Do You See It?

Do you see it?  Can you find the treasure in this little patch of earth, off the side walk, we discovered on our hike today?

The white flowers will be blackberries in the summer, but among them was this beautiful little flower.....

Would you have missed it?  Do you slow down enough to see the hidden treasures in your day or do you walk or run past them with the pace of an Olympic runner?  Do you need a zoom lens to keep you from seeing too broad a picture?

My blog's title is Janette's Sage...not because I have achieved the status of a sage, but because as my hair continues to add gray I have learned something along this journey of life that can only have been learned through the passing of time.

Daily reminding myself to stop and smell the roses along the way, to learn to ignore the thorns, and inhale the fragrance of life has become a battle cry of my heart.

Stopping to listen when my four-year-old announced on our hike, "I have lost my energy!", instead of pulling him along to get back to the house for another task to be checked off my never-ending "to do" list.  I took it in laughingly, thinking maybe that was an added, though unexpected, benefit to our nature walk.  (It wasn't gone for long... he raced me home.)

Many times we focus on goals and achievements that can be measured by the evidences around us...a clean house, gourmet meals, our looks, our decor, our kid's test scores, and yet the times we will look back and smile on will not be those achievements, although worthy.  We will look back, as our family does every spring, and recall our annual trip to the creek to find tadpoles.

We will not recount how good  we were at filling out our nature books, but we will recall how, every year, no matter how much I worked to prevent it, my only girl would fall into the creek.  We will all laugh about how I could take three boys on a hike and only Nicole would come back wet....every year she would somehow fall in the creek.  Yes, my objective was to fill our nature book for science. What was accomplished was my stopping long enough to enjoy the less obvious adventure of my daughter being pulled out of the creek.

As age 50 beckons me even closer, I continue to reflect on the past half-century, weighing how I want to spend the days God will grant me.  Yes, I would love to be back to my post-pregnancy weight I had after four children in my early thirties, that somehow disappeared with my pregnancies at age 35 and 45, but dreaming for a size 8 body might only cause me to focus on the weeds that gathered along the trail on our hike today, while missing the beautiful little treasures hidden under their leaves.

Today's hike was just a reminder to me to remember the important things as I lay down tonight and my brain rehearses the day with it's never-ending list of things not accomplished...but we did see the flower that most people just walk past and I did celebrate my son's 24th birthday.