I woke with only a sore knee and realized as I sorted dreams from feet on the ground that I started too many of the past 1800 mornings thinking about the next.
Cancer can do that to you, if you are lucky enough to live and not hurt too bad. I have had it twice but, while fortunate, I am a slow learner. A ticker tape of my status through both cancers would read, at least through this sunny day, “No evidence of … No evidence of … ”
As I drank coffee and watched for winter birds, I grasped the malignancy of my thoughts. I have been here before but the awareness was clearer today: My thoughts, like mutating cells, too often misdirected to the five-year cancer “cure” mark instead of being grateful for the day at hand. 
I winced when I opened the local newspaper obituaries on my laptop, a regular Sunday morning exercise. After 40 years as a newspaper reporter and editor in an area where I delivered newspapers as a boy, and now 70 myself, too many names are familiar.
I felt sinful: Alive but preoccupied with death.
I knew it too as I took photos of birds through the window glass. The morning cold should not keep me inside.
dream ranch 