This morning I lay in bed for a little while after I awakened. The early sun painted a pink tint onto the black oak trunk where I could see it through my window, and rimmed the western sky with pink as well. I experienced again the glorious burnished colors of birds flying at dawn. How the sky-oriented, sun-pinked world shines.

A little later, I saw the angus herd with a couple babies in a neighbor's meadow. Those calves! They're so sturdy and squared-off-looking, and so charmingly little. And they're all so black on the present pale green meadow. Even later in the year, when the meadows have turned to lush green, the angus are reliably sturdy, rectangular and black. I always look for them, and seeing them always gives me the belly-felt experience of all's-right. "All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well" as long as angus graze in the meadow.

I have a crystal hanging in my bedroom window. In the afternoon, when it is struck by full sunshine, it sheds rainbows on the white walls all around my room. This morning I sat for meditation for half an hour in full sunshine, and a vision opened of a rainbow filling my body with clear, overlapping layers of light, like the afternoon rainbows on my bedroom, only bigger. I was a warm, human rainbow.

With the sensation of being so filled with light came the sensation remembered from childhood of opening my arms wide and running full tilt downhill. Oh, how alive that felt! Do you remember that feeling? Almost out of control but not quite, laughing like crazy at the pure sensation of being.

Wasn't it Rilke who wrote something to the effect that if one had lived fully in childhood one could spend the rest of a lifetime in a cell and still write vividly from those memories? I'm so thankful, though, that I can still experience the wide world.

Today I walked along Deer Creek for the first time since the floods last Thursday and Friday. The road is full of mud. The county dumped gravel over top, but at many places the mud was so thick the gravel just sank in and disappeared. A few neighbors plowed and shoveled mud from the mouths of their lanes much like we shovel heavy snow. There are shoveled-mud piles. Big trees and heavy rocks have been moved all around in the creek bed, though I can't quite see how and to where, yet, the creek is still so high and murky.

Compared to a tsunami, this rushing creek water is small stuff. What wild power is carried in rushing water. The fierce, non-human, dependable loving-kindness of the natural world. As Lao-Tzu says, "Nature is not human hearted," and "Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it."