White Horse Pilgrim talks about the Merits of an Untidy Landscape while his lovely wife Danielle takes these photos that make you feel like you're right there in the windswept Shire.

In a recent dream, I'm in some kind of senior citizen home. In an elegant dining room with linen, crystal, china and sunshine streaming through the windows.

One of the elderly residents, a meticulously groomed woman with white hair arranged just so and one of those swirly crystal pins affixed to the lapel of her timeless wool suit, asks me to arrange peacock feathers in a crystal vase.

I try my best. Really. I do.

But instead of an elegant arrangement of peacock feathers, the best I can come up with is a vase of wild grass. Weeds really. Red. Green. Gold. I stand back and look at my handiwork.

I like it, I'm thinking, admiring the Indian Paintbrush and Horse Grass. Purple Clover. Bachelor Buttons. Queen Anne's Lace.

The elderly woman furrows her brow in disappointment. She lectures me about the chasm, the absolute gulf, between what she asked for, what she expected, and what I managed to produce. And suddenly I feel ashamed at this vase of unruly, untidy weeds.

What was I thinking, she asks? Why couldn't I follow directions?

I wake up confused. But after a few days of thinking it over, I get what the vase of wild and wooly weeds represents. It is in fact quite beautiful, even though some can't see beyond the untidiness.

It's the symbol of a full life.

These days, after a lifetime of preening peacocks trying to hold me to this or that vision of who I should be, I revel in it.