I really like this theme I found for my website.  It’s called ‘naturefox by FoxLoad.’  And what I like most about it is that I can put a photograph in the background.  (If you can’t see a photograph on either side of the white blog panel, make your window larger.)

I replaced the photo that came with the theme with my own photograph of the wetlands at the Eastern Shore National Wildlife Refuge.  I went there last August, during the week before the fall semester started for a solo-mini vacation following a very busy spring and summer.   It’s a beautiful place to visit.

Be on the lookout for a new background photo every couple of weeks.

I was visiting the Eastern Shore while Northern Virginia experienced that freaky earthquake.  I didn’t feel the earthquake, probably because I was driving in the car at the time it happened, and I didn’t know anything about it until my daughter‘s Facebook posting dinged my phone.  When I arrived back at my hotel shortly after that, I saw the reports on the news in the hotel lobby.

It’s wondrous to me… all that is happening in the background, outside our awareness.  The earth is churning and spinning; organisms are coming into existence, living, dying; planets and stars are flying about in space.  Your mitochondria are creating energy; your DNA is replicating; your blood is carrying hundreds of necessary molecules to all parts of your body.

All that goes on, and innumerable more things, every second of every day, yet our awareness only encompasses a miniscule fraction of the action.  Even being as mindful and ‘in the moment’ as it is humanly possible to be, one could never be aware of everything happening in one’s own body, much less everywhere else.

But sometimes a photograph is just a photograph, and all that other stuff doesn’t have to tag along in order for you to enjoy the view.  Unless, of course, you’re like me, and you enjoy thinking about all that other stuff.