Breathe...

In the past few years, I've grown more and more enamored with nature and the earth. It's a different feeling than I have toward the heavens, meaning beyond the sky in outer space. Similar would hold true for the oceans.

I will most likely never scuba dive. Or if I do, diving would not be an ongoing, physical, tangible relationship. I'm not a big water-person.

I doubt I'll ever take a civilian trip to outer space, unless that becomes common before I die. But like diving, there would be no ongoing, physical, tangible relationship. Like with water, I'm not big into flying. Though I could be, if I had the funds.

But the earth. The earth. We are together every day. Without her, I couldn't exist. (I couldn't exist without the oceans or space either.)

It's not that I am not in awe of the oceans and heavens. I love them too. But I don't have the love affair with them that I have with the earth, earth being the dirt and all the life it creates and provides. We are together daily. There are times she cradles me, and I am soothed.

Yesterday...as I sat in the shade of a tree on small, grassy hill keeping an eye on a little Yorkie puppy while she sniffed and frolicked; feeling the breezes blow through the leaves and limbs of the surrounding trees; watching birds flutter about chirping one to another; witnessing squirrels scamper and springtime come to life before my eyes in all its array and vast variety with hues of green, patches of clover, wild flowers, and bees a buzzing...I thought, What a horror it would be to have to stay indoors all the time. To see only walls and fluorescent lights and electronic screens.

And then I thought of a prisoner in solitary confinement, with only a small portal for light way up high in a cement block cell. I can't think of a worse torture. So much darkness. I guess prisoners get let out for 30 minutes a day in a small, fenced area, in the more humane prisons. And what of terrorists' prison cells? There's probably no outside time, or only enough to keep the prisoner breathing, to put him back in the hell-hole.

My thoughts meandered to stories I'd heard or read or seen in movies, about prisoners of war, Holocaust survivors, prisoners who survive solitary confinement in the US prison system, kidnap victims...

At times, I look around me and, to the best of my ability, imagine if a bomb were to hit...all this beauty would be ash. In the cities, rubble would be everywhere. Stacks and stacks of rubble. Rubble strewn in the streets. Rubble and ash and stench. Some people live with that every day. Some have known no differently.

My life is good. A reality I am continually aware of...

Olivia along New River Trail heading south, 4/13/16

New River Trail heading north, 4/13/16