Blah blah blah blah June, Blah blah blah blah Moon

The title of this post comes from an Ira Gershwin lyric, can't remember the song title right now.  However, it is June.  The moon last night was about a quarter full.  This morning the sky is blue, the sun is shining and there is a soft breeze.  It is a beautiful day in mid coast Maine.  That's good because I badly need to be restored after this last week at work. 

This morning Ella and I got out earlier than usual - we were up at 5:00 am and walking by 5:30.  We stopped down at the waterfront and I sat for a while on a bench at one of the businesses on Front Street, Ella laying in the early sunshine on the grass at my feet.  When we got up and walked on, I took a couple photos.

First, this is a roll of shrink-wrap plastic - boat-size.  The photo doesn't really show the scale.  It's probably 12-15 feet high.

 Then these from Ulmer's point - a boat in dry dock  being worked on, and next, what the working water front looks like at 5:45 am (the Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse in the background).

I've been thinking about what my morning walks mean to me (and since David's been working full-time, my mid-afternoon walks, too, and recently, as David's heel pain has continued to bother him - much better now, but not quite completely well - often my evening walks as well.  But most of all, my morning walks.)

Each day to rise, dress, brush my teeth, and be out the door with Ella into the morning - whatever it might be that day - within 15 minutes of shaking off sleep, and within 10 more minutes walking, to be by the water, seeing the sun - depending on the season - just peeking over the horizon, or shining behind Vinalhaven island, the water variously misty, sparkling, wrinkled, glittering, roiling, or smooth as deeply blue or grey or green glass.  Wheeling overhead the gulls.  Calling from the trees, the wires overhead, the rooftops, the sky - birds, birds and more birds.  

Doing this every single day, day in and day out, month in, month out, and now year in, year out - when it is still dark when we go out into the morning, and when it is broad daylight, in the rain, the sunshine, through mist, fog, snow, sleet, when it is below freezing, or there is a warm spring breeze, when summer's heat is already apparent at dawn - whatever the season, the weather, the temperature, every single day, for more than 18 months, rising to walk, to smell the air, to hear the sounds, to watch the trees and bushes and other plants cycle through their seasons' garb.  Almost always to be the only ones out there.  Now become so familiar, and still, every single day new, wondrous, different.

I wonder how I lived in the days when I awoke in a concrete building in a concrete city and walked concrete streets to descend into a concrete tunnel to ride a machine through more tunnels to reach more concrete, breathing day in and day out the exhalations of millions of others doing the same.  (The plus side - I didn't even know I had allergies.  How could I?  There was no green.) How do we human beings, who evolved and lived for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years in, and on, and of green and living lands, how do we come to live in concrete?  

I watched a video posted by my dear friend 'Scabless' Sue on FB today about "concentrated industrial farming" - the images are horrendous, and we ask ourselves how we can put 4,000 chickens into a space that public safety codes would limit to hold at most 100 persons, how we can "raise" pigs in metal cages where their limbs poke through bars.  Do we not see that we are doing the same to our own species?  

Breathe.  Peace.  Breathe.

Peace.