Up the Sunbeam

-- It is quite impossible to spend time in San Francisco without seeing the unusual . Donuts and Chinese Food? Why not? It is a city where oddity is normal, a place where spectacle is commonplace and a slightly magical land where stories on two feet walk freely among the skyscrapers and pass you on the street like a storybook parade of characters. This, like all cities, is a display of contrasts where breathtaking beauty and wretched, hellish ugliness live side by side, where extraordinary wealth and desperate poverty rub shoulders every day without surprise. Despite the fact that I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, and for most of that time have lived less than 25 miles (as the crow flies) from this world famous city, it always feels like an adventure to go there. The skyline and the city itself have hosted countless TV shows and movies and I have grown so familiar with it through those stories I always kind of feel like I'm meeting a superstar...

-- The forest floor wears a shaggy green carpet over fragrant black earth. Recent rain leaves everything feeling spongy underfoot and the spring in my step comes easy. The air is rinsed clean and cool, and I breathe it in greedily, knowing summer smog is not far off when I'll try to breathe shallow to avoid the smelly fumes that make my head feel squeezed too tight.  I step slow, eyes ever scanning, hunting rectangles, always framing the rectangles. There's one! Just at my feet, a single leaf stands out among all the others. There among countless green leaves, grows one impossible-to-ignore leaf arrayed in shades of sunset.  It blushes beautiful, setting its graceful shape in vivid contrast to so much green.  How brightly it stands out! God sees you like that. You stand out to him . . . all the time. When you think you're lost in a sea of city, surrounded by too many people  . . . When you're afraid of  being unimportant and undistinguished . . . Wh...