As Valerie Porter points out in The Valley Floor this week, foliage is about as perfect as it can get right now.
“It’s almost offensively beautiful,” she points out.
She’s not wrong. Every year, it’s hard to know if foliage is gasp-out-loud gorgeous or if it’s a trick of light and clouds and time of day, plus state of mind that makes you stop in your tracks for a moment.
And then, other times you just accept it that is all that. You stop. You pause. You take a breath and confirm, yup, that’s unbelievably stunning.
I’ve had similar thoughts when visiting other stunning places on our planet. I was fortunate to be in Moab, Utah, a couple of times. Both times I stared up at the red walls and buttes in amazement. Visiting Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, I could barely take it in. I asked myself, “how could people hold so much beauty?”
But I kept coming back to those orange-red walls that are visible everywhere whether you’re in a park or not. I wondered if those who live there start to take them for granted and stop seeing them and further wondered how they could stop seeing them.
On one of those western adventures, I fell in love saguaro cactus, (the largest cactus species in the United States) in the Sonoran Desert. These stunning sentinels floored me, thrilled me, and also made me wonder if people who live there love the cacti in their yards as much as I love the maple in my yard that makes me swoon every single year. It’s too close to the house, I’m told, but I’ll never cut it down.
It could just be that this fall is simply a stunner and I’ve been in the right place, at the right time, with the right light and the right frame of mind. Or maybe, it’s as Valerie Porter writes:
“Okay, fine. It really is beautiful here.”
Never stop staring at what’s around us!
