Each year my beautiful wife and I collect wild thyme on the rocks on the sides the mountains of Tinos Greece . As the wild Cycladic wind roars, we scramble (a good name for a cat ) on the rocks with a pruning shears and cut the purple aromatic flowers off the wild scraggly plant and put them in a bag. The thyme is very beautiful and ancient Greece, thyme was the nectar of bees. Bees were the sacred messengers to the spirit world, so thyme was used in ceremony to send prayers to the gods. For me, cutting thyme in the wind is now a ceremony, a ceremony to honor simplicity, love and care. It is a complex ceremony about doing a simple act, about collecting ingredients for preparation of food, The thyme is for the winter, to cook. My wife carefully takes off the flowers, dries them and stores them. It is also about being part of nature, wild and free (you can’t plant this wild thyme). It is about me seeing and loving woman I married, seeing more clearly how she fits into the environment seamlessly in simple beauty and grace. When she cuts the wild thyme, she and the thyme and the wind and the rocks are one. Each year, I take photos of her cutting the thyme, as I hold the bag, and cut too. This simple cutting is beautiful beyond words and taking the photographs helps me see the beauty more intensely.