Another morning has come. When I was still working I often said to my colleagues ‘Good Old Monday’ and Nancy would laugh. She told me once that she was waiting to hear me say ‘Good Old Monday… Although Monday is not the first day of the week…it seems like it when you are employed. Everyday life is a bit like a forest…’It is hard to see the forest for the trees.’ Most days are filled with some type of routine. Many of our activities have become muscle memory. So often life is rushing by us…while we are waiting to live. Next year is our motto…or ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ Scarlett O’Hara said in Gone With The Wind…

Learning the Secret of enjoying life on a daily basis is valuable. The ordinary is extraordinary when looked at through the right prism. The joy of small things is another way to see the ordinary as special. I regularly walk in Campus Woods and I see the most magnificent lessons of nature. We of the human family believe that rabbits and deer and my Building Beaver that is constantly working in my pond…are interlopers and visitors to our property and our world. But…how do the wild animals feel when they see us. Are we not interlopers and visitors to their world? Are we truly superior because we can read and write…or are we basically a destructive species due to our hubris?

Of late I have been photographing our surrounding small towns in Southern Illinois. These are towns that I have visited many times and one, Eldorado, that I grew up in. Yet, I did not see the many nuances of the buildings and the people that I now see in my senior years. When I was younger…I did not take the time to really look. We are a bit myopic in our vision and thus in our understanding of what is around us. I could liken our lives to a Gerbil on a Wheel…always furtively running and never getting anywhere. When you keep your nose to the grindstone…and never look up…the panoply of life is on an IMax Screen and Surround Sound is encompassing you…but you are preoccupied with the Stone…