Cape May on Friday was all atwitter…migrating birds filled the bushes, feeding frantically, in an attempt to get over the Delaware ahead of the storm. There was a Nor’easter coming up the coast, due to hit the Cape by mid-night. Cape May was also atwitter with birders, making the most of the day of good light and light winds to see as many of those birds as possible before retiring (mostly) to hotel rooms to ride out the storm on Saturday. They stayed in Cape May, since Sunday was predicted to be sunny again, and stands (even from where I set this morning still) to be a great day for birding. There should be unusual numbers of birds (even for Cape May in autumn) backed up by the storm which has now passed away to the north.

All that to introduce this image: the leading edge of the weather front coming ashore. You can see the sharp sheer line where the warm moist air pushes up against the cooler, dryer air over the land. You don’t often see the transition that clearly.

I like this image where the sky dominates the land and the line of the storm is reflected in the line of the dunes…both leading away upstage left beyond the buildings of Cape May itself, just visible on the horizon.

Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view, f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast.

Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.

And for the Sunday thought: We often think of weather as being something purely temporal…of this earth. The realm of the spirit we think of as eternally peaceful…every day in heaven will be, we think, 74 degrees, with just enough breeze to cool our faces, and just enough puffy clouds in the blue sky to provide visual interest. But I suspect we are wrong. I suspect there are weather fronts in the spirit, and storms. I mean, what would eternity be without weather? The peace of the spirit is an attitude of the heart that is the same no matter the weather. In that sense we get to practice it right here, right now, in this world. We learn to keep our heads and our hearts up in the wind and the rain, the snow and the sleet, as well as on the peek days of blue skies and puffy clouds. We are all atwitter with the birds on Friday in Cape May, feeding our souls on their slightly frantic beauty…and hunkered down processing images and listening to the storm and watching it out our windows on Saturday as the Nor’easter passes. We might even suit up and go out for a while, just for the experience. And I suspect that is all part of our training for eternity.