Nature, for her

This is Sarah, Sue's best friend going back to the early 70s and newly my friend as well. Sarah has a couple of dogs who pull on their leashes and make it difficult for her to hold a camera. We went out together today so I could hold the dogs and she could take some photographs on this balmy spring day. It seemed that half the population of Portland took the afternoon off and went to the park, which was a great inconvenience for Sarah. We would set up our shots in the same direction, and she would wait for the people to get out of the way, while I would wait for more of them to crowd into the frame. "People for me," I said, as I have said before. "Nature for me," she laughed.

Sarah's spiritual practice is making beautiful commonplace books: her career was in books, and she has a great fondness for beautiful papers, elegant fonts, artful placement of objects on a page, and for just enough white space to make the text glow. She showed me one of her recently-finished books, and I was moved to tears by this quotation:

Love consists in sharing
what one has
and what one is
with those one loves.
--St. Ignatius of Loyola.

As we strolled through the park with the dogs, I was thinking about friendship and how we are influenced, changed and polished, honed, sharpened and softened by our friends. Without realizing it, I was humming this song, from a video posted earlier today by Memento Minutiae.