TIME WELL KEPT

These days I tend to wake up about 8 minutes before my alarm - about the same time the robins and chickadees sound off the morning and songs of joy for a new day pass through my window.

When the wind picks up and the aspen leaves quiver from what I can only imagine as the earth inhaling and exhaling, I know it's about mid morning.

If my stomach doesn't let me know first, I can usually tell by the business of the ground squirrels and chipmunks scurrying around, or the knocking of the woodpecker and zig-zig flight of the jays, that it might be close to lunch.

In the late afternoon the sun warms the skin a bit more and the clouds billow into thunderheads. On my evening runs alongside the river, I always know where I am simply by how each rapid sings its own unique verse in a harmonically beautiful song down the canyon. When the song of the thrushes become the most prominent tune later in the evening, and the deer emerge from the woods for their final grazings, and the light becomes softer, I figure it's time to get ready for bed.

There's not much need for a watch these days, time is well kept around me.

Spend enough time in a place - nature that is - and you began to sense its rhythms and pace. It's not too fast, nor too slow. With or without you, that pace will never change. But if you can match that pace...oo that's a sweet, easy feeling.