Finding strength in my weakness...

Today I reentered the world of the State Park. It'd been a year since I'd gone away and my return was more than over due. It felt strange in the beginning actually. Especially with the photography aspect. Though I do still take nature photography now and then, it took me a minute to get used to photographing trees again instead of the people that have been my focus as of late. What a wonderful park it was to make my return to though. It was beautiful and today offered the perfect weather for hiking.

In case I haven't mentioned on here, I have been working on my state park project for, wow, something like three years now. Once I have visited each and every one (and they are adding new ones all the time), I plan to piece together my favorite shots of each and put them into a book, complete with a short history of each. My initial motivation, other than getting my butt off the couch, was to inspire others to explore the beauty outside their front door. Today as we hiked along the trails, my thoughts traveled back to the adventures of Karana in Island of the Blue Dolphins. Whenever I go hiking, I like to imagine what it must have been like to be the fist person to walk in that very same spot so many years ago. Today I thought how odd it is that only a little over a week ago I was hiking in the middle-of-nowhere Mexico, and today in what you could call the middle-of-nowhere Florida. And it's all the same to me. This is when I get sad that people take for granted the wonder that surrounds them. We are so lucky to be Floridians and have such beautiful resources around us like our state park system.

The best thing about the parks I visited today was that they centered around the water. Most parks I have visited are strictly forest trails. But this one was forest coupled with the beauty of the Sante Fe River. It seemed to be the quietest park I have visited thus far, and continually reminded me of The Neverending Story or The Lord of the Rings (which I hadn't yet seen before tonight). It was straight out of a fantasy storybook. The huge trees with their exposed roots reaching out in all directions. The leaves and growth covering the water. The sunlight peeking through the branches. The creatures scurrying here and there. And, my favorite part, the quiet tinkling of the water as it passed over stones. I have always loved the water, being born of St. Augustine, and having spent my weekends as a kid at our lake house. I mistakenly translated that into a love of marine biology when I entered college, but quickly found that I was happy to just respect the water as opposed to study it. In my reading of Eastern Wisdom the other day, the author relays Lao-tzu's, one of the fathers of the Tao, view of water-

He spoke of water as the weakest of all things in the world, and yet there is nothing to be compared with it in overcoming what is hard and strong. You can cut water with a knife and it lets the knife go right through, yet water alone cut the Grand Canyon out of solid rock.

Oh to be like water- strong in your weakness.


"What's goin' on, Betty Sue?"
"Oh nothing, just doing one of my daily green algae facial masks."
"So that's how you get that youthful glow!"