Life Abundant

There is no finer feeling than coasting on a country road while the world is waking up. The smell of early morning in the air, the birds singing the day in. Two horses in the field run together simply for the joy of it, the cottonweed trees dance in the breeze, the verdant wild grasses on the side of the road bow as we pass. Here is Life, in all its full splendor! The simple wonder of being alive, moving, breathing, feeling, dreaming. It is enough. It is more than enough. It is everything. 

 

Of course, the death-dealers are everywhere. The ones who wake up in the morning thinking, "Who can I hurt today? " Alongside those who squander life, fill it with mere distraction, drug it up or drug it down, refuse to praise or bless or to own their joy, walk through their incarnation like zombies, enclose their hearts in locked chests, let the brainwashers control their minds. “Away with them!” I long to say, but you see how their toxic omnipresence in the air enters my lungs and threatens to darken everything. 

 

But on a morning bike riding through the French countryside, they are whooshed away in the wind. (It’s only when I sit down later to write that they pull up a chair.) The glory of it all stayed with us for the full four hours and almost 40 miles of riding, ending at the Grotto of the Combarelles, one of the local caves that tells us that people like us, yearning to express themselves in images still preserved lived some 15,000 years ago. We witnessed their extraordinary praise of horses, bison, reindeer, a lion, a fish and more etched into the cave walls.

 

By now it was late afternoon and just enough time to dive into the hotel’s perfect temperature (77 Fahrenheit) swimming pool in a luxuriant yard and garden. And then into our evening dress for another 3-course feast.  Life abundant and I cherish it all.