Wednesday

                                                                          Surge, Illuminare 

                                               (Canticle 11 at Morning Prayer) 

Arise,

shine,

for 

your 

light 

has 

come, 

and 

the 

glory 

of
the 

Lord 

has dawned upon you.                        

                                 I took this picture by mistake. Or, more accurately, I saw it by mistake. I was taking a picture of the misty pinky-orange dawn and somehow my iPad got into a mode that I didn’t want it in and I couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there and. more critically, how to change it. And as I messed around with it, I saw this, and snapped a picture.  It’s just gravel that is supposed to be covering the ground, but which has become sparse over the years... When we lived in LA, Gordon and I had a little friend named Erica. She was maybe 5 or 6 at the time and she had a smile that lit up the world. She had cystic fibrosis and she died at age 8, after we'd moved to San Diego, Erica collected Reader’s Digests and rocks. One day while she was at our house, she saw a pile of gravel at the landlord’s and she asked if she could collect some of it. I said “Sure, but Erica, it’s just gavel.” And she looked at me wide-eyed and she said “How do you know?”