I found this leaf lying next to my car, in the parking lot of my building this morning. Now, if you go around picking up every pretty leaf you see, you’ll never make it as far as the grocery store across the street before they close, but this one was especially pretty, so I scooped it up.
For the last several years, my inner life has been dominated by one theme – a struggle against futility. My world has been bracketed on the one side with the fear of losing what I have, and on the other by the belief that I can’t have what I want, anyway. Between these parentheses, my heart has been squeezed.
There’s a part of me that really, deeply, wants you to want to look at my pictures, wants the pictures themselves to be special to you. I want to see things clearly – see what I love in a world of my making, and in myself. If I say your perception doesn’t matter to me, that’s a lie. But I really can’t know if I’ve revealed enough to entice you to see this leaf. And I’m trying, trying not to answer that question.
what is beautiful remains 
I look forward everyday during my lunch half hour to feeling a bit of the rhino skin open so that your eloquent writing and lovely images can seep in to my butterfly soul. Actually, it’s your blog that pierces through that tough working girl hide and reminds me that there is an artisi inside protecting her sacred turf.During the work day your blog is one of the only things that gets let in. It’s like having a poem whispered in my ear. I so appreciate it. Keeps me sane.
These wild wonderful words mean so much to me! Lifting up the rhino skin, unveiling the butterfly soul, that’s the job I’ve assigned myself, the work I attempt to do each time. It makes me so happy to think of that connection being opened for you and between us, too! Thank you, teacher and friend!
Reading your words here, today – well, you have managed to put into words how I feel. I suppose how many of us feel — there’s a line in a Annie Dillard book, that I read almost 30 years ago now ( Teaching a Stone to Talk) where she refers to the space between the “sublimity of our ideals and the absurdity of the fact of us” … sometimes it seems like a huge chasm and other times like no distance at all..