Looking back 3 years

by ruralpearl | Apr 14, 2012 | Inspiration

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

by ruralpearl | Apr 13, 2012 | Inspiration

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.”

Tonight’s Full Pink Moon

by ruralpearl | Apr 6, 2012 | Inspiration

“Full Pink Moon” is the name of the full moon in April. According the the Farmer’s Almanac, “this name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.”

This image came from my iphone.. I shot some photos with my digital camera, but alas, I am visiting family for the weekend and forgot to bring my cable to connect it to the computer.. Hoping those will come out better.

Juvenile Starling

by ruralpearl | Apr 3, 2012 | Inspiration

I came upon a pair of juvenile starlings a couple years ago in the backyard of the house where I was living. They were very willing photo subjects (I took almost 100 photos of them before they flew off — yay for digital cameras…) and have inspired many of my bird themed paper cuttings.