapshot of nature’s vast soul.  They remind us of the difference between grace and destruction.  They provide reference markers between routine and possibility.  In a world that too often seems to be marching on a one way trip to annihilation, moments of beauty keep me, if not sane, at least marching forward within a sanity zone of tolerance.  Moments of beauty restore shreds of hope to my vision of the future.  They are the wind beneath my somewhat life battered and aging wings.