Beauty and gratitude

My knee, which has been acting up ever since we went back to Portland for Sammy's birthday, seems to be calming down. Ups and downs still give me trouble--I've missed our All Saints group's regular Monday hikes up Candy Mountain and Badger Mountain. But I can make two or three miles comfortably on the flat and smooth. So last Friday I walked the Columbia River path in downtown Richland, between Howard Amon and Leslie Groves parks. It was a brilliant and uncharacteristically windless day, and the sight of this magnificent river and the endless horizon beyond calmed my frets and fears, which crop up daily about all kinds of matters, mostly concerning the state of the world and of my own soul. But that day I shed my anxieties along with my jacket and just drank it in like a tonic. When we moved here, in the fall of '24, I was not sure I would be able to find beauty in this dry, windy place, so different from the lush greenscape I left behind in western Oregon. I needn't have worried. Somehow, by some agency only partly mine, beauty seems to find me anywhere I go, if only I lift my eyes to see it.

The Columbia River at Richland, Washington