I sit in an easy chair, in the shade of my patio.  My eyelids are drooping as well as my chin.  I am at the edge of the abyss of a full-blown morning nap.  This is the most nefarious of all naps when considered by a workaholic.  No one naps in the morning.  My eyes are also clouded by the haze from my smoker as I patiently wait for my next two nights meals to properly smoke.  My mind is wandering as it often does, more so lately, and I am thinking of the past and dreaming about the future.  My mind is telling me that I have grown too old to see many of nature’s wonders that I have often felt that I deserved to see.  I have missed the chance to see the flora and fauna of the highlands of New Guinea and Borneo.  I have missed seeing the birds of paradise that inhabit these lands of mist and mystery.  I can see their beauty through the help on NatGeo TV but it just isn’t the same. 

My consciousness is suddenly disturbed by the drone like sound of one of God’s really beautiful creatures.  My mind is pulled back from the brink of napland and my eyes spring open in time to catch a glimpse of the “Sky Opal”.  An opal is a stone that shows both fire and ice and is considered by many as a more beautiful stone than the more precious diamond.  It shows reds, greens, golds, and changes at even the smallest turn of your hand.  The Sky Opal shows all of these features plus it moves with the speed of a blue darter.  With every turn of its tiny body and the rotation of its wings, you can see a dash of red, a slash of blue, a splotch of green and sometimes a spot of yellow.  What a gorgeous creature.  I can only think that God made the Sky Opal (the hummingbird) for all of us who have not directed our lives to allow us to make the exotic trips to lands of dreams.  You can keep your birds of paradise as I have my Sky Opal.
GC