Through the eyes of a cock-eyed optimist 

By Jan Dynes

I enjoy word-jams bursting free into a deluge of unrelated thoughts…they increase my gratitude for my life in this beautiful country.

I like my simple life and have made peace with all the roads that I took to arrive here. Gypsy spirits roam in wonder. Yet here I have embraced a settling in after 70 years of adventuring.

I am passionately and embarrassingly in love with my dog, Coal who delights me just by his mere existence.

I am a softy and I cry during old movies, but try never to in my real life. Actually seldom have a reason to in my paradise.

I love believing all people are basically good and kind even through I follow the news, being a cock-eyed optimist suits me best, if that means I am unrealistic, it doesn’t matter to me. I live in gratitude at my perfect peace on a mountain high!

I enjoy going to parks to watch children play and dogs chase squirrels while time slips by me… unremarkably and yet in joy.

I relish sudden rain storms and thunder with lightning bolts and the adreniline rush of crashing waves on the transom and over the bow of a sailboat, suddenly making me vulnerable to nature’s majesty.

I respect all people everywhere and want to know all about them, I am so glad we are all unique in our thoughts and appearance. Oh how boring to only see one philosophy or color in anything.

My mind is always hungry and my heart perpetually open to new and different.

I am intensely curious about how everything works and how we can all be part of a better whole world and all humanity. I love documentaries and still taking classes and growth through continuing education in rapturous hunger.

I love the earth, sky and trees and all the teaming life in our eco-system and respect the caretakers everywhere who devote themselves to it’s survival.

I love the children I birthed in wonderful and magical moments of their creation and all the other kids I have only loved without shared a shared bloodline and their parents who shared them with me for myriad reasons and from all over the world! I am grateful for all family. The ones by blood and by choice and by all my friends everywhere and throughout my life.

I love all the strangers I’ve met in passing around the world and their subtle imprints on my life, even long after they have gone, even when we may never see each other again, I rejoice in how many I still am in touch with that always bring smiles.

I rejoice in the sounds of waterfalls and white-water rivers rushing over boulders and the crash of ocean waves on pink and gold and even green and white sand beaches.

I look up above and want to know all the stories of gulls and eagles and owls as well as the sparrows.

Oh yes, and the angels and fairies too that live in our imaginations and feed our fantasies.

I have a deep wonder in regard to nature. What does a bear dream in hibernation or a whale think deep in the ocean and as ants and bees labor do they make wishes?

I love the smell of Rosemary and Heather growing wild. Along with all the other flowers and herbs that make it so worth myriad handfuls of dirt through my fingers.

I enjoy the sound of birds chirping ahead of the dawn and nightingales hearlding my bedtime in my mountain paradise perch looking over the city and beyond to the Cajas and Andes and waking up above the clouds that entice like a gynormous trampoline.

I crave utilizing the contrasts of fushia and cobalt, and orchid, and silver when painting or weaving a sunlit sky and see how it reflects in the grass below.

I think new shoes that don’t hurt my feet are a marvel. Simple things are so satisfying, a perfect mango, a wheelbarrow full of cherries and the beautifully dressed velvet and embroidered ladies selling from them.

Kitchens make me happy as a place to tend loved ones souls along with their stomachs, cooking and baking to serve loved ones and friends is rapturous and fulfilling. I love slicing up vegetales in a rainbow of colors that I grew myself and concocting them into new and innovating favors that burst on my tastebuds. Grilling’s magical energetic popping sounds and baking’s aromas that are heavenly. The kitchen is where love is served up and the center of most families and where our friends laugh too.

I want the mystery of the deep black of night, camping under a cloud cover and also the clarity of returning stars when the clouds disapate and the city lights twinkle below.

A full moon always brings magic as does a sunrise over clouds. My views still dazzle me.

I love people who can look me in the eye and show their hearts unabashedly. Authenticity and honesty and kind souls who share my love for diversity and have wide open minds and hearts and love everything and everyone regardless of anything else.

I treasure dogs, horses, cows, llamas, goats, beetles and spiders and everything in between that lives and breathes alive on our amazing planet.

I marvel at how trees grow out of cracks in concrete and how that proves that all things are possible. Lessons in perseverance are exhibited by nature everywhere we look….

I revere the solemn shadows and grizzled trees in the woods of fairytales origins and the authors that they inspired to write books that molded us when we treasured them and internalized their longing, poetry and magic. Making believe charges our imaginations.

I am still dazzled by Ecuador’s myriad piles of gorgeous produce in tiendas and mercados plentifully and artfully piled for a visual feast to my eyes and grown naturally and then the gracious farmers who grew them and sell them to me with a smile.

I find glory in the sky and clouds shifting and painting cloud pictures to make my imagination soar high too. Our skies ever-changing eye candy with so many moods.

I love traveling the world and meeting so many diverse and amazing people everywhere I go. I gobble up new philosophies in fascination.

I love observing other’s in love anew and those who have held hands and weathered many decades. I am in love with life in all it’s forms, so passionately in love myself with all that surrounds me.

It is amazing when lions lay down beside the lambs and peace reigns. May it be our immediate future. May all our News become uplifting and kindness become contagious instead of viruses.

I feel gratitude by loving nature and diversity as they all compliment one another.

I think driving to the Grand Canyon for one day makes perfect sense with a good friend for no reason except it is there. Or deciding to go hike the Cajas, Ingipirca or anywhere at all.

I love hot cocoa with baby marshmellows and cinnamon toast in front of a fire with a friend and talking softly about our dreams.

I believe that all dreams come true, often creatively, you just have to observe that they morph…

I do not need any particular outcome to be happy and no reason to revel in being hopelessly positive.

I like creating art in every form, even if it doesn’t come out as planned.

I also love all of you who wade through my aimless mind meanerings as you nourish my delight and spur my run on ramblings that keep my brain teased and make the corners of my mouth turn up in wonder that you are in my life…….I love Cuenca and all of you!

Life is a miracle, love and light to all.
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