Morning Reflections

When you wake up in the morning and look out your window, what do you see?

If you are like me, you perhaps are first checking the state of the weather -- is the sun up yet?  Are there clouds in the sky?   And if you are a boater, there are more questions to answer -- are we where we were when we went to bed last night?  Is the tide rising or falling?

You may make note of the other earth occupants making themselves heard to you.  What do you hear?  Lawnmowers?Traffic noise?  Garbage trucks?  I am so blessed to mainly heard birds -- loons, eagles, geese, songbirds.

A friend commented on one of my recent posts to facebook, "You live among such rich beauty and have the time to notice it!"

And I try, very hard, not to miss it.  I don't want to take it for granted, when I am surrounded with it.

But then it blesses me again, with surprise.  Yesterday morning I heard a loon cry.  The loon is the state bird of Minnesota, and I am a native Minnesotan, so I do get a little thrill when I hear one, and I stood up to look around the boat to see if I could get a glimpse of it.  This being such a small inlet, and being the quiet of the morning and the loon so loud, the cry echoed, and I did not see a loon in the direction I first looked.

But I did see something splashing near the shore.  Is that a seal coming onto the beach?  I grab the binoculars for a closer look.  And what an amazing sight!  It is an eagle -- swimming!  I had read that they CAN swim, and now I was observing it!  He kind of crawled up on shore, then took 2 or 3 hops.  Yes, he has something in his feet!  He is looking around, and then he flies onto a low branch on a nearby tree and begins his breakfast feast.

This morning held a different kind of magic.  The morning light shines on the trees, the rocks, the water -- it reflects, creates shadows, illuminates.

The native people of these waters carve totems.  But did you know they also occur naturally?  This one called to me, and I had to try to get the image to share.  Not ten minutes later, he was pulling up his blanket of water to sleep again.