One day at the pond I saw three small frogs and two big frogs. My times in the pond have brought more peace and joy than I could have imagined, especially when I find myself eye to eye with a frog. Even though I’m not posting every day right now, I’m still grateful every day; even though it’s been a challenging summer, I’m still grateful every day. Simply experiencing myself as another living being in this little ecosystem fills me with gratitude.

And with progress comes motivation to spend relaxing time at the pond as well as work time in it. Once again I can sit with coffee in the morning at the little blue table, listen to the birds, smell living water, rest in open awareness with contentment. This morning I brought my planner and stopped in delight when I dropped it on the table. The most simple pleasures. Color. Sound. Scent. Senses.

I get an inordinate amount of delight from this small crystal ball which I bought years ago. It was sold as a sort of external lens for photography, but I never did much with it that way. I simply loved the simple perfection of it on a table, surrounded by ancestral cats. But the other evening I took it down to the pond to play, just for fun. No great shots resulted, but the simple pleasure of play sufficed.

I’m grateful for the little dingo who finds the tortoise every evening. I like to know where he’s tucked in for the night even when we don’t need to bring him in, and it keeps Wren in training. In fact, she’s trained me: If we haven’t looked for him by dusk, she agitates until we do. The other night we went out between thunderstorms–she loves her job so much she braved the weather–and she found this hole under the fence. I panicked for a second calculating if Biko could have escaped, but he was tucked in under a sagebrush a foot inside the yard. It took a moment to dawn on me that something had tried to dig under in that spot precisely to get to him! What could it have been? I think it had just happened and Wren had scared it off. We filled the hole and have been vigilant about checking the fenceline morning and evening since then.