Not What You Look at, but What You See - Three Scenarios
Friday, October 21, 2016 at 4:51PM 
Light charges across the water. It rides ripples, reveals rocks, and liberates truth from murky depths.
And I with my camera cannot capture the essence of it all, only reflect its brilliance.
My husband (in the yellow shirt) stopped to help a cyclist with a flat tire on a rocky mountain path. He is my superhero. In day to day living if someone is in trouble, he takes the time to help.
We rode high in the White Top Mountains of Virginia, under a blue-marbled sky. The leaves rustled and crunched under our bike tires and the musky smell of earth declared that summer had gone, in spite of 80 degree (Fahrenheit) temperatures.
Autumn colors displayed across mountainsides like gum drops in candy stores. But in other places, the hues softened to brick and tangerine. And I remembered Emerson. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”
The wheels of our recumbent trikes slapped against the slats of weathered bridges beating out a cadence that jounced us along. The bridges carried us across several gorges on the Virginia Creeper Trail.
I glanced through the gray rails, awed by a creek bed a thousand feet below with a stern current scrubbing boulders in its way. After a moment, I noticed how clean the boulders looked, and felt a part of my own soul cleansed and renewed. And I was reminded of Thoreau. “It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”