Lonely for "The Lone Tree"

It was 14 months ago I saw the Lone Tree on Lake Wanaka.  We search throughout Wanaka looking for the tree.  Photographers in Queenstown has made the tree very popular with tourist by selling prints of the tree in the art shows.  That was how I discovered the tree.  I only had a rainy afternoon and the next morning to take pictures of the tree.  The tree looks extraordinary in its environment by the way it is frame with the shore and trees in a semi-circle on the left and the mountains in the background.  In Florida and south Georgia, it is common to see trees growing in shadow lakes and swamps but not as colorful and flamboyant as the lone tree of Lake Wanaka.

The Scent of Flowers

Matthew 6:28-29                       
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.  29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.

Patience Taught by Nature

 
 Patience Taught By Nature

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

'O DREARY life,' we cry, ' O dreary life ! '

And still the generations of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife
With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle ! Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land, savannah-swards
Unweary sweep, hills watch unworn, and rife
Meek leaves drop year]y from the forest-trees
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory: O thou God of old,
Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these !--
But so much patience as a blade of grass
Grows by, contented through the heat and cold.