The click-throughs lead to pictures of the writing subjects
*  which, though they are not graphic, do contain a certain amount of sadness.  *
 The decision to view them, is left to the viewer.

I am holding my umbrella over me on a small strip of sand dotted with hailstones and surrounded by shallow water I have just stepped through.  A heavy summer rain is misting up the lake for miles before me and scattering grains of wet sand onto my shoes and up the legs of my pants.  It is strange to feel so calm as lightning sears distant, vanishing arcs here and there between the water's surface and the lowering gray of the clouds.  The darkened water around and before me is rolling, twisting and jumping from the impact of immeasurable raindrops.  All the normal life of the sky, the water, and the wild has sought shelter.  A simple umbrella allows me to remain in the open, watching the sublime movements of the world before me.

Storms are a part of the wild beauty of the world that we can admire only because we have learned how to protect ourselves from them.  This protection alleviates our instinctive fear of danger and death. Because we know with reasonable certainty that it will not be able to reach us, we are free to appreciate the power and elegant complexity of something greater than us-- something which threatens us but which is also a vital part of what keeps us alive.  That little shiver of fear transforms itself into awe.
  

There is a mole who has died, its body left in a rut in the trail.  Wildflowers are growing around it-- small, pink, and swaying over the shrunken black fur and sad, clawed hands.  I am sitting in the tall, wild grass a short way down the trail and the clouds are moving quickly above me.  They move on two planes in opposite directions so that the effect is one of the world spinning much faster than we know it to move and reminds one of  what it feels like to be carried.  I wonder then if those weak, subterranean eyes had ever seen the sky before and what strange species of awe it would have brought forth.

I have always been quietly terrified of dead animals for as long as I can remember though there is behind this another instinct, quieter though more insistent.  There is the irrational desire to help what cannot be helped-- a kind of feral love, longing to reach out with protection though it is scared.  How desperate this feeling is of not being able to fix what is broken.  One can see death without being threatened by it, though one is still repulsed.  This repulsion does not stop me from wondering what is was to be something so different from myself.  And it does not prevent me from seeing beauty in the knowledge that the lost will be taken back into those great arms.  The movements of this world must necessarily be understood as sustaining since they are all designed to bear along that which bears us along.

                          

I am standing on the side of a service road.  A Chickaree has just scrambled clumsily out from under a wooden fence and into a patch of golden light on a summer evening.  It was trying to get clear of me as I passed but it cowers not far away, hunched and panting. Its fur is standing on end and its eyes are dull with what must be sickness, confusion, and pain. There is nothing to be done and no way to protect, only a feeling of shared helplessness.  All that can be given is my quick departure so that at least the danger which it understands will have passed.

One cannot tell what goes through the mind of creatures so different but one can easily understand a sense of small helplessness.  From there it is only a question of scale.  The smaller one is, the more things there are greater than oneself.  We can try to see things from these little eyes, where that pain is like a storm which cannot be understood and from which there is no protection.  For someone outside this tiny, lonely sphere, there is the frustrated desire to alleviate the suffering of another.  One feels helpless but it is only because one is part of a cycle which cannot be helped-- something unstoppable which has within it flashes of the terrible but which is ultimately balanced with life-giving grace.  A sense of interconnection lets us see these storms of a smaller order. 

On the asphalt of the beach parking lot in autumn, there is a garter snake.  Its head is at the center of a spiral made by its body.  You can see where its back has been broken, its mouth is open,and large black eyes shine out from under their transparent scales.  I don't wish to disturb things but it feels better to move the stiff body out among the weeds under some nearby willows.  This way something at least will eat.  Crouched there over that little black spiral in the pale leaf litter, with a thicket of half-naked branches arching over, the warblers flitting through the yellow leaves don't seem to notice either of us.

Maybe I, as a human, feel the need to acknowledge these things more than they need human acknowledgement.  Still, a belief that every life matters and deserves dignity means that death matters too.  Even though one fears it, one can answer that fear with compassion, tenderness, and mercy.  One can extend this umbrella to others as much as one is able.  There is at least a small ability in us to shift ugliness into something of a right and true nature, to gently sublimate its essence in a way more reflective of its place in this great order, set in motion long ago and still moving under that same power.  It is a gift given which, if used correctly, no one will notice.

Fall on the Marsh

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Free and hunting, held in a deepening autumn light

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A grateful heart that only half understands its own lonely joy

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Aimless upon the shore, the water offers strange paeans to the setting sun 

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A loving word toward this slanting light inside
A diving bird. An inexpressible divide

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Walking back in tall, wild grass where something 

was drug before through that golden meadow, its path

tracing out wide furrows filled with feather 

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That sweetly dimming, careless light

That wounded red on gentle white

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Again with the Pen (and Pencils)

So I didn't quite get the eye right but decided to plug along anyway as an exercise.  In trying to focus on physical detail, I failed to convey this little Sandpiper's nervously graceful spirit.  Also, the legs didn't make it in and that was the most enchanting part.  Sorry, little buddy.

I did a series of quicker, more impressionistic sketches, one of which came out all right (your call as to which one you think that is).  I kind of like the quick one better.  Here's to improving on both styles and then being able to blend them together.

Left is:

"Sandpiper Who Immediately Came Out Wonky So I Got Frustrated, Gave Him A Stupid Leg, Weird Eye, And Colored Him Green, Then Felt Bad About It So I Gave Him A Crown But Not Too Good A One Because... Who Are We Kidding?"

Thank you...

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-  
  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding  
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding  
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing  
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding  
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding  
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!  
  
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here  
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!  
  
  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion  
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,  
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

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How to bend our words to apprehend the movements of the world?  The bouncing, consonant stutter of the wind, the end rhyme of its rise and fall.  The abrupt rise in exclamation and suddenly smooth turn of wing upon the sky.  The intensely grateful waver of flame re-awakened by these gifts.

The heart held in despair or tedium, when given reason, leaps up with such sublime intensity that all the headwind in the world is nothing to its joyous grace.  Though not simply erased, the winds are taken up and transmuted into a part of that joy.  With something of a falcon's heart we come by the means to understand, accept, and embrace this inevitable turbulence, becoming nimble and light enough to float upon it unbowed.  The gift of this endlessly beautiful world.

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*grainy, grey day pictures are mine, .gif is not*

A Botanical Oasis on a Difficult Day

 It's a long time since I've been to the Arboretum in Reno.

I feel somewhat a stranger there now.  There is such a tender loneliness about it that is hard to define.  Though it is a well-used place, there is an undercurrent of neglect.  There are so many sources of wonder if one cares to look.  Though, when one does, there is the feeling that you are maybe the first person in a long time to have done so-- to have tried to understand that hidden beauty in the margins, beyond the flowers and butterflies.

 And in trying to see, one always finds so many things watching back.  Sometimes it is an owl who might look at you intently for a while, with mild curiosity, before deciding to go back to sleep. 
You wonder what it recognized in you, if anything.

A Peaceful Morning Explore

Tiny, tenuous steps along the sand--
grains undisturbed by their gentle passing

A delicate, endearing nervousness--
and yet an effortless lightness and grace

If one's heart could move like this all the time...
Maybe it will find its way after all.

Sketchin' 4: Slow Going

 "Somebody Needs to Work on his Perspective and Shading"

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"My Killdeer is Plotting Something"
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 "Overly Dignified Black Phoebe with Terrible Pine Needles"

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"You May Notice This Isn't a Bird"

Taken on a beautiful morning.  Not pictured- a beautiful sketch.