Backyard Safari
I couldn’t resist the outdoors, so I took to my backyard armed with my camera…
Busywork Monday & Backyard Birding
Breaking from the day-to-day to take in some necessary nature in really nice weather after a slow walk to the post office and coffee shop. I just watched a pair of cardinals sharing a small meal, but I was too slow to retrieve my camera. The bright red of the male cardinal looked so nice with the green leaves against the blue sky.. Good color combination.
Hummmm
2.5 x 3.5 inch paper cutting.
Tiny Birds
Arachnid Life
I found this squatting spider (an ‘orb weaver’, I believe) this morning as I was sweeping my front porch of new cobwebs and birdseed that’s fallen from the feeders.. but I couldn’t bring myself to sweep away the expectant mother. Charlotte’s Web left a lasting effect maybe. I’ve been catching LOTS of spiders in my house lately and releasing them to my yard. At least this one has made it’s dwelling outside where I won’t find it in a pant leg or under my covers, etc.. The very early spring has brought them out in full force.
The Dream of Now
The Dream of Now by William Stafford
When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream,
you carry day out of the dark
like a flame.
When spring comes north and flowers
unfold from earth and its even sleep,
you lift summer on with your breath
lest it be lost ever so deep.
Your life you live by the light you find
and follow it on as well as you can,
carrying through darkness wherever you go
your one little fire that will start again.
Setting Suns – Cut Paper Art
8 x 10 inch paper cutting.
Music: The Moon – Pleasure
Looking back 3 years
Three years ago today I left Brooklyn and came back to Kansas.. I always celebrate it because it was perhaps one out of two of the most significant events of my life. My life in Brooklyn was the best, most grueling schooling I couldn’t get a student loan for. And coming back “home” opened my eyes to the world with a whole new appreciation.
This was the very first photo I took when I got here. There were asian lady beetles everywhere (there’s one on the window sill) and I decided to embrace them… however you can embrace asian lady beetles (my way was to photograph them).
Brooklyn seems like a whole other lifetime ago, and in a way it was. I left mostly everything behind.. my computer even died about six hours before I left for the airport. And it phased me momentarily, but in the end it didn’t really matter. All the things that mattered I brought with me.
Kansas Frontier
I’m reading a book called “Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier” — it’s a collection of stories gathered by the author’s great-grandmother from 800 women that left their lives in the East and in Europe to settle on this newly available land… An excerpt: “Pioneer life was not all hardship and danger. The outstanding fact is that the environment was such as to bring out and develop the dominant qualities of individual character. Kansas women of that day learned at an early age to depend upon themselves – to do whatever work there was to be done, and to face danger when it must be faced, as calmly as they were able. And there was the compensation of contact with the great new West – a new world – theirs to develop from wild prairie to comfortable homes.”