The other day someone noted that I had the tendency to talk to complete strangers. One becomes very aware of one's foibles if they are pointed out to one! She was right. I am fascinated in strangers. So I was waiting in line with a stranger for some copying to be done. We shared the moment with one of those wonderful black dogs with the graying eyebrows who nuzzled one and then the other.

She was having some copying done from a book called Birds by Andrew Zuckerman. I told her about his other book, Creatures. I mentioned the picture of the grizzly standing on hind legs posing on a white background. He must have waited hours for that picture. She told me her bear story in return. She had been gardening at her summer cottage in the fall. She was walking home with her shovel that had a blue handle. (Only an artist would have noted that detail!) Out of the woods shuffled a large black bear. It paused. She paused and lay down the shovel. The bear "merped" and so she "merped" and put her hands behind her back. I had a mother who was a violinist. Hands are important to violinists and artists. The bear investigated the blue handle and then casually stood up on his bag legs. She realized at that moment that he was only her height (Easy to say in retrospect...) and continued 'merping."

Much to her astonishment, he lay down on his back and started grooming himself. And then from up the hill, one of her children called and she looked away. When she looked back, the bear was gone. She still wondered whether it was her imagination or if that had really happened.

So often we are in situations where we have no witnesses and we wonder if it really happened!

Sometimes one should just hush up and allow a picture to speak for itself. This is Rick Tomalty's photo of a Saw-Whet owl who spent a day sitting in the tree outside John Rennie...perhaps listening in or just reminding us of what wisdom and beauty really is!

These are astonishing creatures...and they have feline curiosity.That is a hole in the wall...put there intentionally I think. I am revisiting some neat horoscopes:

"Don't look before you leap," is a Zen saying that contrasts with what many in the West consider wise counsel," writes Christopher Moors in his article, "Magical Buddha Nature. "If everything is premeditated, we never have the naked brilliance of a new experience. Though we might be able to temper fear in this way, we live at the minimum and have no room for the divine to enter our hearts. Love is above all the freedom of expansion."

An update:

This is Rudy's light!

The deer were absent!

A friend from Calgary wrote the following:
I run the dog at night. By the time we can get up there it is dark. But the hill at night is surprisingly light, when it's clear especially, and if I stay on the face of the hill (rather than going back into the woods) it is light enough to see, and not be afraid (of porcupines, coyotes, and murderers) though not light enough to see exactly. Last night and tonight we (me and Rudy, wearing a red bicycle light on his collar) were suddenly surrounded by movement. It was deer, and they were all around us and moving so fast that I thought I was in a dream, as though they were alien beings (alive, not mechanical, but moving faster than any living thing I really know) or really, as what my mind truly thought then, as though they were gods! It was very dream like and strange and rare. And with a little red light bobbing after them, slowly and with no real effort to catch up...so strange I felt like lying down in the snow right there and then.
I know! These aren't deer...but if one pretends...they could be watching Rudy with his red reflector light run by.

Ciboulette is fascinated with morning sunlight...and shadows...