I am seldom lonely when I wander alone in the wilds of this amazing planet. I feel lonelier in a mall than in a forest. Today I walked in the misty cold and asked the Creator to grant me a memory. I think what I wanted was so much more than a memory. I wanted a chance to relive the moments in my life when I first held my babies close to my breast and inhaled their sweetness and felt as close to The Creator as I think I ever have. I remember what it felt like but I wanted more than that. I remembered the happiness and the joy, but I wanted it in the NOW. I was feeling old and tired and longed for the hope I had when I could see so far down the road that I could see where the road went around a bend and then climbed high into the mountains and I imagined the fertile valleys and the fields of flowers hidden from my view but waiting for me. I had been so filled with anticipation then. I wrapped my shawl close and prayed for a vision of .those moments of Love and Elation suspended in time that I might experience them once more. It is when the world is gentle and soft that I can access the goodness the Cosmos has gifted me with and know that even the times when the road has taken me places where I have felt profound forlornness and pain it has served a purpose. Just maybe it wasn’t fair for me to ask for a chance to relive those amazing feelings, but at the time I felt desperate and thought I could not bear another moment of pain, and wanted to banish it with the pureness of the feelings I had when I first held my babies. A realization came to me that I have always had those moments, and not just as memories. Inside this old lady are all the moments of my life. There is the baby who fell and cut her arm open when her baby bottle broke. I still carry the scar. There are all the moments of my life, even the times when I could not bear to look at the girl in the mirror for shame. Those moments exist, not simply the memories of those moments, but the actual moments exist here in the NOW. They are as much a part of me as this moment is. The misty fog shimmered around me and faded out of focus. I knew my prayer was being answered. I saw in my mind’s eye this ordinary looking cupboard door and knew that all I had to do was reach out and open it for the moments I sought to happen. I sank down between the roots of a great evergreen tree and leaned my back against the dark bark. I bowed my head and wondered at the beauty of the green lichen between my knees. As I saw my hand move toward the plain polished wooden knob my hand changed and was at once the hand of a baby and the hand of a girl, and the hand of a young woman, and the hand of a grown lady with dirt from the garden under her nails, and the hand of an old lady trying to write the sense of her life. My eyes filled with tears and as the tears dropped onto the tiny foliage of the lichen, the earth accepted them and they transformed into petals, soft and light, of unimaginable beauty and with exquisite colors without names. The air filled with Love, and wave after wave of ever changing scents, glorious, and intoxicating lifted my spirit. The moments I longed for happened and I floated in a sea of powerful emotions. I felt light and alive as I realized that I could relive any of the moments of my life in the NOW and that the Creator of the Great Mystery was always with me. I think perhaps this is why I love to photograph Nature. No sunset is the same. No sunrise is the same. No flower is the same. No creek is the same. Each exists in its own moment and has its own spirit. To me photography is about TIME. Time is forever. Time is always. Time is NOW