You contain universes…

Osaka was a feast of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes… but somehow when I scroll through all the photos I took there, this one keeps calling me back to it…fallen leaf on asphalt alleyway. When I revisit this photo I can smell the rain that had just washed the city. I can see the clearing clouds reflected in the water droplets, I can conjure the feeling of just arriving some place new, unfamiliar. We were walking to find dinner. So many possibilities.

When I passed back by the spot where I saw this small wonder, the wind had picked it up and blown it under a parked vehicle. Everything is in constant movement. Everything is uncertain. How lucky I am to have seen this brief little universe that formed here on the pavement. How lucky I am to be here in this now with these ones I love, looking for beauty and finding it everywhere.

for dad

My father passed away in September. I am not a religious person but there have been angels everywhere since his death.  Angels in the form of kind strangers, thoughtful friends, wise voices on the radio, joy filled memories and surprising little magical emerging details from his life. For example, the discovery I made while searching for his soc. number that on my birth certificate my father wrote “Woodsman” as his occupation. It was accurate, my parents were homesteading in the Brooks Range of Alaska when I was born, but somehow that word with all the fairytaleness is evokes, washes me with a sense of relief, admiration even wonder. “Woodsman” invites me inside my father’s 27 yr old self, how he saw himself and what his aspirations were. My father’s life was complicated and sometimes tragic but at his very center he was a man of the woods, a lover of wild spaces, a wild one himself and now he is the angel that greets me in the woods.

Another type of travel

Picking up a pencil and setting yourself to the task of drawing something, anything really, but let us consider the small object, one you can turn over and touch as you mark make. This kind of drawing is a journey. Its affordable travel that doesn’t necessitate packing or standing in lines at airports. It must be said, not every drawing journey is free of snafus and disappointments. Many of us are frustrated by our final product. But let us defocus on the output and consider the travel itself. When I put my attention this closely on an object, trying to catch its curves, match its shadows, mimic its texture, I am transported. I am absorbed by the thing. It expands and fills the previously wiggly sizzling chambers of my mind. I am small and walking along the sun bleached ridges of the shell. I am sliding down the unfathomably smooth pink interior curve. I am blancing on the scalloped edge. I am learning the shell. It is beautiful! Who really cares how my little drawing turns out, I got to go there!

Annual Sale

Hope to see you!

Gratitude

5 days in the backcountry of Olympic National Park, padding through the great moss draped forests, I am tiny at the feet of those regal evergreen giants. Winding our way up rocky mountainsides, up to a world of stone and sky. I am swept clean by the swift winds. I am emptied by the long gazes across tree tops over mountain peaks. This is vastness. I am small. In all these places, along each stretch of varied trail, an impossibly generous gift of blueberries! Blueberries on gangly limbed bushes among the big trees, blueberries on stocky little red leafed plants crouching low among the rocks in the high country. SO MANY BLUEBERRIES! We were slowed by our grazing, stopping every few to gather a handful of sweet tart deliciousness. Every human we encountered on the trail had the same purple stained mouth set in an expression of sated wonder.

Flowers with Feelings

Perhaps the Poppy, more than any other flower, seems to carry a particular mood, an emotional disposition of sorts. I admit its vibrant red gold petals might stand contrary to this idea but I think Poppies feel generally sad, even a bit put upon. You can see it in the way pool their unopened heads hang heavy toward the ground, in their stunningly slender necks that quiver wiggle in the thrust of any little breeze. Their bright disheveled heads all lamenting “Oh whoa is us, why must we grow here in this rocky wind beaten spance beside this highway?” Their lace work leafy arms all suplicant, “Oh lift us up, oh mournful day!”

Stranger than Fiction

I planted lupine in my front yard last year and this spring it is flowering enthusiatically. The blossoms attract a particular kind of bumblebee, dressed in fuzzy black and yellow but with a tinge of reddish orange on his rear end. He bumbles about very systematically visiting each little purple purse shaped bloom, moving around and up the stem in a buzzy spiral. Bumblebee lands on the front edge of the petal sack, bending it downward, triggering a little violet talon to tap him on the back. Buzz - land - sip - tap - buzz - land - sip - tap. They do this bit of choreography again and again, bumblebee and lupin. It is intimate and beautiful and stranger than my imagination can conjure.

I am sewing strange flowers these days but I have yet to devise the dance, the method for their pollination.