Tigger lost her bounce.

The lop-sided smiling lemming with his sister.

The skies look and feel oppressive today ... courtesy of that tropical cyclone working it’s way up the country I guess.  Why is it though that I sometimes wake on mornings like this feeling overwhelmed by the worries of the world.

One of my favourite cars parked in a disabled bay and the owner was definitely NOT disabled.

The greyness of the day matches my mood.

A road trip to the Waitakere Ranges and then a ramble

Even the brilliance of the weekend that WAS doesn’t change how I feel today.  

It’s not the words falling out of my mouth thingy this morning,

 it’s the tears wanting to fall from my eyes.

These two were also heading out for a ramble

For a brief moment in time, Tigger’s lost her bounce.

I just don’t get it.  I love rambling in the rain. 

I love the moodiness and the melancholy of mornings like this

 .... the starkness of the landscape, the monochromatic colour.

There’s so much to see, even though it appears hidden.

Sunday was gorgeous!

So WHY am I feeling so gloomy?

It’s mornings like this that remind me of how many shades of grey there are in the kaleidoscope of colour that fills our world.

Today there’s been NO sunshine, just a mixed up muddled world of grey.

There IS relevance to the way I view my world.  

It IS mixed up and muddled at the moment but, even when I think of it as being grey,

 it’s still FULL of colour and vibrancy and beauty.

I just forgot that for a moment.

Editing photos from the weekend helps put things in perspective.

Beauty is all around and so accessible to us.  We headed out to the Waitakere Ranges this weekend to ramble the Karamatura Falls track.  It’s only a couple of kms long but it’s steep .... mountain goat steep.  It’s made for the likes of my mate Carol and Kangaroo Sam.

Not that the hound had a problem.

She even managed to find replacement logs/sticks at the waterfalls every time we persuaded her to leave one behind. 

What would a forest be without logs!

At last I've managed to photograph a Kereru (a NZ Wood Pigeon) ... common resident of forests.

On a more serious note, I hadn’t realised the severity of the disease that’s killing Kauri trees.   I’ve seen a bit about it on social media sites and in the news recently but the significance of it had eluded me.  Kauri trees, for those of my friends in other parts of the world, are one of the largest rainforest trees on earth.  They’re to New Zealand what the pyramids are to Egypt, and Stonehenge and cathedrals are to England.  

Commercial use of Kauri decimated it.  Today the patches that remain are being carefully protected, not just against commercial use but also against the disease that’s threatening to wipe them out.

“It can be heard in the song of the bird

It can be felt in the breath of each new day

It lives in the spirit of Mother Earth ...” 

~ unknown