listen

I, like many other people, am guilty of not listening enough... to my kids, to my wife, to my employees, and to my Heavenly Father. But I did hear something as I was listening last week that I have to share. I was out in my folks' backyard looking for birds and other interesting flora and fauna. I heard this crackling sound... I thought it might be a chickadee or a nuthatch in the tree I was next to. So I scoured the tree with my eyes but didn't see a single movement... just more crackling, like rice crispies cereal. I finally saw something fall to the ground... a seed. As I looked and listened more intently, it occurred to me that the pine cones were opening. In the almost-twenty years I had lived there I had never heard the stretching of this trees fertility. I had to run and tell Amber, the kids, and my mom. It was so thrilling. We just sat there and listened for some time, as if mesmerized by the luminescence of a campfire, but only audibly. Here is that tree. This tree has a lot of memories in it. It overlooks a large gully and is a beautiful tree. It has seen many birds in it's branches, including a great-horned owl one night as witnessed by my father.
I have a renewed dedication to listening.

I am sorry I don't have a better picture of the entire tree. Spence is climbing a dead snag in front of it in this shot though. The black thing in the tree is a yard light that sits on a branch.

It also occurred to me that this picture would illustrate the story a lot better as a cropped image... so here is one more.
Feel free to click on the image if you aren't able to see its entire width.