A walk under California’s blue skies

The New Year is really here!

I always love this time. However much I love celebrating the year-end hols, it feels so very good to take the decorations down and get back to daily life. 2010 had been a tough year for me (though I certainly don’t emphasize that on this blog.) For one thing, we’ve just gone through the sale of our home in an unbelievable, down-sizing, move. This alone would have been enough, but other things were thrust upon us, too.

While I wish I were a person whose reaction to stress is to stop eating, my problem is the opposite. Thus, in the past twenty months, illness in my family and other high stressors have taken their toll. I’d pretty much abandoned my exercise regimes and my weight has crept up much more than I like to admit.

Now, (even though I have a mountain of work to prepare data for our income tax returns) my family and I are in a bit of a “lull.” Nice timing for some  stay-at-home journeys in nutrition and exercise. In accordance, the day before yesterday, I went out for a ten-minute fast walk.

The day was sunny for this time of year and the sky was vastly blue. I walked for almost an hour! The crispness of the air, the warmth of the sun, and mundane details–yes, beautiful details–of life here in Northern California gave me another gift of today.

I began my journey outside my hotel’s door and walked along a busy street.  The street would be of little interest from a car, but as I walked, things of beauty appeared before my eyes. This simple walk on a so-so street served me poetry on a sunshine platter.

Here’s a sampling.

Some might deem this street dull and non-descript, but observe the little flowers by the sidewalk.

Perhaps the flowers sharpened my senses and made me see additional beauty.

Here's a quite ordinary apartment complex, in the "California" style. Quite lovely, I thought, for a (mainly) commercial area.

And then, I looked up beyond the palms and into an amazing blue.

A flawless blue sky day

The gift of today during this walk showed me how ordinary things can really be sublime. Such are things we miss when we speed through life. But  we see such things when we slow down.

I looked up the street and then discovered–without even realizing, I’d neared the Italian-American market.

Italian-American markets are favorite haunts for my stay-at-home travels. I found myself walking in.

Remember, this was the first week of the year, so besides new goals for exercise, I’m working on nutrition, too. Imagine my chagrin when I realized I hadn’t yet planned my lunch. As things turned out, that was no problem at all. See what this market had in store for my hunger.

Don't these veggies look luscious?

Oh, and possibilities for a healthy dessert spread before me, too!

 

 

Don't these fruits look delicious, too?

Thus, it happened that I bought all I needed for my healthy lunch, and I hadn’t even gone through the planning.

These are the gifts my walk brought me the other day. What gifts would a walk around your neighborhood bring you? Please note that all these pictures were taken with my phone. Be sure to take your camera-phone with you. If you took a walk and snapped pictures of your surroundings as if you were a tourist from abroad, what things of beauty and enjoyment would you see?

Bon voyage,

Rita Elizabeth

P.S. A few months ago, I posted a topic on the gift of today. I’m delighted to say that post was picked up by a new and interesting blog. Click here for the link to that blog, which I’ll talk about about in a future post. (Or, you can see the original gift of today entry in my October 9, 2010 post on Stay-At-Home-Traveler.)