There are times when the world gets very still and the only thing I can hear is my own breath and heartbeat. I have learned to listen for the sound of it, so I can try and understand what it is saying.

I heard the quiet, and the beat of my heart when this photo popped up in my inbox this morning.

It was just a couple of years ago that Becki, a blog and book reader, came to our last Open House, she sent me this photo with this message.

“It has way more meaning now then it did 3 years ago. I hope you treasure it, even a fraction, as much as I do. Follower since the very beginning. Hugs to you,” she wrote.

Hugs to you, Becki.

I may not treasure it in the way that Becki does, but it does have meaning for me. It makes me feel grateful and happy, and reflective as well. Time is time, just like loss is a loss.

I don’t have much use for nostalgia, I don’t see the point of it. I rarely look back and when I do, I rarely like it. The past is not always better than the present. Life is what you make of it, just like Grandma Moses said.

Nostalgia is a sadness feeling, does it ever feel good?

Don’t ask me what I’ve lost, ask me what I have.

I respect life and I know that everything I care about in the world, including me, will die. That is what life is, and I don’t like to swim in that stream, it leads nowhere that is good for me.

Becki’s photo captured a  lot of and feeling. There is Ed Gulley, big and strong and vigorous, standing next to me and Maria, Mary Kellogg sitting with us after reading from her new book of poetry, and faithful and loyal Red watching my back, as he always did.

Ed was such a big and strong man, I’d rather think of him that way that he was when his brain cancer ravaged him so badly. Red is gone too, of course, and Mary is in a home for the aged, struggling with her memory, no longer able to write her precious poetry

Ed loved our Open Houses, he sold his art there and told me he never felt more like an artist than when he was on our farm, that meant a lot to us. And to him. There are few traces of Ed in my life, I have little or no contact with his family, and so much has happened since this picture was taken.

I know him by the art he left with us, and the things he built for us in our woods. He is present in his own unmistakable way.

The photograph is a tableau, a piece of time and memory.

“How did it get late so soon?” Dr. Seuss asked in one of his books.  There is no point in regretting the past, said Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings:

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I appreciate your sending me the photo Becki, I wanted to share it with the people who know. I felt I should also post this photo of my friend Paul Moshimer, shortly before he took his own life.

As long as my heart was talking to me. Hey, Paul.