This morning my eyes followed light, and the sun shot across the neighbor’s field and lit her oak tree all gold and beautiful and I realized I had never seen this tree. The neighbor’s tree is closer to the house than most of our own, but because of a mental boundary, I couldn't see it. The squirrels there were hers, not ours. (Ha! The squirrels never knew...)

When I lived in Texas, we watched on television radar images of weather systems rolling across the state, sometimes into Louisiana and Mississippi. What amused me was the big blank area beneath the state. As though there were no land south of the US border. As though the hurricanes, thunderstorms, tornadoes did not venture past the political line. As though there were not real people there affected. As though weather in Mexico did not exist.

There's so much I don't see because of brain boundaries. Do I wait for the tree to fall across the line to appreciate its existence? To be shocked when the invisible is suddenly right in my face?

Let the barriers dissolve and I'll see more clearly. Horizons stretch far past map lines and fences and ethnic groups, far past my imagination.