A little something about vultures:

• New World vultures lack a syrinx (voicebox) and are nearly silent. They do not have songs, and their typical vocalizations are limited to grunts, hisses, bill clacks, and similar sounds that don't require complex vocal cords.
• Unlike many raptors, vultures are relatively social and often feed, fly, or roost in large flocks. A group of vultures is called a committee, venue, or volt. In flight, a flock of vultures is a kettle, and when the birds are feeding together at a carcass, the group is called a wake.
• Vultures enjoy their own holiday, International Vulture Awareness Day, which is celebrated on the first Saturday of each September.

Altair is looking forward to having an entire day  in September devoted to himself.  He wonders why it isn't EVERY day?  

Fiadh (fee-a) might have all of the studio creatures running amok before long. There's a half-finished vulture lurking on the easel who will surely conspire with her to cause havoc and mayhem.  I never did mind a little mayhem - it's the lack of rhyming that gets my goat.

The beauty of Carroll's words is this:  we are truly not the people we were just a day before today.  And that also means we are not who we will be tomorrow.  No sense going back.  Even less sense going forward.  I suppose I should hang out here in today for now.  And for now.  And now, too. :)

Someone recently asked my how old I will be this year.

When the number popped into my head, I must admit to a certain overwhelming sense of panic.  Not about being older or any of those things (though I imagine I will feel some of those, too) but about the time.   Time, I think, is our most precious resource.  Yet we have no clue how much of it we have.   So each minute, every hour, that day and the one over there, too, are precious.  I'd like to hoard mine.  But that's the thing - you absolutely MUST spend it.  It's all in the how.

Whyte's words are a billboard of how I want to spend mine - in brave participation, wild generosity and robust vulnerability.  But I am also deeply human (flawed, awkward, sensitive, sometimes crabby and all the things humanness entails) and sometimes I am not so brave, not so generous, not so open.  I (gently) remind myself to do better. 

​So far, I wake up each day with another to spend.  Glorious, isn't it?

The universe must be giggling.

Even as my feet find their way to the thin places in the world (mountains and water, in this case), my art finds me in horizontal and perpendicular frontiers in the class with Pauline Agnew, while my heart finds me sharing the depth of life and the human condition with those I love.  And a sweet friend sends me the quote above in response to my hikes.  Whoa.  Is it possible to feel fully grounded in the thin places?  My footing has never felt surer, though my control over the journey is obviously less than I have ever thought I had.

The more I let go, the surer I feel.

That isn't to say the letting go is without anxiousness....oh no no NO!  But the more I let go, the more I know I can let go.  And the more okay I am with opening my hands and letting things perch gently upon them, coming and going.  Sometimes those things stay.