Nowhere is uninteresting

This handsome fellow appeared on our beach yesterday.  He's a black brant, also known as a Pacific brent goose, on his way back to Alaska from his summer home in California, and, along with the increasingly early sunrise, he's a harbinger of spring to come.

He's also an unusual sight; the only other time I've seen brants was a year or two ago, when we found about 15 of them, dead and lying on our beach, evenly spaced some 10 to 15 feet apart.  So seeing a live one is particularly encouraging; it's reassuring to know that at least one has survived this far in this year's migration.

I could, of course, look at it another way, and assume he is the only survivor, but by now you know I tend to think more optimistically than that. Not to mention that I never equate being alone with being lonely...

See how much there is to think about, just looking at a single bird? ... which makes me think of a comment someone put on one of my blog posts yesterday.  I don't know who is reputed to have said it, but it's apparently a quotation from the April issue of Mindful Magazine (I didn't even know there WAS a Mindful Magazine!)  "Nowhere is uninteresting to an eye that's wide awake."

... which is why, I suspect, I grow impatient with my daughter when she claims she is bored. Because everywhere I look there are things to wonder about: the world is full of metaphors to explore -- how could anyone be bored?