Happy Sunday.

I am not sure how, but this image, from our yard in Kennebunk, seems right for Sunday. We are in Southern Maine, but we lived in New Mexico many years, where Yucca is quite at home. It was somewhat surprising to find a Yucca planted in one corner of the tiny front garden of the home we bought when we moved to Maine, but there it was. Over the years it has gown to good size, and now produces an amazing show of flower stalks and blossoms every summer. This shot is from the morning after a day of rain. The rain had only cleared off at first light, and the yard, and all it plants, were still very wet…but for some reason the water had beaded spectacularly on the Yucca blooms.

Here is a second perspective.

Nikon Coolpix P500 in Close Up mode (macro), 32mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/160th and 1/320th @ ISO 160.

Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom. As the blooms are so white, the shadows on them showed a lot of reflected green, and I had to deal with that with the selective saturation control. Our eye/brain in real time view auto adjusts for colored shadows…the camera does not.

And for a Sunday thought. I don’t know how a plant of the desert southwest ended up in our garden in Maine, but brings enough of the desert with it to remind me of how biblical the blessing of rain is. The psalms, written in a desert land, are full of rain imagery, as is the whole old testament. It is easy to forget that rain is a blessing in Southern Maine in the summer, when a rainy week means less beach time, and a rainy weekend means lost tourist dollars, but, of course, even here it is. We are green and lush because of the rain, not rain forest lush, but vibrant and alive in way desert dwellers can only dream of. Water beading on the Yucca blossoms brings that sense of blessing even here. Grace and grace abounding. We live by grace.