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You are what you eat … You know what you experience … You know what you know … But you don’t know what you don’t consider ….
I just walked outside my home and spent a glorious 30 min this evening viewing the snow, the sky, the vistas, the lights, all of it.
I’m about ready to head with my family to many days of skiing in Colorado. We have done so before in many places and many states. In every instance, I can remember the physical moments and the visual moments. Some of those visual moments were quite striking: looking over the back side of Big Mountain into Glacier, overlooking Lake Tahoe, looking north into the broad stretches of Canada.
But what truly blew my mind tonight was that the snowy ground and the vistas from my own backyard were as beautiful as what I have seen elsewhere. Granted, I’ve got open space from my back porch here in Iowa City, but, face it, most anyone who does not live here would not believe there are "world class" views across these prairies. My own backyard view combines pastoral scenes with some suburbia and with views no higher than one or two hundred of feet in topographic change.
But it is beautiful … and it is peaceful … and it is striking in its impact.
So, I think the following: I’m about ready to head to a known wonderful place (in the Rockies) with known vistas and known aesthetics. In that regard, I am a fortunate person and am willing to spend many dollars to do so. But, then, I also think: My own backyard is pretty cool. Actually, more than cool: Beautiful.
My family and I will have a great time and we will enjoy the skiing as we always do. But the magic of our own vistas of snow this night, the lights at night and the dark rolling hills and naked branches are pretty cool here as well.
The short of it is this: You don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry, and you sometimes don’t even know what your true source of water is.
For me, tonight, it is my backyard. I hope, if you care to look around and find the right viewpoint, that maybe it is the same for you ….
Drink deeply this Christmas ….
